The Racial State of the Everyday

and the Making of Ethnic Statistics

in Britain

Jacqueline Nassy Brown

Dateline Paris. 18 November 2005. The biggest explosion of street violence

in France since the late 1960s has jolted the country into confronting its
failure to include its 7 million residents of Arab and African origin in the
national mainstream. Some experts believe the crux of the problem lies
with Frances integration policy. Government bodies and private companies
are barred from gathering data based on ethnicity or religionwhich are
deemed potentially divisive. France has always deemed its model superior to
the Anglo-Saxon approach of diversity, which has enabled ethnic minorities
to retain strong bonds in cultural and religious communities. France calls
this comunitarism and says that it promotes ghettos, exclusion, poverty,
race riots, and religious extremism that can ultimately lead to actions such as
the London bombings. French Equal Opportunities Minister Azouz Begag
has urged the government to overturn the ban on collecting such data, telling
Le Figaro newspaper that it was important to assess the presence of minori-
ties in various professions. Job discrimination was a key complaint voiced by
many youths who rioted in immigrant suburbs in recent weeks. We need to
see Frances true colours, Mr. Begag said.1

Dateline Paris. 17 June 2008. When Youssoupha, a black rapper here, was
asked the other day what was on his mind, a grin spread across his face.
Barack Obama, he said. Obama tells us everything is possible. A new
black consciousness is emerging in France, lately hastened by, of all things,
the presumptive Democratic nominee for president of the United States. An
article in Le Monde a few days ago described how Mr. Obama is stirring up
high hopes among blacks here. Even seeing the word noir in a French news-

Social Text 98 Vol. 27, No. 1 Spring 2009

DOI 10.1215/01642472-2008-015 2009 Duke University Press 11
 paper was an occasion for surprise until recently. . . . Its against the rules for
the government to conduct official surveys according to race. Consequently
nobody even knows for certain how many black citizens there are. Can
you imagine if French officials said, Well, were not sure, the population of
France may be 65 million, or maybe its 30 million? declared a somewhat
exasperated Patrick Lozes, founder of Cran, a black organization devised
not long ago partly to gather statistics the government wont.2

The last several years have seen increasing political agitation on the part
of blacks in France, for whom the racial status quo includes their social
and economic inequality, their second-class citizenship, and their utter
invisibility in the national mainstream. To redress these conditions, blacks
within the government and without have focused their efforts on over-
turning the ban on the collection of ethnic statistics. Such data, they
argue, could provide a critical basis of knowledge from which to make
policy for the elimination of racial discrimination. As testament to the
centrality of the ban to contemporary French politics, both presidential
candidates Nicolas Sarkozy and Sgolne Royal weighed in; the former
supported a lifting of the ban, while the latter objected, citing possible
misuse of such personal information. 3 This debate places France at the
same crossroads that Britain once occupied. In mid-1970s Britain, at the
urging of a variety of black community organizations and the Commis-
sion for Racial Equality, the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys
(now subsumed under the Office of National Statistics) began planning
for the first government survey to ask a direct question on ethnicity.
What follows is an ethnographic study of the 1991 National Census of
the United Kingdom, the first ever to include a question about peoples
ethnic-group membership. The ethnographic material concerns the actual
conduct of the census, as it was carried out in Liverpool, a working-class
and multiracial city in northern England. In the United Kingdom and
France, census questions on race or ethnicitywhether they appear at
all and the forms they take if they doprovide, at the very least, a win-
dow onto the relationship between ethnic/racial difference and national
identity and belonging.
This article locates black participation in state projects such as the
census as important yet little-studied sites of diasporic politics. The cross-
fertilization of ideas among black national populations and the historical
development of radicalized and globalized racial identities has been the
focus of the African diaspora literature for the last twenty years.4 As with
most transnationally centered approaches to culture and identity, what is
generally left out of these studies is the state, especially the role that blacks
play in its special brand of identity politics. This elision is ironic in view of
the centrality of government policies and state ideologies in determining
the legitimacy of black belonging and citizenship, the denial of which often

12 Brown The Making of Ethnic Statistics in Britain

animates diasporic subjectivity. That is, for many black populations, espe-
cially in Europe, state actors are the architects of discriminatory nationality
laws and other policies of racial exclusion.5 With their national belonging
perpetually in question, blacks in Europe often seek out diasporic resources
that originate in other parts of the black world. These resources have most
commonly included music such as reggae and rap, as well as film. To
these we can now add the international icon of black possibility known as
Barack Obama, revered as a relatively progressive contestant for head of
the American state. The example that his image provides suggests that the
state is a dynamic site of investigation for students of diaspora precisely
because it, too, is imbued with racial meanings, nay identity, and because
it, with variegated forms of black participation, engages in highly fateful
practices through which the varieties and criteria of black identity are
established and debated.
The transnational dimensions of these issues extend beyond the
question of how black European outsiders to the nation access diasporic
resources from elsewhere. Border-crossings also take place among the
state officials, policymakers, demographers, and journalists who contrib-
ute to producing knowledge on black communities. As suggested above,
the debate on ethnic statistics in France has unfolded, both in academic
studies and media accounts, with constant reference to the politics of race
and nation in Britain and the United States. Although this article is not
concerned with France per se, its raison dtre is very much inspired by it.
The media snippets that began this article show different kinds of black
activists on the French political scene ruminating on blackness through
the lenses of British and American statecraft vis--vis ethnic difference.
The historic ethnic question that appeared on the 1991 British census
was formulated with the help of a well-developed literature on the racial
politics of the American census. In turn, the British census, and the larger
dynamics of ethnic, racial, and national identity that it shapes and reflects,
is of concrete interest to blacks in France and to French society as a whole.
The way that France proceeds will undoubtedly affect the articulations
of race and nation that contribute to diasporic forms of black identity.
Hence diasporic blackness cannot be considered apart from the society-
wide forms of racial discourse in which the census is so thoroughly impli-
cated. To wit, black people contribute to these discourses from a variety
of positions, not just as rappers such as Youssoupha (who would surely be
a person of interest in the diasporic studies that currently dominate). In
this ethnography of the state, blacks will appear as its representatives, its
consultants, its employees, and as community advocates in state-funded
institutions, as freelance activists, or as ordinary citizens who question or
otherwise thwart its power.
A national census is most fundamentally a state project. Its challenge

Social Text 98 Spring 2009 13

 is to create usable knowledge, the better to govern with.6 As the Office of
Population Censuses and Surveys (henceforth the Census Office), in a
public relations document titled Why Do We Need a Census? explained:

The census collects information about each person in the country and pro-
duces a range of statistical information, not just on people, but on families,
households, housing and workplaces. This information in turn provides
firm foundations of fact for many government decisions on policies and
planning. . . . The census provides the factual setting in which not only
government must work but also industry and commerce, the trade unions,
charities and many others; many important decisions affecting the lives of
everyone in the country and involving thousands of millions of pounds of
expenditure each year hinge upon census information.7

