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.