Volume 3 | Issue 1
Spring 2008
Fixity and Whiteness in the Ethnicity Question of Irish Census 2006
Marian Cadogan
University College Cork
(email: m.cadogan@mars.ucc.ie)
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Abstract
Censuses do not simply collect data; they also simultaneously influence the identities they seek to capture. This paper highlights some of the inadvertent implications of the particular format of the ethnicity question introduced in the Irish Census of 2006. The white category is especially problematized. The paper suggests that the census consolidates rather than in any way destabilising the unquestioned centrality of whites as the dominant and normative identity group in Irish society. Arguing that identity may be understood as processual – relational and situational - an alternative approach to assessing ethnic identity, which does not assume static or essentialist categories, is proposed.
Keywords: census, ethnicity, whiteness
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Introduction[1]
Recent sociological research, in such varied countries as the United States, Canada, South Africa, Brazil, Rwanda, Burundi and Uzbekistan, has analysed the role of the census in defining, as well as measuring, social categories. The findings (see, for example, Anderson 1991; Urla 1993; Appadurai 1996; Scott 1998; Goldberg 1997, 2002; Verdery 2000; Abramson 2002; Goldscheider 2002; Kertzer and Arel, 2002; Nobles 2002; Uvin 2002) indicate that censuses, in seeking to quantify ethnic identity, do not simply collect data, but also simultaneously help shape the emerging identities they seek to objectively record and document. The work of King-O’Riain in particular, has engaged with such debates in the Irish context, highlighting inconsistencies in Irish state processes of racialisation, illuminating contestation between various state actors as well as influences from non-state and international sources (2006, 2007). She underlines the paradox that while the ethnicity question in the 2006 Irish Census appears to be a powerful tool in ‘reinscribing’ racial meanings, being employed as a ‘technology of the state’ to categorise and to quantify persons along ‘racial (visible minority status) lines, the core motivation for collecting such data is ostensibly to enable the implementation of anti discrimination legislation, to monitor institutional discrimination and “to right past wrongs” (2006: 276, 282-3; 2007: 517). She downplays the power of the census to shape identity on its own, asserting that while the census is “not neutral”, neither does it “have the power to dictate the entire conversation about racial equality in Ireland” (2006: 283). This paper builds on King-O’Riain’s work. I discuss in particular the category ‘white’ and additionally, argue that the mode of data collection employed in the ethnicity question obscures notions of identity as processual and relational, overly solidifying and fixing ethnic groupings.
The discussion is presented in five parts. A case is first developed for why the census is worthy of sociological consideration. This is followed by a brief scene-setting review of the background to the introduction of the ethnicity question in the 2006 Irish Census. The next section considers the official ethnic categories established in Question 14 of that census, the category ‘white’ being particularly scrutunized and problematized. The discussion then moves on to a consideration of the collection of objective (‘rigid’) ethnic data as opposed to a relational approach to ethnic data compilation. Finally, in an attempt to provide a way forward conceptually, an alternative to the Census Question 14 format - based on a more dynamic and processual interpretation of ethnicities – is proposed.
Why does the census matter sociologically?
The aura of scientific legitimacy associated with census categories means that they carry weight and tend to be accepted by the public as ‘givens’ (Kertzer and Arel 2002). Urla argues that census statisticians are invested with an authority which lends them “heightened rhetorical power”, which enables them to exert considerable influence in their official capacity (1993: 818). Census designers and implementers enjoy the esteem of the public in Ireland, being perceived as highly specialized and very able - a credible group of professionals in charge of a formal and important endeavour. Urla’s research on the Basque region revealed how counting practices, such as censuses, can give significance to a particular social practice or feature so that they become signifiers of ethnic identity (1993). Who gets counted can have important consequences for the distribution of economic resources and political power. The census, through its power to name and to categorise, helps create social reality (Kertzer and Arel 2002). That which previously was not marked as a significant difference becomes so; the orthodox and the heterodox, the normal and the strange are established in the context of the state’s standardizing project (Verdery 2000; Brubaker 2004). The census acquires its force in large part (post collection) from the fact that census data “are the points of departure for reality as state officials apprehend and shape it” (Scott 1998: 83). The census outputs become the commonplace modes of social categorisation (Scott 1998; Abramson 2002; Brubaker 2004). Goldberg points out that the census not only nominates and elaborates categories of recognition and authorization, but moreover, simultaneously advertises and implicitly endorses those categories which the state ‘seeks to licence’ (2002: 190). Hopkins et al argue that the very presence of socially marked groups can be conceived as a product of processes of categorisation, such as those employed in the census: “Numbers, enumeration and forms of representation – which lie at the core of census-making and taking – … critically underpin the ‘presence’ of racial and religious groups in the social, political and welfare maps of local and national governance” (2005: 71).