Toward those ends, experts of various description devise a uniform set

of methods for data collection in the hope of producing countable and
comparable units of information. There is a long if largely hidden road
from the construction of the categories, the doorstep encounters between
the enumerator and the respondent, the coding and tabulation of the data,
and then the representatational practices wherein the data are presented
and later utilized by all who choose to access them. A host of mysteri-
ous intermediary steps leads from one to the other, resulting ultimately
in authoritative statements that assume that racialized subjects are, with
statistics, knowable. As Jacqueline Urla remarked in a related context,
There are probably few features more characteristic of modernity than
the notion that we can know ourselves through numbers. 8 A further
characteristic of modernity is the belief that the truth will set us free,
that the evil forces of racism, in this case, will be overcome once knowl-
edge of those forces, packaged in the ideal form of numbers, comes to
light. Manynot allblack activists in 1970s and 1980s Britain argued
that through ethnic statistics the extent of racial discrimination could be
known and then ameliorated. That argument prompts the question, what
do people understand questions on ethnic identity to be counting? 9
Social scientific studies of national censuses, which also generally
proceed from the premise that ethnic statistics are necessary for the redress
of discrimination, tend to focus on the difficulty of applying societys
arbitrary, fluid, and imperfect identity categories to exercises in govern-
mental social classification that, by nature, put a premium on consistency
and accuracy.10 In a related vein, there is a tendency to analyze the poli-
tics of the census only in relation to the dynamics of identity as lived and
experienced. For example, in the introduction to their important book
Census and Identity: The Politics of Race, Ethnicity, and Language in National
Censuses, David I. Kertzer and Dominique Arel write: Investigating the
census/identity matrix offers a privileged vantage point for examining

14 Brown The Making of Ethnic Statistics in Britain

such fundamental social and political issues as the growth and evolution
of nationalism, ethnic conflict, racism, and transnational identity forma-
tion and organization. But these processes should be seen in the larger
context of how individuals come to assert certain collective identities for
themselves, how they come to assign them to others, and the role that state
authorities play in these collective identity processes.11
The present case study starts from a different premise: that, in
instances where the real bone of contention is the perpetuation of otherness
on the part of the state and the society, the census categories themselves
are less crucial than the very fact of social differentiation and the forms
of objectification it entails. The real stakes in Britain concerned national
belonging, which the assertion of racial or ethnic difference on the part of
the stateespecially on the national censuswas thought by many blacks
and whites to contradict. Hence my focus is not on problems of accuracy or
of the appropriateness of the categories, per se, nor with identity, strictly
speaking, although all of these will come into play in what follows. Rather,
I draw on contestations over the accuracy and appropriateness of identity
categories to show the forms of power and resistance at work in the con-
duct of the census. In that process, people on both sides of the clipboard
acted on either the injunction to objectifycreating forms of personhood
that could be amenable to countingor the compulsion to resist such
objectification.12 Ultimately, I argue that the conduct of the historic 1991
National Census of the United Kingdom reveals less about peoples ethnic
or racial identity or group membership than about the culture and politics
of social categorization, the fraught relationship between black people and
British society, and the contradictory racial identities of the British state
at a momentous historical juncture.

The History of the Historic Census

As in current-day France, in 1970s Britain, Liverpool-born black and

other antiracist activists in that city and around the country clamored
for the state to collect ethnic statistics.13 Their efforts were rewarded
when the Home Affairs Committee agreed, after extensive hearings on
the issue, to plan for a direct question on ethnicity in the 1981 census.
Prior to that time, the census questionnaire asked for the birthplace of
each individual in a household and for that of his or her parents. Yet that
question was fast becoming obsolete because the British-born children of
postwar immigrants from South Asia, China, the Caribbean, and Africa
would soon be having their own children. Thus the birthplace question
would fail to identify people of these and other ethnic backgrounds.14
This argument, though, belied the fact that there had been many ethni-
cally different peoples multiplying in Britain well before the 1970s

Social Text 98 Spring 2009 15

 particularly in seaport towns and cities like Liverpool, Bristol, Cardiff,
and even London. In Liverpool, for example, seamen from many British
colonies had been resident since at least the mid-nineteenth century, and
they often married white British womenand had children. In the 1970s,
one could ask a black adult in Liverpool for the birthplace of his or her
parents, and the answer could easily be England.
Notwithstanding the role of black community activists in pushing for
an ethnic question, the timing of the Census Offices decision to include it
led other blacks to suspect that this project was not a politically disinter-
ested one. For, despite the longtime presence of colonial-ethnic subjects
in Britain, it was in the tense political milieu of the late 1960s and beyond
that the infamous nationalist and member of Parliament Enoch Powell
politicized their procreation. He dwelled on population statistics in order
to spark fears about the exponential growth of the black population born in
Britain.15 The country was, in that period, experiencing rapid social, eco-
nomic, and political decline. In 1971, the government passed a law effec-
tively halting further immigration from New Commonwealth countries.
Only three years later, the Census Office began devising its explicitly ethnic
question, which was intended to appear on the 1981 census. But ultimately,
the Census Office was forced to abort its plans for two reasons.
First, the Census Office failed to devise a question that was able to
elicit the data it sought. Between 1975 and 1979 it conducted four pilot
studies. All of these met with problems because Afro-Caribbean parents
objected to being asked to identify their British-born children as West
Indian. So they checked the box marked European instead, despite the
fact that this category appeared with the term White in parentheses. Census
officials attributed this response to Afro-Caribbeans confusion between
ethnic origin and nationality.16 In the report on its final experiment, the
Census Office stated that the ethnic question had again fared worst among
Afro-Caribbeans and second generation immigrants generally because
in addition to numerous omissions as many as 23% of the West Indians
were wrongly entered as English, Welsh, Scottish or Irish.17 While the
Census Office was fixated on the presumed correctness of the identity cat-
egories, West Indian parents may have been just as fixated on the national
politics of difference unfolding in Britain.
Second, the Census Office had to abort its plans for political rea-
sons. Blacks suspected that the government would use this data to develop
racially exclusionary nationality laws or to make a case for the wholesale
repatriation of black people.18 The Census Office conducted its final pilot
test in that climate. That pilot test, and the upcoming 1981 census for which
it prepared, became the targets of a massive, highly publicized campaign
in which several minority organizations urged people not to answer any
questions concerning ethnicity or nationality. To allay these fears, the

16 Brown The Making of Ethnic Statistics in Britain

Commission for Racial Equality (a nondepartmental public body created
by the Race Relations Act of 1976) spearheaded public relations efforts
in black communities throughout England, encouraging people to sup-
port the inclusion of an ethnic question on the 1981 census. The Census
Office also consulted state-funded community relations councils across
the country in an attempt to solicit their support for the question and to
seek input on its format. Meanwhile, the government of Margaret Thatcher
was busily formulating the British Nationality Act, which passed in 1981.
It determined that to be a British citizen, one had to have a parent born or
settled in Britaina requirement that was meant to exclude black people
from legitimate citizenship.19
In the statement announcing its decision, the Census Office declared
that there would definitely be an ethnic question in 1991. In the lead-up
to that census, and with the help of another battery of pilot tests, the Cen-
sus Office struggled to devise a question that would be widely accepted,
while averting the ostensible problem of, for example, Afro-Caribbeans
classifying their children as White European. The category Black
British was tested, but it failed because, as a statistician for the Census
Office told me in an interview, the commonsense criteria for membership
in that category were variable and unclear. Moreover, it could be seen as a
privileged category relative to the others with which it would appear. Yet,
the Census Office did make a key concession to the respondents it sought
to assuage: the 1991 questionnaire highlighted the subjective dimension
of ethnicity rather than relying on the phrase it had once used, ethnic ori-
gin. Now the question asked for the ethnic group to which the respondent
considered him or herself to belong. Presenting the elementor, better,
the illusionof choice was part of a larger set of strategies in which certain
kinds of appeals were made to the respondents sense of control and choice,
hence (hopefully) increasing the likelihood of their participation.
Blacks success both in getting the Home Affairs Committee to agree
to include an ethnic question and then other blacks successful resistance
to it show in equal measure black political agency in the realm of state
practices. Theorizing the unstable racial identity of the state through an
ethnography of the census entails a disruption of what we might other-
wise imagine as the dichotomous and determining roles occupied by all-
powerful state officials, on the one hand, and powerless black subjects on
the other. Armed with the tactical lessons learned in 1981, the Census
Office engaged in various and sundry maneuvers to cultivate black par-
ticipation for the next census.
To successfully amass population statisticscreating, so Michel
Foucault argues, a population in the processthe will of the people must
be produced. In his essay on governmentality, Foucault reminds us that
statistics are the science of the state. 20 With the analytic of governmental-

