How Census Categories Create Inequality: Lessons from the Colombian Undercount

Paola Vargas-Arana argues that census designers should recognise categories as political artefacts rather than technical facts, and commit to historical accountability in how they are constructed.

Across the UN member states, official statistics underpin the 2030 Agenda’s pledge to ‘leave no one behind’. The Agenda stresses that ‘quality, accessible, timely and reliable disaggregated data’ are needed to measure progress and ensure that no one is left behind). But this promise has not been matched by monitoring practices that systematically disaggregate data by race or ethnicity, allowing persistent inequalities to remain undetected. In the United States and Brazil, counting by race has always been a fundamentally political process, shaping the experiences and meanings of citizenship. Global survey of census practices reveals that whilst 63 per cent of countries incorporate ethnic enumeration, question schemas vary along dimensions suggesting diverse—and often contested—conceptualisations. This is not merely methodological variation: census categories are products of historically contingent power relations, not neutral descriptors of social reality.

Colombia’s 2018 census offers a telling example of how statistical invisibility operates. The census counted just under three million people self-identifying as Black, mulatto, Afro-descendant or Afro-Colombian, representing only 6.2 per cent of the population. This contrasts with 10.6 per cent in 2005, a drop of over 1.3 million. No other demographic indicator—fertility, mortality or internal migration—suggests such a decline. What shifted was not the population, but the census itself.

Census figures shape policy and infrastructure, prioritising groups statistically associated with poverty or marginalisation. Failure to count affects those rendered invisible. Across major indicator Afro-Colombian populations are the most impoverished peoples in the country, and statistical socio-demography omission risks aggravating those inequalities.

The undercount is not merely technical; it reflects the state’s failure to recognise that these identity terms are products of specific legal and ideological moments. The 1993 census shows that the 1993 census classified only 1.5 per cent as ‘Black community’; the 2005 reform broadened identification to Black, mulatto, Afro-Colombian or Afro-descendant—expanding visibility while flattening internal diversity. The 2018 census made this failure explicit: its self-identification item merged six distinct terms into a single prompt widely cited as a key driver of the undercount. The 2018 census’s socio-racial labels reproduced state-sanctioned ‘institutionalised Blackness’, merging long-standing differentiated categories on how Black—linked to physical traits—and Afro-Colombians—linked to ancestry—should be named and conceptualised.

A further layer is the design of the question itself. In the National Administrative Department of Statistics DANE public 2018 census dataset, only 5.75 per cent answered by selecting listed ethnic categories; 94.25 per cent were therefore not captured by any of them. The phrasing, I will ask you about the ‘ethnic groups recognised in Colombia that are culturally differentiated’ assumes that only some people possess specific ‘culture’ or ‘ethnic’ belonging, relegating the rest to an unmarked, supposedly ‘default’ category. Particularly, it omits two widely used categories of self-identification in the country, ‘mestiza/o’ and ‘white’. The design naturalises a fiction that reproduces colonial asymmetries.

Similar dynamics appear across post-colonial contexts. As Thompson notes, ‘census does not simply reflect objective social reality, but rather plays a constitutive role in the construction of that reality’.  In Britain,census officials themselves acknowledged that the census ethnic categories are essentially racial, conflating ethnic and racial signifiers in ways that conceal rather than clarify social divisions. An analysis of European census practices reveals widespread reluctance to collect ethnic statistics, driven by colour-blind ideologies that depoliticise race whilst leaving structural inequalities intact.

In Colombia, this depoliticisation runs deep. The country’s multicultural reforms made ethnicity a marker of social status for recognised minorities, leaving mestiza/o as the unmarked national norm. The census replicates this split by asking who is ‘ethnic’ rather than recognising that all citizens have socially situated identities. This aligns with analysis that the myth of harmonious mixing among Spaniards, Africans and Indigenous peoples has depoliticised race, making it difficult for Afro-descendants to name themselves ‘Black’. This extends to mestiza/o populations: the depoliticisation of race reduces incentives to reflect on self-identification and, in turn, limits recognition of how privileges and entitlements are tied to lighter skin. The result is a blurred statistical footprint and a wider miscount.

