1. Executive Summary
Race is a “power construct of collected or merged differences that lives socially.” Race is neither a biological fact nor a “fixed trait,” and conceptions of race change over time. In this sense, race is not “real.” However, racism is real. The collection and study of data concerning racial and ethnic inequities and disparities allows us to better understand experiences of racism. Racial and ethnic data collection is thus “a crucial step in fighting racism and structural racial inequality.”
2. Background
In the earliest months of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Center Director, Ibram X. Kendi, feared that the virus was disproportionately harming and killing people of color. He could not get data to confirm or deny this fear, however, as nationwide racial and ethnic data on COVID-19 outcomes were practically nonexistent. At the time, some public officials referred to COVID-19 as the “great equalizer.” In reality, public health emergencies disproportionately devastate under-resourced communities of color, and COVID-19 was no exception.
3. The COVID Racial Data Tracker Experience
This section lays out the deficiencies of existing national COVID-19 datasets that necessitated the CRDT team’s work, describes the CRDT methodology, details the specific challenges that the CRDT team faced, and summarizes the CRDT experience through an antiracist lens.
4. The Racial Data Tracker Experience
In this section, we describe the experience of the RDT team collecting data in the summer of 2021. We describe the RDT methodology, detail the challenges and data deficiencies the RDT team encountered for each issue area it studied, and summarize the implications for antiracist policymaking.
5. Policy Recommendations
Based on the challenges the CRDT and RDT teams faced in collecting race and ethnicity data on COVID-19 outcomes, houselessness, criminal arrests, and police violence, we make the following policy recommendations concerning racial and ethnic data collection and reporting in the United States
6. Policy and Legal Considerations Regarding Racial and Ethnic Data Collection
In this section, we address several policy and legal considerations regarding the collection and reporting of racial and ethnic data that helped shape our policy recommendations. These considerations include the risk of data misuse, legal limitations on federal mandates, and the shortcomings of the OMB categories.
7. Conclusion
The CRDT and RDT teams’ experiences collecting racial and ethnic data across several key issue areas reveal major deficiencies regarding the state of racial and ethnic demographic data collection and reporting in the United States. Existing data collection efforts are riddled with gaps and errors, including missing and incomplete data, insufficiently disaggregated data, lack of meaningful longitudinal data, infrequently updated data, non-standardized methodologies, and other problems. These data quality issues lead to underestimations of racial inequities, obscure evidence of racism, prevent cross-jurisdictional analysis, and, ultimately, hinder evidence-based antiracist policymaking.