Racial, ethnic groups will be allowed to record ancestry on 2020 Census form

The Census Bureau, for the first time, will offer many racial and ethnic groups — including Sikhs, who traditionally have been counted as Asian Indian — an opportunity to state their ancestry, something bureau officials said groups long have sought.

The 2020 decennial count, which is expected to start showing up in mailboxes March 12, will be used to distribute more than $675 billion annually in federal funding for health, education and many other services.

"In 2020, everyone has the opportunity to self-identify," Nicholas Jones, the Census Bureau's director of race and ethnic research, said in an interview last month. "Our research — studies — has shown people have complained everyone didn't have the same opportunity. People were not treated the same way … There were checkboxes for some groups and write-in lines for others."

For the first time on the decennial census, whites and blacks will be able to write in their ancestry: Irish, German and Jamaican, to list a few examples, and those answers will be coded. All residents, for the first time, also will have the option to answer the questionnaire by mail, phone or online.

In previous decades, Hispanic and Asian groups "received codes and tabulations," as well as Pacific Islanders, Native Hawaiians and Alaskans. "But we didn't do it for whites and blacks. That's what's new," Jones said.

As a result, detailed ancestry tabulations for many other groups were available only on the American Community Survey.

"In the past, people went out of their way to tell us they were Jamaican," Jones said, citing one example. "But because we didn't have a code for them, we couldn't tabulate them. In 2020, the plan is to collect and tabulate those detailed responses."

Jones added: "People will tell us who they are. The census can quantify [and] return that data to the public."

Sikhs have been pushing for their own coding for years, census officials said.

"This has been something we've been working on with the Sikh community for the past decade," said Rachel Marks, chief of the bureau's racial statistics branch. "They told us they really needed this, to be counted separately."

"I'm so grateful to the United States that has given us a warm welcome to be part of their society, part of their culture, but we are misidentified as somebody else," said Vikas Singh, chairman of Guru Gobind Singh Sikh Center in Plainview. "Right now, [when] somebody looks at me, 95% of the time people think I'm a Muslim because I wear a turban."

Some Sikhs have faced hate crimes as a result, he added, particularly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Marks said that while the census is prohibited by law from soliciting information on residents' religion, Sikhs fall into a different category, which she labeled ethno-religious, in that their religion is "intertwined to become more of a cultural identity. We have a history of collecting ethno-religious data," she added, listing the bureau's count of the Amish as one example.

Satjeet Kaur, executive director of the Manhattan-based Sikh Coalition, an advocacy group, said in an email: "For any community, the option to be able to self-identify is critical — and that applies to Sikhs as well. Additionally, the ability to get specific about populations can create the potential for distinct community needs to be met."

Marks and Jones made a distinction, however, between the bureau coding various racial and ethnic groups, and tabulating — or counting — those groups. 

"Coding is what we need to create tabulations, and tabulations are our data products," Marks said. "If you see a table and it shows a population count, those are tabulations, and that's what we haven't finalized yet."

They added in an emailed statement this week: "The Census Bureau is currently developing the plans for 2020 census data products, and final decisions have not been made about which groups will be included in our standard data products. However, the Census Bureau is committed to producing data for detailed race and ethnic groups, including distinct detailed groups like the Sikh, Irish, Jamaican and hundreds of other populations."

Local genealogists said having more detailed ancestry information on the census might aid in genealogical research decades down the line. Census information on individuals is kept confidential for 72 years. The most recent census information publicly available is the 1940 census.

Mark Waldron of Kings Park, a board member of the German Genealogy Group, said the ancestry information on the census "might be helpful" for family researchers. But he said the information on the census is of "somebody telling you their ancestry," without any documentation to prove it.

He said the census is a valuable tool for researchers nevertheless, "primarily because it gives you a place where a person lived, their age, occasionally occupation and puts a family together."

Joysetta Pearse, co-founder with her husband, Julius, of the African Atlantic Genealogical Society, said: "Even if the information isn't correct, it's a good place to start … The census is somebody's own thoughts or memories, and sometimes memories don't match the facts. But it's nice to have any kind of data you can look into to search for the truth." 

By Olivia Winslow

olivia.winslow@newsday.com@newsollie