Social Text 98 Spring 2009 17

 ity, Foucault overrides the noun form of the word government by playing it
off of the verb to governwhich means to shape, direct, guide, or control
action. Foucault crystallized the meaning of governmentality by defining
it as the conduct of conduct. He sought to identify the kinds of tactics or
techniques that guide social action within a set of fluid possibilities. It bears
remembering that Foucault did not mean governmentality to be an analytic
of state power. But neither is state power excluded from it. Governmentality
allows room for a juridical principle, even as it does not depend on the law
for its success. Rather, governmentality relies centrally on the general will
of the very population that is to be managed. One tactic for producing that
will consists in the explicit appeals made to the benefits that would inhere
in submitting to the form of conduct being proposed.
A fine example of governmentality can be found in the history of the
British census. The first national census was conducted in 1801. Hitherto,
the British populace objected to it for fear of the ways the data could be
used. But in 1798, with the publication of Thomas Malthuss alarmist trea-
tise on population, the British state argued that the census was absolutely
necessary. Without it, the government would not be able to assess whether
there was sufficient food supply for the people whose well-being it was the
states duty to ensure. As a further index of the states effective govern-
mentality in the conduct of the 1991 census, it is instructive to note that
the historical tidbit just cited, relating to the food supply of the nation, was
printed in the public relations material that the Census Office produced for
its current and still controversial census. Notably, that promotional mate-
rial failed to mention the other purposes of early census data, such as the
rationalization of tax collection and conscription. However, that material
did go on to make the following appeal to the benefits of the ethnic ques-
tion, like so: It is government policy, backed by law, to eliminate racial
discrimination and to promote equality of opportunity for people of all
ethnic groups. Accurate statistics on ethnic groups, both nationally and
locally, will help central government, local government, health authorities,
private employers and voluntary bodies to know what inequalities there
are and to plan action to overcome them.21 In 1991, and notwithstanding
the liberal overtones of that statement, the Census Office faced consider-
able obstacles in producing the general will of the black population. For
the previous twenty years or more, the state had been producing laws that
adversely affected racial and ethnic minorities. And now it was politely
asking themif not pleading with themto submit to being counted.
There is scarcely a public relations document about the 1991 census that
does not refer to the rationale for the ethnic question in terms such as
those just quoted. Those terms unfailingly imply that in order to combat
racial discrimination, it has to be quantified, a process that requires the
government to count people ethnically.

18 Brown The Making of Ethnic Statistics in Britain

 Importantly, though, the state also had to marshal the general will
of white Britons. They raised a set of concerns that overlapped with those
articulated by blacks. The states injunction ran against the grain of a key
and, arguably, cultural ethos about power relations in Britain. According to
that ethos, to give voice to the structuring principles that organize society
hierarchically is to reinforce those principles, effectively articulating the
fact that difference matters. In other words, to inquire into aspects of the
personal identity of someone whom one does not know well is to engage
in an othering move.
For its own part, the state also has what could be called a complex
racial identity. Indeed, what makes the state so interesting is that it is com-
posed of so many moving partsparts that, in this case, were implicated
in national-racial politics in contradictory ways. At once we have the Cen-
sus Office, which was struggling to concern itself with demography pure
and simpleas if the collection of racial/ethnic data in extremely minute
geographical detail were an innocent exercise. The Census Office found
itself dragged into politics on a grand scale as a result of what other arms
of the state had been up to. For, in addition to rendering racial discrimina-
tion unlawful in 1976, central government had also, in that same period,
passed a series of racially discriminatory immigration and nationality
laws. Which of those two impulses on the part of the state would blacks
consider at that critical moment when they were asked to stand up and be
ethnically counted?
To encourage the correct impulse, the Census Office had to work
closely with the Commission for Racial Equality, an institution that serves
the government in an advisory capacity. Together they produced promo-
tional material that appealed to peoples well-being and belonging in stra-
tegically color-coded terms. That material, which was displayed on buses,
in trains, and on billboards all over the country, depicted a multi(ethnic?
racial?) family, rendered in the form of simple line drawings: a green father,
a red mother, and a yellow child, enclosed by a line drawing of a similarly
multicolored house. The silly visuals aside, the Census Office should be
credited for allowing that all members of a household might not be eth-
nically or racially the same. Yet in its use of bright colors, those visuals
could also signal that it was really nonwhite people who were the targets of
the census, a point to which I shall return. The promotional material also
sought to produce the general will of blacks and Asians with the slogan It
counts because you count.
How did the Census Office devise such strategies? Back in 1981, the
Home Affairs Committee undertook a series of investigations into the ways
ethnic data was collected in the national censuses of the United States and
Canada. Committee members even traveled to the United States for this
purpose. Drawing a telling contrast between the American case and the

Social Text 98 Spring 2009 19

 British one, the committee recognized the particular challenge it faced:
There is in the USA a much stronger political will at government level,
embodied in equal opportunity and affirmative action programmes. . . .
No one is challenging the legitimate right of black Americans to reside
in the USA, so they have much greater confidence than their non-white
counterparts in Britain in pressing for equality.22 Even in the contrast, the
particular problems of ethnic categorization in Britain came into focus,
as did strategies to overcome them. The Home Affairs Committee made
various public relations suggestions to the Census Office: solicit advice and
support from ethnic minority organizations, produce ethnically oriented
publicity material, and hire ethnic minorities as enumerators in particu-
lar neighborhoods. These were all inspired by the U.S. example. 23 In any
event, were the incorrect impulse to prevailthat is, should people remain
unconvinced by all the happy public relations messages and ethnically
sensitive tacticsthe census form prominently invoked another arm of
the state: the law. Refusal to be counted could have resulted in a fine of
400 pounds sterling (about $650 in 1991).
The questionnaire required that a head of household or a person over
the age of sixteen fill out the form. A household is defined on the census
form like so: A household comprises either one person living alone or a
group of people (not necessarily related) living at the same address with
common housekeepingthat is, sharing at least one meal a day or sharing
a sitting room.24 In spite of the heterosexual nuclear-familial image that
appeared on the promotional material, the actual census questionnaire does
not assume that a household is comprised of people related to one another.
The respondent must specify the social relationships between him- or
herself and every other individual of the household. All individuals of the
household, unless they request otherwise, are listed on the same form.
The Census Office methodology also required that the respondent specify
where every member of the household was on what it called Census Night
(21 April 1991). If a member of the household was elsewhereperhaps at
college or on holidaythe Census Office needed to know that. Likewise
if someone was staying in the household overnight, that persons name
and usual address had to be included on the form. Most broadly, then, the
census is simply counting people resident in England, Northern Ireland,
Wales, and Scotland on all-important Census Night. For example, despite
being an American national, I too was counted.
This entire event is officially called The National Census of the
United Kingdom, but to what extent is this a national project? On the
actual census questionnaire, the nation is invisibleperhaps strategi-
cally so. The precise relationship between ethnic groups and the political
community that is the nation is left open and ambiguous on the form. In
the actualor, better, ostensibleethnic question, ethnicity is neither

20 Brown The Making of Ethnic Statistics in Britain

associated with nor disassociated from national citizenship as conferred
by the state. The ethnic question appeared on the form like so:

Please tick the appropriate box.

If the person is descended from more than one ethnic or racial group, please
tick the group to which the person considers he/she belongs, or tick the
Any other ethnic group box and describe the persons ancestry in the
space provided.

