History description 2014-03-26: Lock all vaue sets untouched since 2014-03-26 to trackingId 2014T1_2014_03_26
description:
In the United States, federal standards for classifying data on ethnicity determine
the categories used by federal agencies and exert a strong influence on categorization
by state and local agencies and private sector organizations. The federal standards
do not conceptually define ethnicity, and they recognize the absence of an anthropological
or scientific basis for ethnicity classification. Instead, the federal standards acknowledge
that ethnicity is a social-political construct
in which an individual's own identification with a particular ethnicity is preferred
to observer identification. The standards specify two minimum ethnicity categories:
Hispanic or Latino, and Not Hispanic or Latino. The standards define a Hispanic or
Latino as a person of "Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, South or Central America, or
other Spanish culture or origin, regardless of race." The standards stipulate that
ethnicity data need not be limited to the two minimum categories,
but any expansion must be collapsible to those categories. In addition, the standards
stipulate that an individual can be Hispanic or Latino or can be Not Hispanic or Latino,
but cannot be both.