US Census Bureau drops 'negro' as option for respondents on race

The US census bureau announced on Monday that it is to dispense with "negro" as a classification of race. The change will take effect next year, when black respondents to the census will be able to say they are "black" or "African American".

Nicholas Jones, chief of the Census Bureau's racial statistics branch, told the Associated Press that after months of research and public input the Bureau had decided that "negro" was no longer needed on its forms, because many find the term offensive. He acknowledged that more research should have been done before now.

A former Census Bureau director, Robert Groves, addressed the controversy in a 2010 blogpost, in which he wrote that the term had been included in the 2000 census based on research from the late-1990s which showed that 56,000 people self-identified as "negro" under the "some other race" category. Groves also said that more than half of those people were under the age of 45 when they responded to the survey.

According to AP, the number of people self-identifying as "negro" dropped to about 36,000 in the most recent census. Groves wrote that there should have been more research into the use of the term ahead of the 2010 census and apologized to people who were offended.

"I am confident that the intent of my colleagues in using the same wording as Census 2000 was to make sure as many people as possible saw words that matched their self-identities," Groves said. "Full inclusiveness was the goal."

The census has a history of inciting controversy over its race-identification section, because it can oppose respondent's personal feelings about their race. Until 2000, respondents were not allowed to mark more than one race on the form; in 1960, some census takers could identify people's race for them. In 2010, people who identified themselves as being of hispanic, latino or Spanish origin had to choose from white, black, American Indian, asian or Hawaiian/Pacific Islander. The census then determined that "hispanic origins are not races".

In the first census, which was taken in 1790, racial categories were "free white", "all other free persons" and "slaves." These divisions continued until race categories were expanded in 1850. "Negro" appeared for the first time in 1900, as "black (or negro or negro descent)". In 1910 and 1920, those who identified as mixed race had the option of selecting "mulatto".