White
Black-Caribbean
Black-African
Black-Other
Please describe
___________________
___________________

Indian
Pakistani
Bangladeshi
Chinese
Any other ethnic group
Please describe
___________________
___________________

Nationality may be looming around somewhere, but ethnicity is

prominent and somewhat fixed. The respondent is required to check one
box. One is given a list of boxes from which to choose, yes, but one has no
choice about whether to check a box at all. And the form does allow people
to identify as members of two ethnic groupsin which case the question
invokes matters of racial ancestry. The form also allows one to reject the
choices given and to define oneself (or be defined by whomever fills out
the questionnaire) as, for example, Black-Other instead.

Producing Ethnic Statistics

A white woman in her twenties was the first of several census enumera-
tors I interviewed in Liverpool. In a phone conversation, I explained to
her that I was conducting research on the census and its historic ethnic
question, and she happily agreed to be interviewed. On shaking my hand
the next day, and before I had time to ask a single question, she began
expressing her shock that it was so difficult for black people in Liverpool
to define themselves in ethnic terms. As I sat down, frantically searching
for a pen to record her unsolicited comments, she said, with authority,

Social Text 98 Spring 2009 21

 that black people were totally unable to place themselves in space and
time.25 At first blush, her frustrations might find context in the fact
that black families in Liverpool are typically composed of a black father
(whether Afro-Caribbean, African, or black British), a white English or
Irish mother, and their children. Deeper context may lie in the fact that,
for hundreds of years, Liverpool was a major international seaport, one
where seamen from around the globe settled, married, and had children.
As indicated earlier, the historical depth of blacks presence in that city
means that even in the early 1970s many middle-aged blacks would have
had parents born in England. For this reason, among others, there has
never been anything close to an accurate statistical picture for any of
Liverpools ethnic minorities.
Although the shifting and contradictory bases of racial identity did
come to bear as white and black members of interracial families approached
the ostensibly ethnic question, I would suggest that what seemed to this
enumerator to be blacks confoundment about the workings of identity
might better be understood as an effect of peoples multiply mediated
perceptions ofand objections tothe states agenda. Blacks and many
whites responded critically to the request that they, for their own good,
describe themselves and their children in the states rigid, highly problem-
atic, and deeply nationalistic terms.
Black people whom I knew were scandalized by the fact that the term
White appeared on top and that it was unaccompanied by other ethnic
terms. That lack highlighted the racial nature of the question itself. It threw
into blunt relief that what the state really wanted to know was how many
black and Asian people there were in the country, their ethnicity completely
aside. Compounding the problem was the Black-Other category, which
people I knew complained about vociferously. To them, it gave, again,
blunt expression to their status as others. Interestingly enough, though,
the Black-Other category was very popular, as we shall see later. The
absence of a Black British category came as a devastating shock for many
people I knew in Liverpool whose birth in Britain goes back several very
proud generations. And indeed, back in 1980, when blacks in other parts of
Britain were saying to the state, we will not be counted, black activists in
Liverpool were complaining that there were no statistics about how many
of the citys blacks were born in Britain. The overwhelming majority of
statistics about racial discrimination in their city concerned immigrants.
Existing statistics about joblessness, housing, lack of access to health care,
and education rendered self-described Liverpool-born blacks virtually
invisible, hence undermining their ability to make the case about what they
saw as the different ways that they (as opposed to immigrants) experienced
the material effects of racism. In 1980, Liverpool-born blacks working in
radical organizations were loudly demanding that the state count them. 26

22 Brown The Making of Ethnic Statistics in Britain

 Earlier, I suggested that the states various parts were racially contra-
dictory, working at cross-purposes. Yet the ultimate source of the states
racially unstable identity lay in the fascinating group of people who ulti-
mately carried out the states work, the enumerators. The enumerators, as a
group, represented the height of the ordinary. They were students, house-
wives, retired people, or people who were otherwise employed but wanted
to earn some extra cash. There were twelve enumerators for the area
where Liverpools multiracial (and interracial) community is centered
an area known as Liverpool 8 (which is, technically, the first part of a
postcode). The enumerators for Liverpool 8 were Afro-Caribbean, Afri-
can, white, and Liverpool-born black. Some lived in Liverpool 8, some
lived in neighboring areas, and one lived way out in the suburbs. For the
three nights that they interfaced directly with the nation, these everyday
people were the face of the British stateand thus did they often incur
the respondents wrath. Or, alternatively, they could find themselves in the
position of authorities on identity. In either case, or in variations therein,
we see people of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds negotiating the
criteria of social categorization. Their negotiations provide a window onto
the cultural and deeply political salience of identity itself.
I interviewed eleven of the twelve enumerators assigned to Liverpool
8, as well as a variety of Census Office bureaucrats, statisticians, policy-
makers, and managers resident in Liverpool. The most important figure
among these was the manager of the enumeration district that included
Liverpool 8, a middle-aged Nigerian man whom I will call Mr. Afua. His
responsibilities included hiring and training the enumerators for that area.
Mr. Afua had a background in management, but was currently without
work. For him, too, this was a temporary job. In my first interview with Mr.
Afua, he emphasized that the ethnic question on the census was necessary
in order to accurately assess the needs of the Liverpool 8 community as, for
example, in the provision of social services to underprivileged minorities.
Yet, this official discourse quickly gave way to his own views about matters
concerning racial identity. Without any prompting from me, he volunteered
a history of racial identities in Liverpool. Shortly after he began, he stopped
short to ask me whether I was mixed race. 27 I was suspicious of where this
line of inquiry would lead, but I responded anyway: Both of my parents
are black. That settled, he proceeded to share with me his confusion
about the recent turn in the terms of identity now being used in Liverpool.
The term half-caste, he said, was becoming obsolete in the city, and now
a lot of people were, as he put it, calling themselves blackbut theyre
not black. He continued, After the 1981 riots in Liverpool, it became
Liverpool-born black. He went on with his analysis of changing racial
identities in Liverpool, expressing his own confusion about the reasons
people of mixed parentage would call themselves black. Yet his logic was

Social Text 98 Spring 2009 23

 eluding me. In a final desperate attempt to make himself clear, he asked
me point blank, Lookif you mate a sheep with a goat, you dont get a
goat, do you? I could not manage a poker face here. Reading my stunned
expression, he said, Oh, maybe Ive offended you. I mumbled something,
trying to brush it off.
So this is the person hired to oversee the historic and highly controver-
sial census, which was about to be administered to members of the multi-
racial households of Liverpool 8. Many Liverpool-born blacks I knew were
familiar with the view that Mr. Afua articulated about racial categories,
as it was the same view held by their own West African fathers. His per-
spective on racial identities and categories aside, his outline of their recent
history was valid. Just as Mr. Afua suggested, the term half-castewhich
was, for generations, the hegemonic descriptor for people of mixed racial
parentageis largely obsolete and truly despised among the people it used
to describe. Since the mid-1960s or so, people of mixed racial parentage
in Liverpool have claimed an unqualified black identity, roundly denounc-
ing the half-caste category. But in doing so, they went against the racial
constructions held not only by white society at large, but also those held
by their own African fathers. Liverpool-born blacks also proudly claim
African identityand here, too, they contradict their African fathers
views about who counts as a real African.
Part of Mr. Afuas job was to train the enumerators whom he hired.
He led two training sessions, each lasting several hours. Here the enumera-
tors learned exactly how to ask not only the ethnic question, but also the
eighteen other questions on the form. In one session, a Liverpool-born
black woman, Tina, asked what to do if someone did not want to answer the
ethnic question. We cant just assume, she insisted. In response to Tinas
question, Mr. Afua joked that she should, if the respondent is a man, try
suggesting that she has ways of making him talk. He followed that joke
with another, which fell just as flat: Just ask, What are you? and take a
step back. Then, on a serious note, he instructed the enumerators to recite
the law requiring their participation. He said they should also pretend that
their jobs depended on their collecting all the data, and that the Commis-
sion for Racial Equality is really pushing for it and that there would
be cultural benefits. And he seemed to believe this, for at one point he
exclaimed that blacks should scarcely object because this is the best thing
that has ever happened to them! Mr. Afua assumed here that it is only
black people who would object to the question. How might one represent
the cultural benefits of the ethnic question to the many white people who
objected to it? And to the many white peoplemost controversially, the
Irishwho were left off of it?
When it was time for me to accompany an enumerator on rounds