I make the case in this paper that the pre-given ‘ethnic categories’ of the Irish Census 2006 are questionable, in part, insofar as they implicitly consolidate a large ‘white Irish’ ethnic grouping as culturally homogenous, as an undifferentiated ‘majority’ against which ‘minorities’ are highlighted as exotic and deviant (see Ballard 1997, 1998). This point is developed further below. The majority/minority dynamic of the census monitors the relative size of groupings, providing vital information to those members of ‘the majority’ who may fear that in situations of rapid and substantial immigration, their influence may wane “in the territory that matters most to them” (Anderson 1998; Kertzer and Arel 2002: 30). Census data are used to ‘read’ social reality, contributing to shaping how we think and talk about Irish society, facilitating new ways of thinking about the self in relation to society as a whole, playing a part in crystallising identities (Urla 1993; Kertzer and Arel 2002; Uvin 2002).
Brief Background to the Inclusion of an Ethnicity Question in the Irish Census of 2006
King-O’Riain’s research on the evolution of the format of the ethnicity question employed in the Irish Census of 2006, details the extensive consultation which took place - involving many organs of the Irish state, as well as non-government and inter-government agencies – prior to agreement on the final version included in the census (2006, 2007; see also Fanning and Pierce 2004). Yet, notably, King-O’Riain remarks that there was “little or no consultation with the racialised and with immigrants” (2006: 282). She detects contradictions rather than consistency in state processes of racialisation in Ireland. She emphasises that the state should not be understood as a ‘monolithic organism’ but rather, that it comprises a variety of actors in contestation (2006: 277). An ethnicity question in the census was deemed necessary or desirable because of a combination of circumstances: the increasingly ethnically diverse population; more awareness of equality legislation and the need to monitor discrimination, as well as pressure from Irish Traveller representatives to include an ethnicity question in the census. It was introduced in a period when new immigrants are contributing to “challenging existing frameworks of racial and ethnic understanding” in Ireland, in the process contributing to the transformation of those frameworks via “a process of social negotiation and constestation” (King-O’Riain, 2007: 519).
King-O’Riain traces major transformations in the format of the question over a number of years (2007). Its final form was highly influenced by a variety of factors, including the British census format, as well as the Central Statistics Office’s (CSO) engagement with European statistics agencies who were increasingly interested in ethnocultural characteristics of populations, plus debates in Ireland about whether or not Irish Travellers were an ethnic group (King-O’Riain 2007). She argues that drawing on already established UK models “legitimated using ethnicity to try to capture racial meanings and inequality”: “[t]his legitimated the question in Ireland as the CSO used existing questions in England as a model for the question in Ireland and the models they examined had blended race and ethnicity together conceptually” (2007: 533).
Fig 1 Q. 14 of Irish Census 2006
Yet, there are significant
differences too in the final format of the question in Ireland and in the UK. King-O’Riain attributes this to pertinent elements in the Irish context
during the period, including, on the one hand, an increasing emphasis on
legislation which provided grounds for claims to equality and
anti-discrimination rights and on the other, a context of ‘exclusionary
racialization’ surrounding the citizenship referendum and consequent changes in
the Constitution, as well as insistence by the Minister for Justice that
Travellers are not an ethnic group (2007: 533). In contrast to the format used
in Northern Ireland in 2001, where the census question took the form – “To
which of these ethnic groups do you consider you belong” – the question asked
in the Republic of Ireland implied ‘static and finite group membership’ rather
than focusing on ‘belonging’ and ‘self-identity’ (ibid: 531).
