Pacific Islander Americans are ... Pacific Islander Americans

In an earlier post, I mentioned three factors related to the exclusion of Pacific Islanders from most academic programs for underrepresented minorities. Today I'd like to expand on one of those factors: the grouping of Pacific Islanders with Asians.

My main point is this: Pacific Islanders are Pacific Islanders. Pacific Islander Americans are not Asian Americans. (I know that's obvious, but bear with me.)

Classification by Race and Ethnicity
Since the 1970s the federal government has used a detailed, written policy on how to classify people by race and ethnicity for the purpose of data collection. This data standard is known as Statistical Policy Directive No. 15 (or just "Directive 15").

The Office of Management and Budget, which is responsible for Directive 15, explained its rationale for setting this policy in the 1970s by saying this: "Development of the data standards stemmed in large measure from new responsibilities to enforce civil rights laws. Data were needed to monitor equal access in housing, education, employment, and other areas, for populations that historically had experienced discrimination and differential treatment because of their race or ethnicity."

1970s: Federal Policy Groups Pacific Islanders with Asians
In the first version of the data standard, Directive 15 grouped Pacific Islanders with Asians in the "Asian and Pacific Islander" category. This was not the first time that Pacific Islanders were grouped with Asians in public policy, and it undoubtedly played a role in how people view and mis-understand Pacific Islander Americans.

Why?

Because people see statistics on "Asian Pacific Islanders" and think that those stats accurately reflect what's happening to both Pacific Islanders and Asians. But those stats do not reflect what's happening to both groups. (I'll explain why this happens in an upcoming post. For now, I'll leave it at this: when you group Pacific Islander Americans together with Asian Americans, Pacific Islander data is essentially hidden.)

1990s to Present: Federal Policy Recognizes Pacific Islanders as Distinct Group
When Directive 15 came up for review in the 1990s, the federal government determined that it was inappropriate to group Pacific Islanders and Asians together as if they were one group. Rather than describing the rationale, I'm going to copy a portion of the recommendation on the policy to this post, then link to the entire thing so you can read it for yourself. Here's one of the sections pertaining to our topic:

Recommendations from the Interagency Committee for the Review of the Racial and Ethnic Standards to the Office of Management and Budget Concerning Changes to the Standards for the Classification of Federal Data on Race and Ethnicity
5.3.2.1 SHOULD THE "ASIAN OR PACIFIC ISLANDER" CATEGORY BE SPLIT INTO TWO CATEGORIES? IF YES, HOW SHOULD THIS BE DONE?
The issue is whether to retain the current Asian or Pacific Islander category, or to split the category into two separate categories, one for Asians and one for Pacific Islanders. The argument in favor of such a split is that the current category places two peoples who have few social or cultural similarities. It is argued that having separate categories for Asians and Pacific Islanders would result in more homogeneous groups, which would increase the comprehensibility and logic of the entire classification scheme. In addition, the two resulting groups are dissimilar on a number of measures. For example:

• Education -- Although approximately the same number of Asians and Pacific Islanders graduate from high school, far fewer Pacific Islanders (about 11 percent of persons 25 years of age or older) than Asians (about 40 percent) obtain bachelors degrees.
• Income and employment -- According to 1990 census data, 5.2 percent of Asians over age 16 were unemployed, compared with 7.3 percent of Pacific Islanders. Median household income was $41,583 for Asians and $33,955 for Pacific Islanders.
• Poverty -- The poverty rate was 13.7 percent for Asians and 16.6 percent for Pacific Islanders.

(Here's a link to the full document: link)

Since that determination was made in 1997, federal policy has been to recognize that Pacific Islanders (also described as "Native Hawaiians and Other Pacific Islanders") are a unique racial group, which should not be lumped together with Asians for the purpose of data collection and categorization. Unfortunately, even though it's been almost one-and-a-half decades since then, some people still don't realize that Pacific Islanders and Asians are two separate groups. This, along with the continued practice of lumping the two groups together, leads to misleading data and misunderstanding.