24 Brown The Making of Ethnic Statistics in Britain

through Liverpool 8, Mr. Afua first paired me up with Tina, and, as it
happened, I was with her when a problem related to her question arose.
Tina didnt like one of the answers that a respondent gaveand so she
changed it. Tina popped the ethnic question to a middle-aged white man,
who responded, Well, my wife is black, Im white . . . , and then, pointing
to his five-year-old daughter who was looking on from the foyer, the man
continued, and her, shes half-caste. Tina was not willing to put half-caste
on the form. Thus did she proceed to change his answer in his presence.
Cutting a sly glance at me, she snickered: Well! Were all African, arent
we? With that, she checked the box next to Black-African.
This is only one example of the randomness that surrounded how
individuals were categorized ethnically on the census. On the one hand,
there is the sheer serendipity of the fact that it was the childs father who
answered the door. I found, actually, that it was the negotiation of this
highly particular and contingent encounter, one in which the state met the
nation on its doorstep, that determined how people were ultimately catego-
rized and counted. For example, had the childs black mother appeared,
she may have described the ethnicity of her daughter differently. And had
the state shown up in the form of a different enumerator than Tina, that
child could have come to occupy a different ethnic category; perhaps she
would have been written in as Half-Caste. Theres no telling. But Tina
checked the box marked Black-African. She could have chosen another
option: she could have opted for the Black-Other category and filled in
Black British. There can scarcely be a doubt that that child was a British
citizen. Regretfully, I failed to ask Tina why she chose Black-African. I
was too shocked at her gumption. But I can surmise why she would not have
put Black British on that form. That category does not have sufficient
subjective importance as a frame for her own identity. Tinaa British
citizen herselfassociates Britishness with whiteness. In the context of
what became my great friendship with Tina, I came to witness the term
black British stick in her throat. Hence did she describe that ostensibly
half-caste child as a black African.
The terms black British and black African worked differently for another
enumerator, Rachel. Rachel was Mr. Afuas twenty-year-old daughter.
Though she was born and raised in Liverpool, Rachel did not perceive herself
as a Liverpool-born black, as Tina did. Like other young people with two
African parents, Rachel saw herself as ethnically (in her case) Nigerian. As
well, the term Liverpool-born black tended to get collapsed into the category
mixed race pretty much by default, since the majority of blacks born in
Liverpool were thought to be of mixed racial parentage. Of course, we dont
know how many people actually were of mixed racial parentage because there
had never been any accurate statistics on such matters.

Social Text 98 Spring 2009 25

 In describing her work as an enumerator, Rachel betrayed a perspec-
tive on racial identity similar to her fathers. To be black, one must have two
black parents. But phenotype confuses. Lots of people in Liverpool with
two black parents could look like, for example, me. And that is why Mr.
Afua had to clarify whether I was mixed-race. In her capacity as an enu-
merator, Rachel reported to me that some black and light-skinned people
objected to the ethnic question and would not answer it. I asked whom she
meant by light-skinned people. People like you, she responded plainly.
The distinction she made is critical: it depended on skin color. And, as
she just reported, she encountered several black and light-skinned people
who refused to fill in the ethnic question. She added that one man had
written on the form, Ive lived here for sixty years and no one ever asked
me my ethnic origin before! When people rebuked her verbally, she said
she would, in her words, just write what she saw. Sometimes she would
write Black British (in the space marked Black-Other) and at other
times she would check the box marked Black-African. I asked her what
these determinations depended on, to which she responded, It doesnt
depend on anything. It just comes. Sometimes she saw Black Brit-
ish and at other times she saw Black-African. Presumably, the same
people whom Tina would list as Black-African, Mr. Afuas daughter was
describing as Black British.
I would suggest that the British state, as it appeared on Liverpool
8 doorsteps, is not without racial identity. Rachel was doing the states
work from her own highly specific racial positionalityone that was iden-
tical to that of her father. The census form was meant to deliver ultimate
authority to the respondents; it was they who should have determined their
membership in ethnic groups. But, as Rachel said, some black and light-
skinned people refused to answer the question. It was offensive. Rachel,
however, overrode these peoples attempts to resist being racially classified
by the state.
The doorstep methodology of the census is critical, then, to the ethnic
numbers that were calculatedand not just in Liverpool 8, obviously, but
in every British city and neighborhood from Belfast to Brixton. From tens
of thousands of these highly variable and contingent racial encounters, a
national census was ultimately produced.
In addition to Tina, I also accompanied a middle-class white woman,
Laura, in her rounds through Liverpool 8. Laura was a student at nearby
Liverpool University. She lived in Liverpools nether reaches. I once visited
her at home. I had not heretofore realized that Liverpool had an area quite
this suburban. By contrast, the part of Liverpool that Laura covered in her
census rounds was located deep in the heart of the proverbial ghetto. Laura
was more than a little nervous walking down its streets. To wit, her census
duties not only required her to traverse this ethnic space, but to actually

26 Brown The Making of Ethnic Statistics in Britain

ring doorbells there. Thus was Laura elated to have me accompany her on
her rounds. She emphasized to me that her goal, on these doorsteps, was to
be in and out! The sun was setting and, damn it, time was of the essence.
At one point, as we scurried from one house to the next, she expressed
embarrassment about having to ask people their ethnicity. She confessed,
I wish I had taken a course on tact. This statement confused me. All
of Lauras respondents answered the ethnic question without incident.
They didnt seem to take any offense. A later comment she made filled in
the blanks. It seemed that their stated identities embarrassed her. Laura
went on to joke about the responses people were putting on the forms. She
explicitly characterized the people of Liverpool 8 through a reference to
Heinz 57 Varieties ketchup. Yet, in the heat of the moment, and in view
of her jitteriness, she was scarcely going to intercede in peoples tendency
to give voice to those varieties by checking multiple boxes. (Remember
that the Census Office decreed that if people wanted to claim member-
ship in more than one ethnic group, they were to describe their ancestry
rather than checking multiple boxes. Presumably other state workers would
classify such people later.) The fact that Laura could be embarrassed by
the plurality of peoples ethnic backgrounds only affirms the cultural
view described earlier: that identities are best kept private. And on this
point, Laura, a nice young Englishwoman, seems to share culture with the
Nigerian Mr. Afua, who also found hybrid identities to be a joking matter:
Just ask, What are you? and take a step back.
One womans response did catch Laura off guard, though. One very
friendly woman, who appeared to Laura (and to me, quite frankly) to be
black, announced quite simply that she was whitenot white and some-
thing else. Laura took the unusual step of attempting to clarify the matter.
Youre white? Yes, Im white, she said. With that, Laura checked the
White box, and we were gone a moment later. Lauras embarrassment
and her emphasis on speed militated against her entering into complex
negotiations on ethnic-group membership with this woman or anyone else.
Unlike Rachel or Tina, Laura did not thwart the agency or desires of her
respondent; she was marked down as white. Yet this case of Lauras high-
lights the fact that the authoritative ethnic data that the state, in the form
of the Census Office, would ultimately announce depended profoundly
on the racialized fears and anxieties operating at another, more intimate,
level of the states operation.
The point of this ethnographic analysis is not to pronounce upon
the limitation of the categories or the hopelessness of statistical accuracy.
Rather, the ethnography is meant to highlight moments of heightened
contingency as they occurred on peoples doorsteps. From that vantage
point, we can see myriad layers of racialized motivation and action. These,
in turn, produced demographic statistics that form a body of knowledge

