The Census Question Hits the News
I've raised an eyebrow in a media story about the census
I’ve been waiting for this issue to hit the news, and finally, the ABC’s Ahmed Yussuf published a story a couple of weeks ago about how the Australian Government has reversed its decision to enumerate us all by ethnicity from the next census. As I’ve mentioned in this newsletter before, it’s going to stick with “ancestry” instead.
The story is basically a series of quotes from experts offering their views on the decision. It airs a range of definitions that I’ve got questions about, including the idea that “ancestry” is about geography while “ethnicity” is about culture. Look, I’m not a demographer and I don’t do population health stats, but is that how these fields work with these concepts? Where do these ideas come from?
The story also features my view, which I’ve delivered with an eyebrow raised like I’m quite concerned, as you’ll see in the picture above that I had to get taken for the story. I’m totally vain about such pictures and don’t love this one, but it does capture my discomfort at watching racial classification move from being a tool of racism and imperialism to a form of progressive statecraft. We need to be much more critical about it.
By the way, it’s not exactly true that we “won’t have” ethnicity data now. As I wrote in my Ethnic and Racial Studies article that I’ve been going on about (which has had 1,000+ views!), there are private sector providers out there who are willing to do the classifying. They’re even preparing AI classification tools to sell to states. And the Australian Bureau of Statistics already classifies us using our ancestry answers anyway - just take a look at its ASCCEG spreadsheet.
P.S. you know who’s annoyed about the government reversing its decision? That’s right - racists, including great replacement conspiracy theory people. They have been all over the social media channels complaining that we will now be prevented from understanding just how many non-white people now live in Australia. That’s complete nonsense, of course, as all the existing diversity questions will still be there, and racists will continue to have every opportunity to be racist.
The full set of quotes
I gave Ahmed much more than the quotes he published, which is how these things always go. So, here’s the full text I gave him:
What are your initial thoughts on the decision by the ABS to not collect ethnicity data?
I’m not surprised. There isn’t a clear-cut connection between collecting more data and experiencing fewer problems, nor is it easy to raise issues of race and racism for public discussion, as terms like ethnicity don’t have stable meanings, nor will you always like the responses you get. The ABS states that when they tested the question, they found it created confusion, and that finding matches the literature on ethnicity data exercises elsewhere in the world.
You've written about the potential negative ramifications of the inclusion of race or ethnicity data because it can sometimes become 'race making instruments'. Can you explain that?
Ethnicity isn’t a stable, constant feature of our being, connecting our pasts and futures in a straight line through our present-day experiences.
Rather, it’s dynamic, contested, and produced through processes of social transformation, much like we see in Australian society right now as it grows more diverse. We live among processes of new ethnicity construction taking place around us, for example within the large Asian diaspora groups that everybody now wants to court.
This is why exercises in sorting people into “ethnicities” or “races” should be viewed as attempts to freeze these dynamic processes and make social identities easier to read – by state agencies, for example – when in fact they are staggeringly complex.
But freezing this complexity into simplified categories can make these categories permanent and force us to live within the categories we’re put in, whether they suit us or not. In fact, sorting people into permanent races is a classic technique of colonial statecraft, and many of us already have plenty of experience with that. In addition to experiencing racism in Australia, many of us come from postcolonial societies in which states assign us racial or other identities at birth, continuing colonial practices that were socialised among us. We’re then forced to carry these identities around for many generations, even if we find them confusing or limiting, so they structure our lives in ways that often aren’t welcome.
In short, creating formal, permanent ethnic and racial categories tends to socialise and harden those categories so they structure our experiences and opportunities even more than they did before. This is obviously not what Australian advocates have been calling for, but it is consistent with how states have used census categories all around the world.
The ABS gathers ancestry questions that go further than language spoken and country of birth. Should this be included across all government agencies?
I think the first question is what are state agencies trying to achieve? Let’s launch a frank discussion about that so we can understand what problem we’re addressing.
You write that collecting ethnicity data would necessitate complicated and critical questions. Can you explain that a little more?
We’d have to determine what ethnicity is, and who is entitled to refer to their preferred group identity as an “ethnicity.” That means figuring out how it’s different from race, language, religion, caste, and our various places of recent or past origin and the new or old states they might have been located in.
There are simply no stable, universal answers to these questions – whatever we settle on will hold true for some groups but not others. So, which groups would we like to privilege, and which would we prefer to force to live with ill-fitting definitions? And what social benefits and disadvantages would we like to assign to either of these outcomes?
And who will we consult – who will speak for the ethnic groups we construct and who will we appoint as their “leaders”? What about people who object to these leaders’ claims or find them unsuitable in some way – how will we frame their counterclaims?
The ABS has said that the public wouldn't be able to understand ethnicity data. What do you think?
Census race and ethnicity questions create confusion wherever they exist, so it’s unsurprising that ABS testing processes have found they also confuse Australians. Every state that collects this type of data is navigating similar problems all the time.
And lastly, can you explain how Australia's initial multicultural system created in the 70s has changed?
The implicit assumption was that Australia would welcome non-white migrants that the state would recognise as members of distinct ethnic groups, each with its recognised “representatives,” who governments would consult. Yet putative ethnic groups are not only different from each other in certain key respects, they are also always internally diverse in many ways. Now that there are simply so many more of us “ethnics” living here, it is simply impossible to ignore our many intersecting forms of diversity, which is why governments complain about having to listen to too many different bodies that claim to represent too many different groups.
Well, that’s too bad. Australians have all sorts of nested, multiple, and sometimes contradictory identities, and will continue to make competing and contested identity claims. Ordering everyone into census categories will not harmonise these claims.