Patrick Simon, a former RSF Visiting Scholar, has co-edited a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies devoted to the study of the production of racial and ethnic statistics in a variety of countries, including Hungary, Brazil, South Africa and the United States. As he writes in the issue's introduction, these statistics are both scientific and socially constructed categories, influenced by "power relationships, national images and stereotypes, legal procedures and historical paths":

[If] there were any doubts that the formulation of classificatory systems in censuses and social statistics is objective and straightforward, the articles presented here clearly show that categories are socially constructed and most often the result of competing claims. Census questions on ‘race’ or ‘Hispanic origin’ in the US, ‘visible minorities’ in Canada, ‘ethnic group’ in Great Britain, ‘national minorities’ in Hungary, or ‘colour’ in Brazil are embedded in a long history and reflect the complex ties between identity, ascription, subordination, prejudice, affiliation, recognition, identification, experience of social inequalities, and social and cultural capital. This accounts for the diversified and often inconsistent ways of collecting ethnic and racial data in most countries, even though there is increased recognition of diversity and the need to capture it.

Read the full issue, published in August, which includes Simon's individual article on race statistics in the European context.