The Fixity and Exclusivity of Ethnic Categories in Census 2006
Modern states manage the complex task of governing (including the provision of key social welfare services) by making society more ‘legible’, achieving this in part by employing typifications to simplify reality (Scott 1998; Urla 1993; Jenkins 2000; Kertzer and Arel 2002). As Scott remarks: “[t]he utopian, immanent and continually frustrated goal of the modern state is to reduce the chaotic, disorderly, constantly changing social reality beneath it to something more closely resembling the administrative grid of its observations” (1998: 82). Such typifications reduce infinite detail to a manageable set of categories, enabling state administrators to compare, to aggregate and to describe (Scott 1998; see also Jenkins 2000). Once official ethnic (or other) categories have been devised, they operate as if all the cases classified as similar were, in fact, uniform and homogenous, no matter how unique the particularly of the aggregated individuals (Scott 1998). The state’s aggregations thus hide huge variation, creating ‘new facts’ and ‘flattening idiosyncrasies’ (Appadurai 1996; Scott 1998) In constructing homogeneity out of great variety, the state endeavours – in the terminology of Lentin and McVeigh (2006: 11) - to “produce a coherent picture of the population in the face of divisive heterogeneity”.[2] Once categories have been devised, the state attempts to understand people via the categories into which they fall or into which they have been assigned (Kertzer and Arel 2002).
Sociologically, ethnicity may be understood as subjective belonging to a group. As Cohen states, it is “the self’s consciousness which has primacy in the creation of ethnicity, in rendering boundaries meaningful, in the interpretation of ethnic identity” (2000: 76). Q. 14 of the census seeks to objectively capture a subjective (and relational) dimension of identity. Barth argued that different cultures per se were not the source of ethnicity but that rather, processes of categorisation create ethnic groups, i.e. ethnicity is about relationality (1969). Barth highlighted the political implications of certain characteristics becoming salient as the boundary markers between groups: “some cultural features are used by the actors as signals and emblems of difference, others are ignored and in some relationships radical differences are played down and denied” (Barth, 1969: 14 cited in Helbling 2007: 13). The discontinuity between ethnic groups is a social discontinuity, not one based on cultural differences per se: “[t]he ethnic group is defined through its relationship to others, highlighted through the boundary, and the boundary is itself a social product which may have variable importance and which may change through time” (Eriksen, 2002: 38)
Ethnicity then, is centrally about marking and communicating difference and ordering social life (Barth 1969; Verdery 2000). As circumstances change, the categories change and some boundaries blur or dissolve, while new boundaries may be created (Wimmer 2007). Changes in the boundary are due to changes in relations and power dynamics between social groupings in a society (ibid: 20). People actively engage in processes of identification rather than passively or automatically acting in a certain way because they are members of a particular ethnic group (Jenkins 2006). Macro institutions are highly influential in shaping and forming ethnic boundaries, the incentives provided by the institutional environment, especially by state institutions, supporting certain ethnic claims rather than others (Wimmer 2007). The resulting social field limits the options and strategies considered meaningful by various actors (ibid). Resource allocation along ethnic lines is likely to be especially influential in determining ethnic boundaries. Boundaries emerge, then in a social field which is pre-configured by the particular institutional arrangements which prevail during any historical time period (ibid 50). Each person has many social statuses and which is most salient depends on the particular, prevailing, interactive situation and general circumstances (Calhoun 2003; Reicher 2004; Hutchinson 2005). As Simpson says: “[w]e each have many cultural affiliations, which we express differently in different contexts; we change our affiliation over time too, in response to our own development and understanding, as well as the environment within which our declarations of difference take place” (2002).
‘Irishness’ has been undergoing continuous revision in recent decades as the myths underpinning ethnicity and nationalism – the symbolic claims to common identity which give members an inalienable right to belong and which exclude others - are challenged, as Ireland engages more with Europe and is impacted by globalisation. To be ‘Irish’ in the not too distant past was primarily to be ‘not-British’ and the traditional ethno-religious cleavage line within Irish society was the Catholic-Protestant divide. In the very different socio-historical era prevailing in Ireland since the 1960s, Irish Catholics have become more secular and pluralist and less group-like (Ruane 2006: 522) and ethno-religious as well as other, relational boundaries have shifted and continue to shift. Share et al (2007: 352, citing the work of O’Dowd 1992) suggest that Ireland may now be increasingly conceived as a ‘state-nation’ rather than a ‘nation-state’ and as such, identification with a common culture is being replaced with identification with the state (or with counter-cultures). Yet, as I discuss below, ‘White Irish’ is still presented in the census as a single, homogenised and unproblematized ethnic category.
