The Choice of (Selective) Ignorance: Theorizing the Omission of Ethnoracial Categories from Official Statistics

Michael Zanger-Tishler, Harvard University

Scholars, activists, and politicians have advocated for statistical visibility for ethnoracial minorities to expose and subsequently ameliorate the inequalities they experience. However, this paper complicates this narrative by exploring how states can actively omit ethnoracial breakdowns in statistics that would have helped achieve the goal of exposing inequality and can publish ethnoracial data in ways that stigmatize groups, promote state ideology, conceal state discrimination, and ignore groups on which they collect data. To demonstrate this point, this research studies the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics from 1948-1964 and its main publication, the Statistical Abstract of Israel. Supplementing these abstracts with less widely circulated reports published by the Central Bureau of Statistics and microdata from the 1961 Israeli census, this paper shows statistical breakdowns the Central Bureau of Statistics possessed but did not publish. In doing so, this work provides examples of the Israeli state publishing and omitting ethnoracial statistics to pursue non-inequality related goals. Building on this case, this research argues that in advocating for additional ethnoracial categories to be included in official contexts like the census, scholars and policy makers need to carefully consider the state, its officials, and their ability to present the statistics they collect in harmful ways.

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 Presented in Session 72. Race and the Long Shadow of European Nationalism