Social Text 98 Spring 2009 27

 about the nation. Race was supremely implicated in the production of this
knowledge, since the collective bodies of the nation were objectified visu-
ally by state representativesin all their varietyas they stood on hun-
dreds of thousands of doorsteps. 28 What is of interest here is not whether
the ethnic question, the ethnic categories, or peoples answers are wrong
or right; rather, and following Foucault, I want to pose the question of how
power and knowledge are mutuallyand raciallyconstituted. Some
black activists echoed state policy makers and demographers in arguing
that ethnic statistics were necessary to the elimination of racial discrimi-
nation, while other blacks rejected that premise and resisted the entire
exercise. But more pointedly, I mean to question what objectification itself
means. In that regard, the real source of insight lay with the enumerators,
for, even if temporarily, they were the state. The particular ways in which
they embodied that role were mediated by their own racialized worldviews,
as we have already seen.
Unlike Laura, some enumerators relished their roles as arbiters of
identity. I conducted a joint interview with two enumerators, Julia and
Steve. They were a couple and lived in a nice flat in a lower-middle-class
neighborhood adjacent to Liverpool 8. They were otherwise employed. The
mark of their middle-class status was their accents. In the predominantly
working-class city that is Liverpool, their speech would easily be described
as posh. Julia and Steve show another crucial way in which British cultural
concerns about identity and difference shaped these doorstep encounters
and, with them, the outcome of the 1991 National Census of the United
Kingdom. Julia worked in an area that had many interracial families, while
Steves corner of Liverpool 8 had very few.
Steve began the interview by saying that he had to help about half of
the respondents fill out the form. About the ethnic question, Steve said:
They didnt comment on it. It wasnt a big issue with the white people. I
think mainly because it was an all-white area. I then asked Julia whether
a lot of her respondents had problems with the form:

Julia: Yes. Out of 187 forms, 2 people filled it in, and the rest I had to help
them fill it in. In the majority of casesif I think about the ethnic people
answering that questioncause I was asking it, they just seemed to answer
it like that [she snaps her finger]! I got more positive response where people
havent had the time to think about it and I ask them the question on the
spot. I would almost look at them and say, Are you Black British, or Black-
African, or Black-Caribbean? Id, like, eliminate five of the categories and
get to the three most important! So its if you give people less choice you get
a more positive answer.
I found problems arose in ethnic households where perhaps they had
time to think about the forms and were able to do some of the forms them-

28 Brown The Making of Ethnic Statistics in Britain

 selves, and they objected to the question, and asked, Well, what do you
want this question for? There was only one guy that objected to that one,
but was prepared to answer them all. He ticked them all just to confuse
people at the records office.

He ticked every category in the ethnic part?

Julia: Yeah, and I queried him and said, Oh, youve got an interesting
background! And I said, So youve got a bit of all of these in you? And
he said, Oh yes! Im afraid I gave him a category of my own. I surmised
he was Black British.

How did you surmise that? How did you come up with that category?

Julia: It was a colored guy and I chatted to him long enough to know that he
was born locally, so he was British.

Did you have any cases where people asked you how they should answer the
question?

Julia: I think that tended to show with people who were definite about them-
selves and their partner, but when it came to the children, a lot of them were
left blank and it was up to me to say. . . . Well, I could see the kids and I
could see that they were colored children and I would ask where were your
children born and I filled in Black British for them because I could see
that thats what they were. If not [that is, for the children she couldnt see],
I asked where they were born. I think perhaps instead of asking, they left it
blank, which amounts to the same thing: not knowing. If they didnt know,
they left it blank. And it was up to us to pick it up. They werent going to
spend more than a second thinking about it.

Did you find people using either or both the terms mixed race or half-caste for
either themselves or their children?

Julia: I didnt come across any of those terms. I dont think they use that. I
didnt come across that at all. A lot of people in the area were familiar with
the term Black British and would use that automatically because they were
used to filling in that term on other forms that theyve done. It seemed to
be . . . because it was so common, I ended up using it a lot. You begin to
forget. . . . I certainly wouldnt have used it before I started doing the census
but because so many people used it, I would then prompt other people that
didnt know of that phrase so perhaps that got logged down a lot because I
started using it. I thought it was quite a good term. Its sort of succinct and
describes exactly what you want.

In view of the offense that some people took to the ethnic question,
the very same category that was controversially left off the censusBlack
Britishwound up facilitating the enumerators conduct of the respon-

Social Text 98 Spring 2009 29

 dents conduct. It was the default category, par excellence. This supposedly
ethnic category was the polite way out of national antagonisms surrounding
racial identity. Julias strategic invocation of the term Black British helped
her perform her duties. As she put it, Its quite a good term . . . it describes
exactly what you want. Unlike Laura, who was not going to prolong her
stay in Liverpool 8 any longer than she had to, Julia relished her duties, for
which she seemed perfectly suited. With all the authority of her racial and
class background, she was able to whip folks right into shape. These two
elements of her authority are at work in this statement: If I think about
the ethnic people answering that questioncause I was asking it, they
just seemed to answer it like that [snaps finger]!
So the difference here is that there are ethnic people and then
there is her. She continued, I would almost look at them and say, are
you Black British, or Black-African, or Black-Caribbean? She actively
sizes them up, and then pops the question with an authoritative delivery
that may very well be enabled by her class background and the posh
accent that signifies it. And they responded like that! (Or, at least that is
how she recalls peoples responses.) Moreover, she happily reports that
she eliminated a few categories right on the spot. As she said, If you give
people less choice you get a more positive answer. And for the one person
who apparently attempted to resist by ticking all the boxes, she filled in
an answer for him. She assigned him the identity that the central govern-
ment and the white British mainstream had been busily denying people
like him: Black British. Of course, his phenotype gave Julia her first
clue about his race. The British part came not through his phenotype
but, as she told us, his accent. It is also crucial to rememberin view of
our interest in dominant ideas about race, nation, and identitythat, by
Julias own account, the popularity of the term Black British among her
respondents shaped her own use of that term, a term that she wouldnt
have used before, despite black peoples local accents. I asked her how she
would have referred to black people with British accents before, and she
said, As second-generation blacks.
Another white female enumerator described similar complexities
concerning race and ethnicitybut, for her, black Britishness was not the
way out. She told me that one of her respondents was a white woman who
had had several children by a black man. But the respondent was not sure
what boxes to check for her various children, and so solicited the advice of
the enumerator. The respondent was concerned about how to describe her
children without discriminating among them. The enumerator quoted her
as saying that with mixed marriages, children dont necessarily come out
the same color. The enumerator looked at her children, and then advised
her to list her daughter as black and the boys as white because, as the enu-

30 Brown The Making of Ethnic Statistics in Britain

merator reported to me, thats what they were. This enumerator empa-
thized with white women in this position, saying that it was disgraceful
that there was no mixed-race category on the census questionnaire.
What strikes me about this conflictand there were many like this
oneis that it goes far beyond the perceived rudeness of ethnic inqui-
ries. Nor does it touch upon the multiple contestations over black peoples
national belonging and identity. It seems that from the point of view of the
white respondent, the Census Office was compelling her to use this thing
called ethnic group to differentiate among her children. To differentiate
these childrens identities, this mother seemed to suggest, is to participate
in an especially injurious form of objectification. So the statein the form
of this empathetic enumeratordid the work for her. One child becomes
black and the others become white.
As I mentioned earlier, I interviewed eleven of the twelve enumerators
for Liverpool 8. The twelfth was perhaps the most interesting. I spoke with
this middle-aged white woman by phone, asking for her participation in
my research. She declined, and not too politely. If the previous enumera-
tor was disturbed about the lack of a mixed-race category, this one was
undone by the lack of a Black British category. She seemed personally
offended at this lack, saying it was an insult to black people. She went on
to say, quite passionately: Race is very sensitive. People dont want to go
on about it. Blacks are treated like second-class citizens. One can only
imagine how this state workers racial positionality affected the ethnicity
of her respondents.