Yau highlights the ‘in-between-ness’ of the identity lived by 2nd generation Irish-Chinese in Ireland, racialised by mainstream Irish society as Chinese and consequently experiencing themselves as ‘other’ in Ireland, where to be Irish is to be white by default (2006). She remarks that her Irish-Chinese informants’ insistence on hyphenated identities may constitute an attempt to blur the distinct lines encompassing the category ‘Irish’. Ballard likewise points out that ethnic identity, especially for immigrants or persons with more than one ethnic heritage, is a painful social process, the outcomes in terms of identity not being predictable from one’s ancestry (1997). Culture within immigrant groupings tends to be particularly “conflictual, open, hybridizing and fluid” as immigrants adjust to the dislocations occasioned by emigration (Werbner 2005: 745). Culture in such a situation is “changing and dialogical, inventive and responsive” (ibid). The sense of solidarity that immigrants feel with co-ethnics competes with developing bonds of loyalty to the country of settlement (Hickman 2002). Yet, Irish Census 2006, on the contrary, promotes a fiction that each respondent occupies one and only one, clear ethnic identity position (Yau 2006). Q. 14’s focus on exclusive ethnic categories encourages, moreover, a notion of the world composed of quite distinct, neatly separated ethnic groups (Urla 1993; Kertzer and Arel 2002).
The stress in Q. 14’s on ‘ethnic and cultural background’ emphasises family history and ancestry and implies that ethnicity is something one ‘has’, which is inherited.[3] This format thus naturalises ethnicity, the ‘ethnic background’ data sought seeming to imply the ‘genetic transmission of identity across the ages’ and ‘assumed belongings’ rather than acknowledging persons’ ongoing creative construction of meaning and subjectively-felt ethnic belonging in the present (Alexander, 2002; Kertzer and Arel, 2002: 11, 27). Comerford (2003: 1-2) describes as ‘essentialist’ that notion of nationalism which assumes that each nation has ‘its own personality and a naturally defined (and thus obvious) membership and extent, and that each has about it some kind of informing spirit’ (ibid). The focus in Q. 14 on ‘background’ implies that where one’s ancestors were born has natural or obvious implications for one’s current sense of ethnic belonging – rather than any such influence being a matter which needs to be established and whose impact is likely to change generationally. The data sought do not permit the expression of the respondent’s subjective sense of belonging in the present – which may, or may not, include considerable allegiance to the culture(s) of their ancestors. Would a respondent who feels ethnically Irish, for instance, who had been fully socialized in Ireland, but who had double sets of German grandparents, feel obliged to choose the ‘White Other’ or the ‘Other/mixed’ - rather than, perhaps, the ‘White Irish’ - box to express her/his ‘ethnic or cultural background? After how many generations may one claim to ethnically belong to Ireland?[4] A relational understanding of social identity acknowledges its embeddedness in complex social webs where ethnic and other dimensions of identity, including the political projects being pursued by individuals and groupings, take on varying degrees of salience depending on context and where, as mentioned, ethnic boundaries shift as social and political circumstances change (Emirbayer 1997; Kertzer and Arel 2002; Wimmer 2007). An alternate approach to gathering data on ethnicity, which does not assume essentialised, inherited or fixed notions of ethnicity, is suggested below.
Whiteness in Irish Census 2006
The markers used to construct and to distinguish between categories become highlighted in the process of constructing categories (Kertzer and Arel, 2002: 5-6). In introducing ‘White Irish’ and ‘Black and Black Irish’ as ‘ethnic groups’ in the Census, the CSO supplants the traditional ethnic identity cleavage line in Ireland which was based on religious affiliation (see Coakley 2005), highlighting instead whiteness and blackness. By making ethnic identity a subset of metaracial designations, ethnicity is thus racialised (King-O’Riain 2006, 2007). White and black are presented in the census as if matter-of-factly referring to skin colour and as if ethnicity adhered to each such category. Whiteness is not, however, about skin pigmentation (or usually, about ethnicity) but rather, concerns principles of social organisation whereby white people benefit from unearned social privilege (Lewis 2004; Nayak 2007). Hopkins et al assert that far from being natural outcomes of perception - as if our brains were wired to see, for example, ‘races’ – social categories are linguistic constructions (1997: 321). Countering social cognition theories which posit that it is normal / natural / obvious - to perceive ‘blacks’ and ‘whites’ as separate ‘races’, Hopkins et al point out that such a view assumes that racialisation derives from processes internal to each individual, whereas, on the contrary, racialised categories are social constructs (ibid: 312).
