3 Questions: Melissa Nobles on the U.S. Census
April 1 marks National Census Day, the official date of this year’s U.S. Census. To help put the census in context, MIT News spoke with Associate Professor of Political Science Melissa Nobles, whose teaching and research interests span the comparative study of racial and ethnic politics, and issues of retrospective justice. Her book, Shades of Citizenship: Race and the Census in Modern Politics (Stanford University Press, 2000), examined the political origins and consequences of racial categorization in demographic censuses in the United States and Brazil.Q. You’ve noted in your book that the initial impetus for census-taking was political, and yet the earliest censuses also included racial categories. Why are race and ethnicity included in the U.S. Census?A. Census-taking in the U.S. is as old as the Republic. The U.S. Constitution mandates that an “actual enumeration” be conducted every 10 years to allow for representational apportionment. The initial impetus for census...