Pacific Islander Categorization

Census History

The first year of the U.S. census was 1790. At that time, only questions about free whites and enslaved people were posed. The 1810 and 1820 censuses asked more questions about people freed from slavery, such as age. The 1820 census also inquired about nonnaturalized foreigners for the first time. Obviously, the changes in 1810 and 1820 had to do with cultural shifts, such as early waves of immigration into the United States and the escalating tensions surrounding slavery. Between 1830 and 1930 many different racial categories were added and deleted from the census, but none of them explicitly referred to Pacific Islanders.

The 1960 census added “color” back into the race questions, switched “Indian” to “Native American,” and added the Hawai'ian, part-Hawai'ian, Aleut, and Eskimo category. It also removed the “write in” option for race. These changes followed the admission of Hawai'i to the United States. Clearly, at this point, there was a recognition that Asian and Pacific Islander categories were far more diverse than was previously understood. From 1960 to 1990 Pacific Islanders were lumped in with the Hawai'ian, part-Hawai'ian, Aleut, and Eskimo category.

Well before the “Native Hawai'ian or Other Pacific Islander” census category was established in 2000, there were at least some separate data for each group—original peoples of Hawai'i, Guam, Samoa, or other Pacific Islands have been noted in both official records and things like church and community records. For example, U.S. immigration records show that waves of Tongans immigrated to the United States in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, and that there was a boom in the 1980s. Immigration records also have detailed data on Fijian and French Polynesians for the same decades.

Historically, Asians and Pacific Islanders were grouped together by government agencies despite the fact that the groups self-identified in significantly different ways. This tension between convenience for government agencies and self-appellation and identity formation of ethnic groups is meaningful, and this tension is likely to shape the character of these ethnic groups in the future.

The Addition of Native Hawai'ian and Other Pacific Islander Category

The 2000 census was the first to use the category “Native Hawai'ian and Other Pacific Islander” (NHPI). It did so in response to a 1997 White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) notice on revision of racial categories. The notice explicitly states that the promulgated categories “represent social-political constructs designed for collecting data on the race and ethnicity of broad population groups in this country, and are not anthropologically or scientifically based.” The change followed years of lobbying, research, and scientifically designed studies.

Most of the investigation was conducted by the Interagency Committee's Research Working [Page 70]Group (Interagency Committee), cochaired by the Bureau of the Census and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The OMB notice based most of its directive on the report prepared by the Interagency Committee but the Pacific Islander category was an exception. The Interagency Committee recommended in its report that Native Hawai'ians continue to be classified in the Asian or Pacific Islander category. However, thousands of Hawai'ians opposed this move.

...