To develop an identity as white requires constructing it on the basis of what it is not, i.e. ‘black’ / ‘other’ (Roediger 1994; Ignatiev 1996; Byrne 2006; O’Toole 2006). Whiteness is a relational category (Frankenberg 2001). Byrne proposes that the Western concept of ‘race’ may be understood as a particular way of marking and of seeing difference. What matters is the signification attached to the visible differences:
It is through raced categories that visual differences become apprehended… ’[R]ace is a particular way of seeing, and then categorising, difference…It is through such perceptual practices that externally evident physical differences are seen and categorised as racialised differences and that various inferences are drawn from these differences… Perceptual practices, particularly those centred on visible difference, performatively construct ‘race’ … Who is visibly ‘black’ or white changes over time and in different contexts. Thus, questions of visibility and invisibility are mediated by power…’Race’ is not the result of visual practices alone, but is conditioned by who is seeing and who has the ability to assert what is seen and how it is seen. (Byrne 2006: 21, 74, 171)
‘White Irish’ persons – comprising 87.4% of the total population enumerated in Census 2006 - normally inhabit a comfortable, normative and unexamined position requiring no description or questioning, experiencing an uncomplicated belonging to Ireland (see Byrne 2006; Chan 2006). White privilege includes the luxury of not having to take ‘race’ into account in day-to-day life (Lewis 2004). Census Q. 14 has the merit of (unintentionally) highlighting the taken-for-granted white positionality of the majority Irish. Whites are normally non-racialised whereas visible minorities are dis-proportionately racialised (ibid 143). In western societies, the very existence of the category white is inescapably linked to differentiation from ‘blacks’ - and to historical white domination of ‘blacks’ (Lewis 2004: 625). Whiteness has become salient as an identity in Ireland in the co-presence of non-whites. We are not born with ‘race’; whiteness is learned, performed and achieved via interaction and institutions (ibid: 629). Whiteness as privilege is not, however, measurable by assessing whites’ sense of their racial/ethnic identity or their sense of groupness based on whiteness (Lewis 2004: 624). An individual may disavow her whiteness but that does not change her social privilege in a racist society. Those who appear to be white will still be relatively privileged vis-à-vis those who are designated ‘racial others’, the latter paying material, physical and psychological penalties for their inferiorized difference (ibid 627-8). As Lewis argues, “even whites who abdicate racial privilege can readily reclaim it at the moment they cease to actively reject it” (2004: 628). Whiteness unifies its members through their relation to social structures: “[w]hile their access to cultural capital and other resources may vary, all whites have access to the symbolic capital of whiteness […] to the ‘wages’ of whiteness” (Lewis 2004: 627-8).
Notwithstanding the useful, if inadvertent, highlighting of whites as racialised subjects, occasioned by Q. 14 of the census, in unproblematically presenting ‘White Irish’ as an ethnic identity, the abovementioned political and structural aspects of whiteness are obscured. Whereas a political understanding of whiteness sees it as a problem of racial privilege and dominance (Frankenberg 2001), census Q. 14 implies that we may read somatic signs (in particular, skin colour) matter-of-factly.
While the ‘White Irish’ label occludes hyphenated ethnic identities such as Irish-English, Irish-American, Irish-French and so forth, it simultaneously promotes the homogenisation of all ‘blacks’ into ‘them’ / ‘they’ (as contrast to whites) (Byrne, 2006: 87). On the contrary, ‘black’ is understood politically as a chosen – not a natural - identification favoured by activists resisting similar experiences of racism. Even as a self-selected identity it does not denote a homogenous grouping, being rent as it is by class, gender and cultural differences (Jenkins 2000: 13). This official, dichotomised ascription of persons as white and black in Census 2006, with associated ethnic characteristics, feeds into assumptions that persons ‘naturally’ belong to particular racial/ethnic groupings.
