Our Pillars

Narrator:

Everyone has a racial identity, and for better or worse, whether as laws, principles, or socially acceptable practices, policies and ethics shaped by race guide our everyday lives.

In the United States, we constantly choose from lists of racial categories to identify ourselves.

Racial categorization is a cultural norm and a federal policy.

The United States Office of Management and Budget determines and enforces official racial categories.

The Decennial Census is one of the clearest examples of racial categorization collection.

Categories shift and expand, but since the first count in 1790, every U.S. census has included racial categories.

Racial categories have determined who you can marry, where you could eat, and where you could go to school.

Since 1860, racial categorization has defined Chinese as a distinct and separate category.

In the 1927 case, Lum versus Rice, the Supreme Court upheld this racial segregation policy by ruling that Chinese students in Mississippi could not attend white public schools.

Twenty years later, a lower court in California ruled that the legal segregation of students of Mexican heritage from white students was unconstitutional.

At the time, racial segregation policy defined Mexican as white.

In fact, the census did not include a permanent Latino/Hispanic category until 1970.

Neither court ruling dismantled racial segregation, policies, and our understanding of what is right.

Ethics have changed and evolved over time.

In the 1954 landmark Supreme Court case, Brown versus Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously struck down the segregation of students in public education on the basis of race.

This ruling meant that students of all races could legally attend school together.

Tools like the census and the ways that we use them have changed too.

For example, racial data from the census helps identify inequities in our public health system.

Categories of racial identification were created to justify difference.

Yet today, although imperfect, they can also help us measure progress towards racial equality.

Join the Smithsonian's Our Shared Future: Reckoning With Our Racial Past to better understand what was and create what can be.