We’re a little under two months out from release of the Demographic Profiles and Demographic and Housing Characteristics File, the first 2020 Decennial Census products since the P.L. 94-171 Redistricting Data Summary Files released in fall 2021. The 2020 Census saw major changes to the way that race and ethnicity are both collected and subsequently coded, and we in Bexar County and Texas may need to rethink the way we collect and work with race and ethnicity data, both on its own and to disaggregate other data. If you’re not already up to speed, it’s worth taking a look at this Census blog post summarizing the changes made. This week the Census Bureau released an analysis of how people identifying as Hispanic self-report their race, and the results are fascinating. To a large extent they mirror what we see for Bexar County in the table above: among Hispanics, the percent identifying as white alone dropped by over half, with the greatest increases in the categories of Two or More Races Alone and American Indian and Alaska Native Alone.
Got any thoughts on what these changes mean for us data users and analysts? Drop a comment below.