Thursday, the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society sponsored Thompson’s presentation of her census studies in the Indiana Memorial Union.
Her book, “The Schematic State: Race, Transnationalism and the Politics of the Census,” is to be reviewed by the Cambridge University Press.
Thompson’s book covers her comparative study of how and why the United States, Great Britain and Canada develop classifications of race.
Thompson said the U.S. recently reformatted its census for 2020, and the Census Bureau will report back on the proposal in the fall.
“It’s totally new in that for the first time people will be able to fill in their own identities,” Thompson said.
The Canadian census took a turn in 1970s when multiculturalism was adopted.
“So, the multiculturalism that I’m talking about avoided any reference to race whatsoever,”Thompson said.
In 1991, the newspapers of Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal began a campaign that asked Canadian citizens to write “Canadian” in response to the ethnic question, Thompson said. The campaign was called “Call Me Canadian,” Thompson said.
In 1984, the Thatcher ?government of Great Britain said they would develop and implement a question on race, Thompson said.
“The only public agitation over the inclusion of a census question came from second and third generation black Britons who wanted a category that recognized that they were part of Britain, too,” Thompson said.
This group of people wanted recognition that they were born, bred in and belonged to the national community, Thompson said.
Jelani Ince said he is involved with the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society and he is very interested in race scholarship.
.”Because we live in the United States and because race defines our reactions and encounters, we have to look at in more transnational contexts, “Ince said. “It’s about power relations, and power isn’t respective to the ?United States.”
Canada and Great Britain do not categorize race like the U.S. does, Thompson said.
“There’s a standardization in the U.S. that interestingly doesn’t exist in Canada and the U.K.,” Thompson said. “There are no racial statistics in college admission, we don’t know graduation rates because universities don’t collect data. You’re never asked your race when you go to the doctor. These are all American ways of gathering data that don’t seem to have permeated Canada or Great Britain to the same extent.”