Conclusion

The ethnography of the 1991 census highlights not only the states vari-
able racial identities, but also its vulnerability to the multiple plays of
racial difference that it had long participated in creating. It may be a
rare event, but the conduct of the national census proceeds through the
everyday meanings, politics, and, ultimately, contradictions of race and
nation. In that respect, it is worth briefly contrasting the racialized logic
of ethnic counting in Britain to that unfolding in France. In France,
we see the delegitimization of racial and ethnic identities through the
ostensibly liberal proposition that everyone is just French. In the British
case, blacks have been marked and differentiated racially and ethnically
in ways that also claim to be liberal. The promotional material for the
census explicitly announced the states desire to redress discrimination,
for example, while also seeming to celebrate ethnic diversity. But in the
act of quantifying ethnic particularity, the state reified racial and ethnic
identities, even if not wholly creating them. The categories Black and
British were, as a result, rendered mutually exclusivepursuant to

Social Text 98 Spring 2009 31

 the very worst ideologies and practices of British nationalists, both the
famous and the everyday.
Interestingly, at least some of those in Liverpool who resisted the
states attempt to classify them were effectively articulating something
similar to the French liberal view: that in France, blacks, like everyone
else, are just French and therefore should not be racially or ethnically
marked on a census. To wit, the very notion, perpetuated by black activ-
ists, that statistics are needed to effectively combat racial discrimination
participates in the states agenda of managing populations through knowl-
edgeor, better, seeming to. Has the state significantly managed the
racist tendencies of its population since first collecting ethnic statistics in
1991? The notion that statistics are the missing link to a nonracial society
perpetuates the idea that measurable forms of discrimination constitute
the primary site of racism. Can racist state ideologies and practices be
quantified? I concede that some of their effects can be. But in the process
of so quantifying, the state effectively absolves itself of blame. The state
becomes part of the solution, escaping recognition as part of the problem.
The argument that the state needs statistics in order to combat racial dis-
crimination implies that it is only proof of racism that stands in the way
of its eradicationa burden that falls on blacks, who are encouraged to
exert their agency by submitting to their objectification.
Black people of various ethnic backgrounds played a mediating role
in a British state project that served to define the nation. Yet again it is
instructive to think relationally about the cases of Britain and France.
The difference between them is commonly cited, as we see in one of the
quotations that opened the present article. France rejects Anglo models of
reckoning with or otherwise legitimating ethnic diversity. That rejection
signals that it is not only blacks who look outside of their own national
context for insight and ideas about blackness. The cross-fertilization of
cultures within and across Europe and North America is not unique to
their respective black populations. States, inclusive of black political actors,
contribute to that phenomenon too.
My point, it bears emphasizing, is not to decry the inaccuracy of
the numbers collected, which is why I am neither citing nor disputing the
Liverpool statistics here; nor is it to argue for or against the collection of
national ethnic statistics. As the British and the French cases together
suggest, there is no politically innocuous position on that matter; Britain,
in collecting ethnic statistics, rendered blacks other, while the French,
in banning ethnic statistics, renders them invisible. Population statistics
do not in themselves lead to a better or a worse political, economic, or
social condition for blacks or anyone else. Is it the case, for example, that
our political leaders and their constituents respond to discrimination
with alarm, speed, vigilance, and unwavering commitment upon merely

32 Brown The Making of Ethnic Statistics in Britain

beholding the data? The earlier cited example of Enoch Powell, who fix-
ated on population statistics about blacks, shows that numbers can just as
easily serve politically unsavory purposes as righteous ones. I have aimed
merely to call attention to the regime of truth that underwrites a racial
discourse heavily invested in the power of numbers. Endowing statistics
with the singular ability to prove the existence of racial discrimination
comes, arguably, at the expense of other forms of knowledge. What other,
perhaps related, effects of racism escape the purview of the truths we
derive from ethnic statistics? What is the connection between the forms
of objectification that the census represents and the more violent forms of
it that have occurred across the whole of Britain since the 1993 murder of
Stephen Lawrence? One connection lay in the high degree of serendipity,
contingency, and randomness that characterized the racialized doorstep
encounters described above and that also characterized the everyday space
of the bus stop and the street, as described in the news snippets below:

Dateline Liverpool. 31 July 2005. An 18-year-old black man, Anthony Walker,

suffered a fatal racist attack that began at a bus stop in Huyton, a Liverpool
suburb. Mr. Walker had been waiting for a bus with his girlfriend and his
cousin, whereupon a group of whites verbally abused them. Walker, his
girlfriend, and his cousin, decided to move on to the next bus stop in order
to avoid thema journey that took them through a park. The young white
men gave chase. Anthony Walkers girlfriend and cousin got away. Later
that night, after trying to get help, the girlfriend and cousin returned to the
park to find Anthony lying on the ground with an ax lodged into his skull.
He died in the wee hours of the following morning. 29

Dateline Birmingham. 25 October 2005. The man who was stabbed to death
during weekend rioting in Birmingham was set upon by up to 11 armed
youths as he walked home from the cinema with his brother, it emerged
yesterday. Isaiah Young-Sam, 24, had not been involved in any of the con-
frontations between the Pakistani and African-Caribbean communities
that erupted on Saturday evening, officers from the West Midlands police
said. The victim was, they said, innocently walking home with his younger
brother, Zephaniah, and two friends, when three cars pulled up alongside
them and launched into a furious attack. Detective Superintendent Dave
Mirfield said: The group was approached by three cars. Those cars con-
tained, we believe, between 10 and 11 men. These men got out of the cars,
armed with knives, and attacked Isaiah and his friends. He and his brother
had spent the late afternoon and early evening in the cinema. Afterwards
they caught a bus from the city centre and were just a few hundred metres
from home when they were set upon. Mr. Young-Sam, an IT analyst at
Birmingham city council, was taken to hospital but was dead on arrival.
Yesterday, as riot police returned to the troubled streets of Lozells, his fam-
ily paid tribute to a man in the wrong place at the wrong time. 30

Social Text 98 Spring 2009 33

 Dateline London. 8 November 2007. The five suspects in the racially moti-
vated murder of Stephen Lawrence could be rearrested after a breathtak-
ing forensic breakthrough, it emerged last night. New techniques by a team
of experts working in secret are believed to have uncovered fresh evidence.
Fibres from the clothes worn by the black eighteen-year-old are said to have
matched those found on garments thought to have been worn by the sus-
pects at the time of the attack. The A-level student was fatally stabbed at a
bus stop near to his home in Eltham, southeast London in April, 1993. An
inquest in 1997 ruled that he had been unlawfully killed in a completely
unprovoked racist attack by five white youths.. . . The Metropolitan Police
investigation which followed his death led to an inquiry which found the
force was guilty of institutional racism.31

