This was reserached and quoted numerous times in the last couple of years. Do the homework, it’s all here on FR. People could not just invent whatever races or ethnicities they wanted, they had to pick from a list, and the appropirate one was “Negro”, “African” was not on the list.
Is it?
People could not just invent whatever races or ethnicities they wanted, they had to pick from a list, and the appropirate one was “Negro”, “African” was not on the list.
Couldn't they? I'm not finding the Hawaiian Administrative Code mentioned here any time before today. I may be wrong, but if you have a citation, it's up to you to produce it.
Federal law specified various races to appear in birth certificates, among them "Negro," but it's not clear that state law restricted registrars to those categories.
Especially not in Hawaii where the race on one's birth certificate might be "Chinese," "Japanese," "Korean," "Filipino," or even "Portuguese" or "Puerto Rican."
When the data was submitted to the federal government it was made to conform to federal guidelines, but you'd have to provide the proof that the state imposed those federal categories on its own employees.