I follow the development of the racialization of categories used by representatives of the public culture in censuses in the former British colonies of Jamaica, the USA, Fiji, Ireland, and the UK itself, from the beginning of their organization, and in various historical and contemporary references to residents. On this basis, I claim that censuses, by obliging all adult citizens to participate in them, and to understand and correctly answer the questions, contributed to promoting a more or less reflective application of racial categories in the everyday life of societies. Discussions about these categories and analyzes of census results further promoted the use of these terms in the language of Public Culture from which they had largely been borrowed, also influencing the language of politics, law, literature, science, and education. Anthropology certainly too. Citizens, for whom the world of imagination created by the intellectual elites and the administration was a source of knowledge, quickly absorbed this language and began to describe themselves in terms of race, class, or ethnicity defined by the state. They have integrated these concepts, more or less willingly, into the repertoire of their identities and ideas about the cultural Other, and their imaginaries of the social statuses.
The result was not only in the reshaped vision of society but also in the machinery of the state administration’s influence. The methods of collecting data by questioning the individuals have been simultaneously methods of imposing terminology, ways of thinking, and considering reality. Consequently, almost 100 years after overthrowing the concept of race as a harmful, non-scientific imaginary, in some societies most experienced by racism, the data on race is still collected and analyzed in various socio-economical contexts not only by the institutions of the state, influential financial organisations (e.g. World Bank). Should anthropology react firmly?
