Race in the US is complicated.
Everything from the kind of neighborhood you might get to live in (paywall) to what college you can get into can depend on how you identify (or choose to identify) racially, but even those categories remain in constant flux.
The US Census Bureau just released Monday (Nov. 2) a new interactive that illustrates that flux: It’s a timeline that shows how races listed on the census changed over time. Additionally, it details the background behind those changes when you hover over a given year with your mouse.
The tool challenges many simplistic conceptualizations of race in the United States. “Mexican,” for example, makes a brief appearance as a race in 1930, only to reappear 40 years later with other examples of what we now call Hispanic origins. ”Hawaiian,” “Aleut,” and “Eskimo” only show up in 1960, one year after Alaska and Hawaii became states. It makes you think: What demographic changes slipped through the cracks because the government hadn’t tweaked a box on a form? (The interactive also shows you how that box has changed over the years.)
Racial identification is vitally important to the way Americans see themselves, but it is also wont to change. A January 2015 NBER working paper suggests that, during Reconstruction and into the early 20th century, the Census Bureau overestimated America’s white population because some Southern black families moved to the North or otherwise far from home and began passing as white to gain access to better lives. In a (controversial) post at Slate last year, Jamelle Bouie suggested that more and more Latinos might begin to see themselves as white in the same way that Irish or Italian families as generations began to assimilate over time. And it’s not just about the “whitening” of America—last year, the Census Bureau finally gave Arab-Americans an option to define themselves as non-white.
The interactive’s overall lesson may simply be that the US has a long, complicated history—but that casts into sharp relief our long complicated future ahead.