Kawika

Pacific Islander Americans: the Missing Underrepresented Minority

Earlier this week, McClatchy News published an article on underrepresented minority graduation rates at different universities. The article was based on a report by the Education Trust, which pulled from data made available by College Results Online. The tweet-sized summary is this: some schools are doing much better (or worse) than others at graduating underrepresented minorities.

I think it's terrific that McClatchy is doing an article on underrepresented minorities, and that the Education Trust and College Results Online are paying attention to this issue. After all, the U.S. Census estimates that minorities will comprise over half of the U.S. population in a generation. With the exception of Asians, all of these minorities are underrepresented in higher education. (In related news, Brookings blogged earlier this month that minorities now make up over half of the nation's 3-year-old population.) If our higher education system doesn't figure out how to recruit, retain, and graduate the groups that will make up half of the American population in the coming decades, that's not just a system that's failing minorities: that's just plain failure.

There is a shortcoming to this article, which I'm referring to as: the case of the missing underrepresented minority.

• Check out the article, and you'll see that when the author talks about underrepresented minorities, she focuses on"black and Latino students," and mentions "Native Americans" once. (LINK)
• Check out the press release from the Education Trust and you'll see that they define underrepresented minority to mean "African American, Latino, and Native American." (LINK)
• And if you go to College Results Online and do an advanced search for graduation rates by race and ethnicity, you'll be able to search for the following groups: "Black, Asian, Latino, Native American, White, Underrepresented Minority." (LINK)

Each step of the way, Pacific Islanders are missing from this equation. Pacific Islanders are not included in the article, not included in the Education Trust's definition of underrepresented, and not included at all in the College Results Online list of racial and ethnic groups. Of course, as I've mentioned before, Pacific Islanders are underrepresented in higher education. Also, Pacific Islanders are a distinct racial group, recognized by the federal government's policy on collecting racial and ethnic data.

In order to solve a problem, you need to know that it exists. Now, I don't think any of the people or groups I mentioned are trying to stop people from realizing that Pacific Islanders are underrepresented -- they probably don't know any better. Still, the fact remains that until Pacific Islanders are included in discussions about underrepresented minorities, it is unlikely that Pacific Islanders will be included in most efforts to help underrepresented minorities.


Kawika

Race Remixed

I somehow missed this article when it came out two weeks ago, but two paragraphs into this New York Times piece on racial and ethnic data collection, I knew I wanted to highlight it in a short blog post. The article, "Race Remixed: Counting by Race Can Throw Off Some Numbers," is a good introduction to the complexities of modern efforts to accurately count an increasingly diverse and multiracial nation.

Unfortunately, the article doesn't mention Pacific Islander Americans, but it does introduce a number of important facts. They include:

• The federal government actually has a standard for racial and ethnic data collection;
• While race and ethnicity are concepts that are nearly-universally known, different group collect and report racial and ethnic data differently;
• Older methods of racial data collection that don't account for people of more than one race are growing increasingly outdated.

If I had to pull from just one part of the article it would be this early paragraph, which explains that how people are categorized by race and ethnicity "...might seem trivial except that statistics on ethnicity and race are used for many important purposes. These include assessing disparities in health, education, employment and housing, enforcing civil rights protections, and deciding who might qualify for special consideration as members of underrepresented minority groups."

Unless minority groups -- including Pacific Islanders -- are properly counted, Americans will not know whether our nation is making progress against the types of disparities the article mentions. And while counting people properly will not solve these problems alone, good data is necessary for good decisions.

Of course, this comes back to Pacific Islanders and their access to underrepresented minority scholarships and fellowships. As I'll explain in an upcoming post or two, the way Pacific Islanders have been categorized with Asian Americans has masked the true needs of Pacific Islanders, including their level of underrepresentation in higher education.

Here's a link to the article: LINK

Kawika