Hey US, its time to call Hispanics, Hispanics, not other Whites
The US publishes excellent, detailed reports for a variety of statistics. Here are two examples:
- National Vital Statistics Report (2013)
2. The US Department of Justice, Firearm Violence report (1993–2011)
http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/fv9311.pdf
After you study these US Government statistic reports, you begin to notice something interesting. Hispanics are lumped into the White demographics data. The reports later parse out the Hispanic stats from the White statistics, but only after the fact. To further complicate the issue, the white data figures needs to be recalculated manually to fix the Hispanic figures.
CONFUSED? Let me see if I can clarify how this works with one of the reports.
Example of the demographic statistic problem
What’s wrong with this picture above Appendix Table 8 (Figure 1)? Yup, no Hispanics.
In order to understand the victims of gun violence including Hispanics, you need to work backwards from Appendix Table 9 shown above in Figure 2.
Here’s what you have to do.
- For year 2010, there were 1919 Hispanics killed with a firearm (Figure 2).
Wait, we are not done yet. We still need to fix the “White” figure for the data in Figure 1.
2. For year 2010, you need to take the White total of 4647 and subtract the Hispanic total 1919. Now the figure is 2728 Whites killed in firearm incidents.
The corrected chart now looks like this:
The Hispanic population warps the “White” data
As you can see, the large differential in the firearm death rate between Whites and Hispanics (1.4 versus 3.8 for every 100,000 people) distorts the data in Appendix Table 8 (Figure 1). There is little doubt that in other statistics such as household income, education level and criminal convictions, that there will be a sharp difference in the White and Hispanic figures as well.
Conspiracy Theory Time
Why is the Hispanic data missing from the top line totals? Why do these comprehensive reports make is so difficult to calculate the true White totals?
A paranoid person might think that the reason is that the government may prefer to water down the White statistics so the difference between Whites, Blacks and Latinos do not contrast as sharply.
Let’s consider the gun death totals from above. For 2010, Blacks died at a 10X ratio per capita versus Whites. Latinos died at a 2.7X ratio versus Whites.
If we were to look at the original charts in Appendix Table 8 and 9 (Figures 1 and 2), we would have a much different perception of the data. We might think that Blacks died at a 7.7X rate of Whites in 2010. Still not good, but better than the actuals. Figure 2 would indicate that Latinos died at only a slightly higher rate (3.8 versus 3.5 per 100,000) than all other Americans. What we don’t see from Figure 2, is that significantly higher firearm death rate of Blacks make the Latino figures less troubling than if we were to compare against the White firearm death rate.
Time to add a data column
If Hispanics data statistics were close to the White population data, the need to separate and co-list the Hispanic data would not be so important. That is not the case. The Hispanic population is the 2nd largest demographic group after Whites with over 50 million and 16.3% of the total US population. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_United_States#Hispanic_or_Latino_origin
Until we correct the way we treat and classify Hispanics, important statistic information will be misinterpreted.
