{"id":1593,"date":"2011-08-22T20:02:26","date_gmt":"2011-08-23T01:02:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/?p=1593"},"modified":"2011-08-22T20:02:26","modified_gmt":"2011-08-23T01:02:26","slug":"census-in-black-white-what-i-wondered-about-lately","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/census-in-black-white-what-i-wondered-about-lately\/","title":{"rendered":"Census in Black & White: What I wondered about lately"},"content":{"rendered":"

The census now allows more than one race to be checked. For many years, friends of mine in inter-racial couples when they registered their children for school would check the “Other” box for race, rather than pick black or white.<\/p>\n

Although an individual’s census form responses are confidential, you certainly are free to tell anyone what you put. In response to an inquiry, the white house spokesperson said that President Obama had checked only “African-American or Black<\/a>“, even though his mother is white.<\/p>\n

Now that you can select both black and white as race, I wondered how many people did. Unlike normal people who wonder about these things, I decided to download all 3,030,728 records from the 2009 American Community Survey to find out. Once I downloaded the survey and read it into SAS, I produced the chart below. I was quite surprised to see how few people checked both black and white. As you can see, it was less than 1%.<\/p>\n

\"Distribution<\/a><\/p>\n

The SAS code to create this chart is shown below. You might think this is a ridiculous amount of work to create one chart and you could do it way easier in Excel. You’d be correct except for two things.\u00a0 One, I know that earlier versions of Excel no way could you read in 3,000,000+\u00a0 records. Even if you can do it now I’ll bet it’s painfully slow. Two, most of these options or steps only need to be done once and I was doing multiple charts. The AXIS and PATTERN statements only need to be specified once.<\/p>\n

If you DO want to create your chart in Excel, you could just do the first part, the PROC FREQ, and then export your output from the frequency procedure to a four- record file and do the rest in Excel. There is no need to get religiously attached to doing everything with one program or package.<\/p>\n


\nPROC FREQ DATA = lib.pums9 NOPRINT;<\/code><\/p>\n

TABLES racblk* racwht \/ OUT = lib.blkwhitmix ;<\/code><\/p>\n

WEIGHT pwgtp ;<\/p>\n

DATA byrace ;<\/p>\n

SET lib.blkwhitmix ;<\/p>\n

IF racblk = 1 AND racwht = 0 THEN Race = \"Black\" ;<\/p>\n

ELSE IF racblk = 0 AND racwht = 1 THEN Race = \"White\" ;<\/p>\n

ELSE IF racblk = 0 AND racwht = 0 THEN Race = \"Other\" ;<\/p>\n

ELSE IF racblk = 1 AND racwht = 1 THEN Race = \"Mixed\" ;<\/p>\n

PERCENT = PERCENT\/ 100 ;<\/p>\n

AXIS1 LABEL = ( ANGLE = 90 \"Percent\") ORDER = (0 to 1 by .1 ) ;<\/p>\n

AXIS2 ORDER = (\"White\" \"Black\" \"Mixed\" \"Other\" ) ;<\/p>\n

PATTERN1 COLOR = BLACK ;<\/p>\n

PATTERN2 COLOR= GRAY\u00a0 ;<\/p>\n

PATTERN3 COLOR = BROWN ;<\/p>\n

PATTERN4 COLOR=WHITE\u00a0 ;<\/p>\n

PROC GCHART DATA=byrace ;<\/p>\n

VBAR Race \/ raxis = axis1 maxis = axis2<\/p>\n

SUMVAR= percent<\/p>\n

TYPE=SUM<\/p>\n

OUTSIDE= SUM<\/p>\n

PATTERNID = MIDPOINT ;<\/p>\n

LABEL\u00a0 Race\u00a0 = \"Race\"\u00a0 ;<\/p>\n

<\/code><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

FORMAT percent percent8.1\u00a0 ;<\/code><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The census now allows more than one race to be checked. For many years, friends of mine in inter-racial couples when they registered their children for school would check the “Other” box for race, rather than pick black or white. Although an individual’s census form responses are confidential, you certainly are free to tell anyone…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1593","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-open-data","category-statistics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1593","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1593"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1593\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1597,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1593\/revisions\/1597"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1593"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1593"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1593"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}