Paul Schor has written a novel and fascinating history of US census racial categories. Before reading it, I fancied myself something of an expert on the topic; in hindsight, I can only admit to having learned a tremendous amount from Compter et classer. Simply put, as a French colleague remarked to me, “No one else has done what Paul did”. Schor’s painstaking reconstruction of Congressional debates, internal Census Bureau reflections on racial classification, and the grassroots practices of enumeration – over a long period encompassing many shifts in US society – is without doubt a unique and terrifically valuable contribution.
Compter et classer argues that racial categories that appear to have been stable over time – because they were used continuously from one census to the next with little overt change in their language or definition – in fact carried different meanings and notions of difference depending on their historical context (p. 1). Schor makes his case by exhaustively detailing the generation of race categories for each census from the first in 1790 until 1940, in a way no one else has. Schor understands that an important part of this history is to be found in the versions that never made it to the census schedules – and perhaps an even more important story lies in the ways in which thousands of on-the-ground census-takers actually understood and filled out the questionnaires.
Schor divides the manuscript very appropriately into sections that reflect important eras in US census enumeration in general, and racial classification in particular. The first section focuses on the 1790-1840 period, rightly linking racial categorization in this period to the political role that census enumeration played more fundamentally in the early Republic. The second section focuses on the classification of slaves and later African Americans over the 1850-1865 period. The third section is overlapping in its timeline, taking up census enumeration of mulattoes, American Indians, Asians, and European immigrants (1850-1900). The fourth section examines “ethnic” statistics, i.e. those understood as applying to European immigrants and their descendants, as well as a fascinating inquiry into the censuses conducted in the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii. It also sheds light on the curious episode of the “Mexican” race on the 1930 census. Finally, the fifth section considers how the Census Bureau in the early 20th century faced racial minorities and women as interlocutors and employees, not simply as subpopulations to be enumerated.
Overall, I believe that Schor contributes both empirical data and insights that American scholars of race have overlooked, perhaps due to the “taken-for-granted” nature of racial classification in US society. I know of no one else, for example, who has so seriously asked the question of whether racial labels used on one census meant the same thing to subsequent generations of census officials, or to those in different regions of the country. Certainly no one else has examined so carefully the production of these census categories, by analyzing the Congressional debates, internal Census Bureau correspondence or enumeration practices that pertained specifically to race, over such a long period of time. As Schor explains (p. 17), he focuses on the empirical practices of classification rather than on the resultant taxonomies, which have been the object of most American scholars’ study in this area. Yet as Schor shows, it is precisely the process of their construction – unearthed through his archival research on Census Bureau questionnaire drafts, internal memoranda, and the returns painstakingly filled out by hand by the enumerators – that offers a rich understanding of the beliefs about racial difference that animated their times.
Schor’s writing for a French audience also has the benefit that it requires him to spell out aspects of American history that US scholars would do well to re-examine in connection with official racial classification. For example, although American students of race are familiar with the “three-fifths” clause of the Constitution that applied to the weighting of slave counts, Schor provides an extremely clear and detailed account of the political motives for it as well as of its political repercussions (pp. 27-30). Perhaps more importantly, he goes on to detail how the 1790 and subsequent censuses developed questions on color and (slave) condition to help policymakers enumerate a particular subpopulation of interest: white men of age to serve in the military (p. 33). His account is also full of fascinating details that are less known: for example, the Constitution used the phrase “all other persons” to designate slaves, out of a desire on the part of its authors not to sully the text with any reference to slavery (p. 35). Overall, Schor takes the very important and unusual step of putting the census’s racial classification in the larger context of what the US census aimed to do politically at its inception: introduce demographic weight as the basis for democratic power (p. 25).
As is the case with any serious work of scholarship, readers will find certain aspects of the book to be weaker than others. In my view, the last section, which largely chronicles the Census Bureau’s employment of blacks and women, as well as its outreach to European immigrant groups, does not truly mesh with the book’s central focus on the production of racial census categories. Another concern is that Compter et classer is full of meticulous observations on the census, but Schor does not consistently provide readers with information on broader historical currents in American racial and ethnic thinking. For example, he discusses the differences in the ways Indian/white “half-breeds” versus black/white “mulattoes” were enumerated, but does not link this bureaucratic distinction with a broader history of racial ideology going back to Thomas Jefferson and his Notes on the State of Virginia (at least), in which Indians are seen as more racially assimilable than blacks.
In short, however, Compter et classer offers an expert guide to US racial classification that will provide both race scholars and others with new insights and empirical knowledge of the categories that Americans live with every day. I predict – and hope – that its translation into English will be forthcoming.