The official census category ‘white’ – accounting for 94.8% of the population counted in the 2006 census – encapsulates, moreover, the unintended possibility of facilitating the assertion of the superiority of whiteness (see Frankenberg 2001). The power of naming can nominate social categories into existence (Goldberg 1997; Verdery 2000; Brubaker 2004). Whites are “a passive social collectivity that can become, at strategic moments, a self-conscious group” – during, for instance, race riots or when choosing a school for their children (Lewis 2004: 626). To the extent that ‘white Irish’ identity is reified by and in the eyes of some, implicitly if inadvertently endorsed, through such instruments as the census, it is possible that a ‘white-Irish’ ethnic group may consolidate whose members will feel and assert a special metaphoric ‘kinship’ with one another on the basis of their ‘shared whiteness’.[5] Ware for instance, suggests that whiteness functions in the UK “as a hidden normative code that determines who is in or out on the basis of birth and complexion” (2001: 193). Essed and Trienekens similarly remark that “white skin colour is one of the criteria of inclusion in the community of ‘real’ European nationals” (2008: 68; see also Ballard 1998).
From the category choices provided in the Irish Census, English, Polish, Russian, American, Serbian or Albanian respondents – insofar as they do not fit in a ‘non-white’ category - would all most likely tick the ‘any other white background’ box, all then being homogenized into an ‘other-white-background’ ‘ethnic group’. This disparate ‘grouping’ does not enjoy a shared sense of belonging to a common ethnic or cultural group. They only share whiteness, i.e., white privilege vis-à-vis non-whites, but are fractured by class, gender, ethnic and other key characteristics (see Hickman and Walters 1995).
Disaggregating the white category is – quite apart from matters of principle - likely to promote practical research benefits. Bhopal and Donaldson, for instance, indicate that the white category in the UK census tends to be utilized unquestioningly by medical and public health researchers, having been ‘legitimized’ for use in British epidemiology by its inclusion as a census category (1998: 1303-4). Yet, they maintain that it is of ‘little value’ in health research, particularly when used as a ‘reference group’ in research seeking to understand health outcomes for various population groupings via comparison. They cite a study of thirty-nine white patients in London which included seven Greek or Turkish Cypriots, five Irish and nine persons of non-British European origin. Such ‘lumping together’ results in a category which is too heterogeneous to be a feasible research category for public health purposes. Furthermore, they also point out that Irish-born and Scottish-born residents of England and Wales have “the highest standardized mortality ratios in England and Wales, higher than those of racial and ethnic minorities” yet they are usually subsumed in health research under the general category white (1998: 1306).
Discussing the UK Census of 1991, Ballard concludes that one of the most striking outcomes of the inclusion of an ethnicity question was a highlighting of the majority white population vis-à-vis the minorities of non-European origin (1997: 183-5). To him, the readiness of the majority to unquestioningly be racially identified as white highlighted the enduring importance of whiteness as an identifier as far as the majority British population is concerned. As he scathingly remarked, the census question “simply enabled the white sheep to be separated from the black goats” and bolstered the status quo: “any investigation of a plural society which uncritically deploys common-sense understandings as the foundation for its analytical perspectives will almost inevitably privilege (and indeed, legitimize) the taken-for-granted assumptions of the hegemonic majority, so yet further marginalizing the minorities” (Ballard 1997: 185-7)
In using white and black categories in Q. 14 of the Irish Census 2006, the CSO seeks objective, verifiable and useful ‘facts’. However, this paper suggests that the format employed in Q. 14 consolidates racialised ways of seeing by lending official credence and weight to ‘black’ and ‘white’ - supposedly ethnic - categories. The largely undifferentiated white category contributes to sustaining a sense of cultural unity and ‘national integrity’, underlining the unquestioned centrality of whites as the dominant and normative identity group in Irish society (see Sinha 1999) and facilitating minority cultures being perceived as deviant (see Share et al 2007; King-O’Riain 2006).
