The Schematic State Race, Transnationalism, and the Politics of the Census

By examining the political development of racial classifications on the national censuses of the United States, Canada, and Great Britain, The Schematic State maps the changing nature of the census from an instrument historically used to manage and control racial populations to its contemporary purpose as an important source of statistical information, employed to monitor and rectify racial discrimination. Through a careful comparative analysis of nearly two hundred years of census taking, it demonstrates that changes in racial schemas are driven by the interactions among shifting transnational ideas about race, the ways they are tempered and translated by nationally distinct racial projects, and the configuration of political institutions involved in the design and execution of census policy. This book argues that states seek to make their populations racially legible, turning the fluid and politically contested substance of race into stable, identifiable categories to be used as the basis of law and policy.

1. Invitation; 2. Orientation; 3. Transnational biological racialism; 4. The death and resurrection of race; 5. The multicultural moment; 6. The multiracial moment; 7. The future of counting by race.

Debra Thompson is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Northwestern University, Illinois. She completed her Ph.D. in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto in 2010 and served as a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Postdoctoral Fellow with the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard University, Massachusetts in 2010–11. In 2011 she received the prestigious Governor General of Canada's Academic Gold Medal, and her 2008 article 'Is Race Political?' won the Canadian Political Science Association's John McMenemy Prize for the best article published in the Canadian Journal of Political Science.