Pitch: West Virginia has a very simple set up for a complicated population. Even though according to the census, white is the most prominent race in the state, it is necessary to count other races as well given that they are a minority there. One of the things in the data that seemed interesting was how WV started to count Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander cases and then stopped and grouped them with “Others”. Similarly American Indians faced the same fate. Asians, NHPI, AI and all other races that aren’t Black and White go into either other or unknown. One of the reasons in the CTP data states that because of small or no numbers, they decided to aggregate it. But then why did they start counting NHPI in the middle and stopped and also NHPI is a smaller portion of the total population compared to Asians in the census. Why weren’t Asians counted separately then? Why is it grouped together?
Sources:
West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources
Census Data West Virginia
Asian American Advancing Justice
Length: 800 words