immigrants. Similarly, the Netherlands experimented with distinguishing
Autochtonen and Allochtonen, the latter comprising all persons with at least one
parent born overseas. However, in 2016 the Dutch government abandoned this
classification as unsuitable for separating ‘us’ from ‘them’, the native from the
foreign.
Census data and immigration regimes provide further examples of changing
ethnic classifications. For instance, the 1860 US census had just three race
categories: White, Black, and Mulatto. The 1900 census collected data on ‘Color
or Race’ as follows: ‘ “W” for White, “B” for Black, “Ch” for Chinese, “Jp” for
Japanese, or “In” for American Indian’. From 1920 until 1940, it counted all
persons originating from India as ‘Hindus’, regardless of religion, language, or
skin colour. In 1930, Hispanics were first counted as their own race/ethnic
group, but not in subsequent censuses. Since 1980, renewed attempts were made
to count Hispanics, which, however, proved difficult and the issue is not settled.
Of late, the standards used for official data collection proposed in the US contain
five categories for race: American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, Black or
African American, Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islanders, and White. In
2014, the Census Bureau added MENA as another category, Middle Eastern and
North African.
Voluntary attachment and loyalty
Every country’s ethnic classification mirrors its history of migration; at the same
time, the diversity of national standards is also indicative of the general difficulty
of finding universal criteria for categorizing ethnicities. Max Weber, one of the
founding fathers of sociology, was aware of this and, therefore, grounded his
theory of community formation not in seemingly objective—i.e. biological—
criteria such as race and innate ties of ancestry, but in perceived distance and
cultivated exclusiveness, which in combination make for group identity. For
Weber, an ethnic group was a social rather than a natural fact.
For a long time, this insight remained academic and was of little practical
consequence, but finally some governments have recognized self-identification
as the proper method of determining a person’s ethnicity, in effect relativizing if
not eliminating the ascribed/asserted distinction. The British Office of National
Statistics declares: