The study of the racial composition of the American nation was initiated by the first federal census, which took place in 1790.24 The US Census Bureau traditionally defines racial and ethnicity on the basis of self-identification, i.e. the person himself determines to which race and ethnic group he belongs. And already in its classification system, the Bureau is guided by the Classification Federal Standards for Determining Races and Ethnicity in the 1997 version, developed by the Office of Administration and Budgeting (ABU), with subsequent changes and clarifications. ABU has prescribed five racial categories since 1997:
the white race, which includes people with roots in any of the European nations, in the Middle East or North Africa; it includes those who indicate “white” in the column “race” or indicate their origin as “Irish”, “German”, “Italian”, “Lebanese”, “Arab”, “Moroccan” or “Caucasian”;
black race, or African American – are blacks in the United States who descend from any black people on the African continent and indicate their race as “black, African American or negro”, “Kenyan”, “Nigerian” or “Haitian”;
American Indians or Alaska Natives are people of the Americas who descend from the indigenous peoples of these continents and indicate their race as formulated in the census, or indicate their belonging to a particular tribe or community (Navajo, Blackfoot, Iñupiat, Yupiki), or to the Central American or South American Indian group;
Asians – this racial group includes people descending from any of the indigenous peoples of the Far East and Southeast Asia; it includes those who indicate “Asian” in the column “race” or choose one of the sub-items with the answers: “Asian Indian”, “Chinese”, “Filipino”, “Korean”, “Japanese”, “Vietnamese” or he writes his nationality in the column “other Asian”, for example, Thai, Cambodian;
indigenous people of Hawaii or other islands of the Pacific Ocean – this race includes those who, by their origin, belong to the peoples inhabiting Hawaii, Guam, Samoa and other islands of the Pacific Ocean.
For respondents who find it difficult to identify their race according to the proposed racial categories and who define their origin as multiracial, mixed, interracial, or Hispanic, or those who identify themselves with a particular Latin American group (for example, Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, or Spanish), ABU approved a sixth category called Other Race, first included in the Census Bureau’s questionnaires in 2000 and later used in the 2010 Census.