Is ancestry history? The U.S. Census Bureau is contemplating getting rid of a question about a person’s ancestry on its most comprehensive survey, saying it may duplicate a newly-revised race question that allows respondents to write from where they or their antecedents came.
Moving forward, the Census Bureau needs to consider how the questions are worded and what race and ancestry terms mean in people’s everyday lives, said Iheoma Iruka, a committee member and research professor of public policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
“They are social and political, meaning they can change over time,” Iruka said.