They call me Whello Yello: revisiting the SEER race and nationality descriptions

The Division of Vital Statistics of the National Center for Health Statistics and the Census Bureau each maintain a list of race recodes for write-in responses to the race question. For example, if “Italian” is written in, this is recoded as white. An (approximate) union of these two lists is provided as Appendix D of the SEER Program Coding and Staging Manual and offered as guidance for assigning race when it is not directly coded.

Here, we assess the validity of this information by cross-tabulating race and birthplace in the New York State Cancer Registry (NYSCR). Some anomalies are evident, mainly in Central America and the Caribbean. For example, “Panamanian” recodes to white, but most of the cases born in Panama are coded as black in the NYSCR.

The list also embeds a number of obsolete and obscure terms such as Whello, Yello, Brava, Ebian, and Hamitic. In a 2002 paper Laws and Heckscher raised questions about the existence of such terms and their propensity to be widely reproduced in public health data systems. While they may be harmless since they never actually appear in public health records (beyond their presumed original appearance which placed them on the list), this is still no reason to maintain them indefinitely. Conversely, the list omits some obvious designations such as Danish and New Zealander. It is time for the cancer registration community to scrutinize this list for continued validity and interoperability.