Notes
The research on which this article is based was generously funded by the National
Science Foundation (BN# 9024515) and the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthro-
pological Research. I would also like to extend special thanks to the Black Atlantic
group at Rutgers University, as well as the various intellectual communities to whom
I have presented this work. As always, Lisa Rofel offered enormously helpful feed-
back, for which I am indebted.
1. Adapted from Charles Bremner, Colour-Blind Policy Has Fed Muslim
Radicalism, Times Online, 7 November 2005, www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/
world/europe/article587289.ece, and from France Needs Ethnic Statistics, BBC
News Online, 18 November 2005, news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4451038.stm.
2. Adapted from Michael Kimmelman, For Blacks in France, Obamas Rise
Is Reason to Rejoice, and to Hope, New York Times, 17 June 2008.
3. Angelique Chrisafis, Guardian Online, French Presidential Candidates
Divided over Race Census, 24 February 2007, www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/
feb/24/france.population.
4. For example: Bernard Magubane, The Ties That Bind: African-American
Consciousness of Africa (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1987); Zine Magubane,
Bringing the Empire Home: Race, Class, and Gender in Britain and Colonial South
Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Paul Gilroy, There Aint No
Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (London: Hutchin-
son, 1987) and The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); J. Lorand Matory, Black Atlantic Religion:
Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomble (Princ-
eton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); Tina Campt, Other Germans: Black
Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Memory in the Third Reich (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2004); Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora:
Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA: Har-
vard University Press, 2003); Deborah Thomas, Modern Blackness: Nationalism,
Globalization, and the Politics of Culture in Jamaica (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2004); Janette Yarwood, Deterritorialized Blackness: (Re)Making Coloured
Identities among Youth in Post-Apartheid South Africa, Postamble, no. 1 (2006):
15572; Kevin Yelvington, ed., Afro-Atlantic Dialogues: Anthropology in the Diaspora
(Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 2006); Jacqueline Nassy Brown,

34 Brown The Making of Ethnic Statistics in Britain

Dropping Anchor, Setting Sail: Geographies of Race in Black Liverpool (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2005).
5. Gloria Wekker, The Politics of Passion: Womens Sexual Culture in the Afro-
Surinamese Diaspora (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006); Gargi Bhat-
tacharyya, John Gabriel, and Steven Small, Race and Power: Global Racism in the
Twenty-First Century (London and New York: Routledge, 2002).
6. The fact that the British government recently passed into law the Statis-
tics and Registration Service Act of 2007, making the Office of National Statis-
tics (which includes the Office of Population Surveys) independent of government,
only reinforces this point. The state needs population statistics, which requires
the participation of the populace. As Karen Dunnell, the national statistician,
remarked in endorsing the act: I see legislation as an important step in helping
to build public confidence in official statistics. I believe these new arrangements
will reinforce the independence and quality of statistics produced within the UKs
long-standing decentralised system. Office of National Statistics, National Stat-
istician Welcomes Statistics and Registration Service Bill, November 2006, www
.statistics.gov.uk/pdfdir/nsa1106.pdf.
7. Office of Population Censuses and Surveys, Why Do We Need a Census?
Census Topics, no. 1 (1981).
8. Jacqueline Urla, Cultural Politics in an Age of Statistics: Numbers, Nations,
and the Making of Basque Identity, American Ethnologist, no. 4 (1993): 818.
9. See Ian Hacking, Making Up People, in Reconstructing Individualism:
Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought, ed. Thomas C. Heller,
Morton Sosan, and David E. Wellbery (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1986), and Biopower and the Avalanche of Printed Numbers, Humanities in Soci-
ety, nos. 34 (1982): 27995.
10. Katherine K. Wallman, Data on Race and Ethnicity: Revising the Federal
Standard, American Statistician, no. 1 (1998): 3133; Patrick Simon, Nationality
and Origins in French Statistics: Ambiguous Categories, Population: An English
Selection 11 (1999): 193220; Olivier Barbary, Measurement and Practices of
Social and Racial Segmentation in Cali: A Survey of African Colombian House-
holds, Population, nos. 45 (2001): 76592; David I. Kertzer and Dominique Arel,
Censuses, Identity Formation, and the Struggle for Political Power, in Census and
Identity: The Politics of Race, Ethnicity, and Language in National Censuses, ed. David
I. Kertzer and Dominique Arel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002),
142.
11. Kertzer and Arel, Censuses, 35.
12. The classic study on the thingification of identity is in Bernard Cohns
study of census-taking in India under British colonialism, The Census, Social
Structure, and Objectification in South Asia, in An Anthropologist among the Histo-
rians and Other Essays (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987). On a related note, see
Michael Herzfelds call for more ethnographic treatments of the state, which would
include the popular tendency to reify it. Michael Herzfeld, Cultural Intimacy: Social
Poetics in the Nation-State (New York: Routledge, 2005).
13. Heather Booth, Ethnic and Racial Questions in the Census: The Home
Affairs Committee Report, New Community, nos. 12 (1983): 8391; Merseyside
Area Profile Group, Racial Disadvantage in Liverpool: An Area Profile (Liverpool:
Merseyside Area Profile Group, 1980).
14. The French case is of related interest on this point. Although the col-
lection of ethnic and racial statistics has been subject to a ban since 1978, French

Social Text 98 Spring 2009 35

 demographers have been able to proffer reasonable estimates of the ethnic minority
population due to the presence of other kinds of questions on the census, such as
those relating to individuals of foreign origin and their progeny. But such estima-
tions are becoming less and less feasible with the birth of subsequent generations.
See Simon, Nationality and Origins in French Statistics.
15. Colin Holmes, John Bulls Island: Immigration and British Society,
18711971 (London: Macmillan, 1988).
16. Office of Population Censuses and Surveys, Monitor, 25 July 1978, 20.
17. Ken Sillitoe, Ethnic Origins 4: An Experiment in the Use of a Direct
Question about Ethnicity for the Census, Office of Population Censuses and Sur-
veys, Occasional Paper no. 24 (1981): 43.
18. Office of Population Censuses and Surveys, Monitor, 20 March 1980.
19. Dateline Ireland: 1 January 2005. The new Irish Nationality and Citizen-
ship Act of 2004 came into effect today. Children born on or after 1 January 2005,
of parents who are not Irish citizens, are no longer automatically entitled to Irish
citizenship.
20. Michel Foucault, Governmentality, in The Foucault Effect: Studies in
Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (London:
Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991): 87104. Also see Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom:
Reframing Political Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
21. The Ethnic Question in the 1991 Census (London: Her Majestys Stationery
Office, 1991).
22. Booth, Ethnic and Racial Questions, 90.
23. Ibid.
24. Census England: H form for Private Households (London: Her Majestys
Stationery Office, April 1991).
25. All interview material quoted in this article was collected during fieldwork
in 1991 and 1992. All names of people encountered during this fieldwork, as given
here, are pseudonyms.
26. See Merseyside Area Profile Group, Racial Disadvantage.
27. In Britain, mixed race refers to people born to parents belonging to what
are constituted as two distinct racial groups. It bears noting in this context that I
am black American. My informants, many of whom were of mixed racial parentage,
often likened my appearance to theirs and assumed that I, too, was mixed race.
28. For an ethnographic analysis of similar dynamics in South Africa, see
Deborah Posel, Race as Common Sense: Racial Classification in Twentieth Cen-
tury South Africa, African Studies Review, no. 2 (2001): 87113.
29. Adapted from Man Held over Student Axe Murder, BBC News Online,
31 July 2005, news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/merseyside/4732563.stm.
30. Steve Bird, Police Investigate Second Killing as Mother Mourns for
Diamond Son, Times Online, 25 October 2005, www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/
uk/article582133.ece; Hugh Muir and Riazat Butt, Police Hunt Eleven Youths
over Killing, Guardian, 25 October 2005, www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2005/oct/25/
race.ukcrime.
31. Steven Bird and Adam Fresco, Five Stephen Lawrence Suspects Could
Be Rearrested, Times Online, 8 November 2007, www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/
uk/crime/article2827878.ece.

36 Brown The Making of Ethnic Statistics in Britain