Having discussed the white category in some detail, I will now very briefly remark on certain aspects of other ethnic classifications employed in Q. 14 of Census 2006. The category ‘Black African’ infers that all of those born in or descended from Africa’s fifty-four countries share some essential characteristics which bond them as an ethnic group. There is no clear evidence that persons from various African countries living in Ireland share such a sense of fellowship. Whereas research undertaken by Ugba (2004) found that 83% of his 182 interviewees from 17 African countries indicated that they wanted to be called an ‘African’ man or woman and only 10% wanted to be identified as a ‘black’ man or woman, Ejorh’s current research with immigrants from various African countries, living in Ireland, suggests that while some would like to identify as African, for many others, ethno-cultural, religious or national identity comes first (2007). Many want to highlight their distinctiveness from others of African origin and resist the imposition of a unitary and homogeneous African identity. That is not to say that in time, if many of them come to believe that they are systematically discriminated against in Ireland, such a sense of fellowship will not develop into what Hall calls ‘new ethnicity’, i.e. a consciousness of group-ness which develops because of how others relate to and treat them (1996). But the census question seems to imply that a commonly felt ‘Black ethnicity’ naturally flows from origins on the continent of Africa or ‘any other black background’. In Nigeria alone, over five hundred indigenous languages are spoken and there are several large ethnic (tribal) groups, including the Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, Fulani and Tiv (Akinwale 2005). Nigerian nationals usually categorise themselves by ethnicity based on tribal background (ibid). Macro categories such as ‘Asian or Asian Irish’, likewise, have little descriptive value and are also implausible as coherent identity categories, including as they do, persons from, or descendents of immigrants from, approximately thirty-seven countries, of various religions and none, further disaggregated by class and gender. Even within one vast Asian country – India - the ethnic identity of Sikhs, Hindus, Muslims, Christians and atheists will tend to be quite dis-similar, especially if caste, gender, class, and educational attainment is also taken into account.[6] Do a Bangladeshi Muslim woman and a Japanese atheist man hold sufficient in common that they both supposedly belong to the same ‘Any other Asian background’ ethnic category if residing in Ireland?
An alternative to Q.14 of Census 2006
Both the EU and the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) recommend that, unless a contrary justification exists, ethnic identification should be based on “self-identification by the individual concerned” (European Commission, 2006: 40). However, as statistician Simpson (2002) says of the ethnic question format used in the UK census (which is similar in many respects to the design used in the Irish Census 2006[7]), that particular format merely “elicits the individual’s response to an official set of categories, the official cognitive system which compels respondents to allocate themselves to a particular group whether they like it or not”. While the CSO does mention in an online Q&A page,[8] that the option ‘Other’ allows respondents to “write in their own description of their ethnic or cultural background where it is not covered by one of the tick boxes” provided,[9] the mutually exclusive, pre-given tick boxes are designed to force choice, steering the vast majority of respondents to choose one of the available, official ‘identities’ and to opt for self-description only if they self-identify as definitively ‘not-White’, ‘not-Black’ or ‘not-Asian’.
Because ethnic boundaries change or shift as social, political and economic circumstances change, members’ allegiances as well as the ethnic categories themselves, change (Barth 1969; Verdery 2000; Wimmer 2007). The Canadian Ethnic Diversity Survey (EDS) of 2002, is an example of how ethnic/cultural and race-related data may be collected in a manner which acknowledges a changing social landscape and does not imply essentialist notions of ethnicity. The EDS sought to understand whether / how people’s backgrounds affected their participation in the social, economic and cultural life of Canada, as well as information on how Canadians ‘interpret and report’ ethnicity (Statistics Canada 2003a: 5). The survey elicited the ethnic or cultural origins of respondents’ ancestors as well as their own current, subjective sense of ethnic or cultural affiliation. Respondents were advised that ethnic or cultural ancestry refers to ’roots’ or cultural background and is not to be confused with citizenship or nationality (Statistics Canada, 2002). The interviewer provided no suggestions or examples, eliciting instead a “’top-of-head’ response from the respondent, without influencing the respondent in any way as to how they should answer the ethnicity question” (Statistics Canada 2003a: fn1: 7). Up to 8 responses were accepted for ancestral background and up to 6 in terms of the respondent’s description of her/his own current, ethnic or cultural belonging.