A legal suit mobilised by a coalition of Afro-Colombian organisations before the Constitutional Court sought accountability for the census undercount, arguing that category regimes matter for rights and resource allocation The Constitutional Court’s ruling T-276/2022 acknowledged the harm, declaring that the census failed to uphold the constitutional rights of the African diaspora by producing ‘statistical invisibility’ amounting to structural discrimination. It ordered DANE to review its methods and propose amendments for future censuses.

However, the ruling did not request an interrogation of the historical formation of the categories included and omitted in the question. It left unexamined a deeper issue: census terms are not neutral descriptors but products of uneven histories of violence, exclusion, survival and political negotiation.

The divergent experiences of slavery and emancipation complicate the picture further. The late-colonial category libres de todos los colores (‘free of all colours’), used in the 1777 Cartagena census and accounting for 49.3 per cent of the population, served as an umbrella for free people of mixed background who did not fit any colonial ‘caste’ classification. Those classified as ‘free of all colours’ carried the stigma of ‘stained bad race’ (mancha de mala raza), and their civic worth hinged on ‘honour’ as a negotiable cultural currency. During the gradual abolition of slavery, classificatory ambiguities resurfaced. Rather than dismantling structures of unfreedom and hierarchy, the process reconfigured them through mechanisms—mandatory apprenticeships and debt regimes—that disproportionately affected African diaspora families, extending forced labour practices long after formal abolition.

These legacies carried into the twentieth century. Colombian policies embedded overtly ‘racialist’ assumptions—imposing precarious labour contracts, vagrancy laws and phenotype-based criminalisation on descendants of the enslaved, whilst favouring ‘white’ immigrants. To complicate an already fragmenting scenario, the African diaspora in Colombia originated from distinct trajectories. In Antioquia’s goldfields, African people arrived mainly from the Upper Guinea coast in the late sixteenth century. The later influx, particularly from the mid-seventeenth century, came mainly from Central Africa. Although San Basilio and the raizal creole of San Andrés and Providencia appear as distinct categories in the census question, many other existing creoles and palenques (maroon communities) are omitted, concealing broader maroon diversity the state has yet to recognise.

Colombia’s rugged geography fostered relatively isolated autonomous communities that forged specific identities. These geographies—socially and historically produced—also sustained imaginaries linking certain populations to inferiority, contributing to their invisibility in state policy. Since the 1990s, armed conflict has displaced large numbers of African diaspora populations to marginal urban peripheries. Micro-societies whose sense of belonging had centred on a single village or river path are now compressed into unfamiliar urban spaces. Urban life has opened pathways to professional careers, yet people from Caribbean maroon backgrounds report being sidelined by Pacific-origin peers who question their legitimacy within the diaspora. Phenotype and visible difference continue to shape recognition and exclusion.

Rather than offering a generic critique of bureaucratic practice, this commentary argues that historically contingent categories structure contemporary visibility and resource distribution. When applied in the census, labels defined by time and region shape recognition, rights and access to public benefits. Any effort to clarify or expand these categories will falter if it ignores their historical layers.

The implications extend beyond Colombia. Statistical invisibility affects SDG monitoring globally, particularly in contexts where mestizaje myths or colour-blind ideologies depoliticise race across Latin America and elsewhere. In South Africa, post-apartheid censuses still rely on the racial classifications first codified in the 1950 Population Registration Act, and those inherited labels continue to structure profound material inequalities. Brazil’s struggles to establish consistent racial terminology on census mirror Colombia's tensions, as Black movements push for recognition against ideologies of racial democracy.

The reflection extends beyond African diaspora populations. The census should ask every Colombian—and indeed every citizen in post-colonial states facing similar challenges—for their ethnic identity to measure how resources and entitlements are distributed across the population. First, national departments of statistic should craft an appropriate formulation of ethnic/racial questions and categorisations through broad consultation and co-production with diverse communities. Second, states should pursue sustained historical research into demographic formation, external and internal forced migration, and the laws and policies that have produced enduring exclusion, omission and invisibility for African diaspora populations. These principles apply wherever census categories bear colonial histories: recognising categories as political artefacts rather than technical facts, and committing to historical accountability in how they are constructed.

Paola Vargas Arana is a Research Associate at the University of Manchester. Her work examines inequalities and cross-cultural exchanges between Africa and South America from an Atlantic perspective.

Photo - Author's Own.