Measuring Racial and Ethnic Diversity for the 2020 Census

First, it’s important to know how we collect and tabulate data on race and ethnicity in the 2020 Census. Like other statistical agencies, we follow standards on race and ethnicity set by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in 1997. These standards guide how the federal government collects and presents data on these topics. Per these standards:

• The 2020 Census collected data on Hispanic origin and race in two separate questions.
• We tabulated the responses based on standard categories.
   

For race, the OMB standards identify five minimum categories:

• White
• Black or African American
• American Indian or Alaska Native
• Asian
• Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander

We use a sixth category, Some Other Race, for people who do not identify with any of the OMB race categories.

We tabulate statistics on people who report only one race in one of these six “race alone” categories, and we include people who report multiple races in the “Multiracial” population, also referred to as the “Two or More Races” population. 

For ethnicity, the OMB standards classify individuals in one of two categories: “Hispanic or Latino” or “Not Hispanic or Latino.” We use the term “Hispanic or Latino” interchangeably with the term “Hispanic,” and also refer to this concept as “ethnicity.”

The OMB standards also emphasize that people of Hispanic origin may be of any race. In data tables, we often cross-tabulate the race and Hispanic origin categories to display Hispanic as a single category and the non-Hispanic race groups as categories summing up to the total population.

These diversity calculations require the use of mutually exclusive racial and ethnic (nonoverlapping) categories. For our analyses, we calculate the Hispanic or Latino population of any race as a category; each of the race alone, non-Hispanic groups as individual categories; and the Multiracial non-Hispanic group as a distinct category.

The following groups are used in the diversity calculations:

• Hispanic
• White alone, non-Hispanic
• Black or African American alone, non-Hispanic
• American Indian and Alaska Native alone, non-Hispanic
• Asian alone, non-Hispanic
• Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander alone, non-Hispanic
• Some Other Race alone, non-Hispanic
• Multiracial, non-Hispanic

The recent blog Improvements to the 2020 Census Hispanic Origin and Race Questions and Coding Procedures describes how we code write-in responses into these standard categories.