Fig. 2 Sample Question of Canadian Ethnic Diversity Survey (EDS), 2002
ID_Q100
‘I would now like to ask you to think about your own identity, in ethnic or cultural terms. This identity may be the same as that of your parents, grandparents or ancestors or it may be different.
What is your ethnic or cultural identity?’
Interviewer: Specify up to 6 responses
DO NOT provide examples
Your ethnic or cultural identity is the ethnic or cultural group or groups to which you feel you belong’
Statistics Canada, 2002:5 (emphasis in original)
Respondents were asked how important their ethnic or cultural identity was to them on a scale of 1 to 5 , ranging from ‘is not at all important’ (1), up to ‘is very important’ (5). Several questions explored whether they have been made to feel uncomfortable, or out of place, or have felt discriminated against, or unfairly treated on the basis of ethnicity, culture, race, skin colour, accent, language or religion. Insofar as they answered in the affirmative, they were asked to indicate whether they believed they experienced discrimination based on ethnicity, culture, race, skin colour, accent, language or religion, or combinations of these (or - ‘don’t know’). They were further probed regarding the locations or contexts in which such treatment (if it occurs) tends to happen most. The survey examined levels of contact with family members inside and outside Canada, the importance of continuing ethnic or cultural customs and the extent to which they currently socially interact with members of their own ethnic or cultural grouping(s) or not, as well as the extent of their general participation in civil society organisations in Canada. It also examined people’s sense of belonging to family, ethnic or cultural group(s), to town, city or region, to Province, to Canada and to North America (Statistics Canada 2003a).
The survey report analysed the level of attachment of persons of different generations and ethnic groups to their own ethno-cultural backgrounds and to the broader Canadian society, also taking into account how long they or their families have lived in Canada. It depicts a panorama of altering ethnic allegiances. For instance, while less than half of those who arrived in Canada prior to 1961 retained a strong sense of belonging to their original ethnic-cultural group, 62% of those who arrived since 1991 still did so. And while only 18% of second-generation and 8% of third-plus-generation Canadians with family in the original country or countries of origin, contacted them at least once a month, 75% of first generation immigrants who had arrived since 1991 did so (Statistics Canada 2003b). Forty percent of the first generation said that their identity included Canadian or a provincial or regional identity, compared with 78% in the second generation.
As ethnic diversity and ethnic intermarriages increase in Ireland, ethnic self identification is likely to remain important. The census will need to adjust its methodology to meet the challenges of diversity and of ethno-cultural hybridity (Aspinall 2000; see also, Gilmartin 2006). The Canadian EDS generates far richer sociological insights and from a policy-maker’s point of view, much more applicable ethnic data, than those currently generated by the Irish Census and would seem to constitute an appropriate model which might be usefully drawn upon (in part at least) in re-framing an ethnicity question in Irish censuses to come. The data generated from such a re-designed question, when combined with a variety of class-related and other variables in the census, will make more nuanced monitoring of systemic racial discrimination possible, as well as facilitating understanding of ethnic change in Irish society over time. A revised ethnicity question along the lines sketched above, would contribute to developing a social imaginary of shared membership in a socially dynamic, ethnically heterogeneous state, i.e. one which does not assume (or require) cultural homogeneity or fixity (Sinha 1999; Conway 2006).
Conclusion
I have argued that the census matters, that it helps shape identity and the social imaginary. Presenting identity as processual – relational and situational - an alternative approach to the ethnicity question of Census 2006, one which does not assume static or essentialist ethnic categories, has been outlined. This paper has suggested that the ‘ethnic’ classifications employed in the census are inadequate in terms of meaningfulness, and practical research and policy-formulation value. The category ‘white’ is especially problematic, implicitly legitimating white as an ethnic identity, obscuring the political and structural dimensions of whiteness and effectually endorsing common-sense notions of ‘race’. Rather than being esteemed as an official ‘ethnic’ identity, the social category ‘white’ would be more appropriately acknowledged as a marker of privilege and dominance and concerted efforts made by state agencies and others, in the spirit of anti-racism, to destabilise it as a social identity. This would contribute to re-imagining Ireland and Irishness. The state has considerable authority and power to facilitate and even to promote, the expression of cross-cutting identities which could contest notions of ‘the nation’ as culturally homogenous. An alternative approach to collecting ethnic data could contribute to such a project.
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