As part of its final research push before finalizing its 2020 wording, test-census forms will be sent to 1.2 million households later this fall in without any references to “race” or “origin.” Instead, the forms will ask: “Which categories describe person 1?” Respondents will then be able to choose from the usual list of racial and ethnic categories.
According to Pew, Census officials want to be clearer with their questions so that officials can gather more accurate data as required by law. Past testing and focus-group research has indicated confusion among found that the terms “race,” “ethnicity” and “origin” can mislead or confuse respondents, they can mean different things depending on the person answering.
“We recognize that race and ethnicity are not quantifiable values. Rather, identity is a complex mix of one’s family and social environment, historical or socio-political constructs, personal experience, context, and many other immeasurable factors,” the Census Bureau noted in a 2013 report on past testing efforts in the 2010 census. The report also recommended continued research on optimizing the use of examples for each racial and ethnic category, among other strategies.
Census forms currently contain two questions related to race and Hispanic origin, with one asking Americans whether they are Hispanic, Latino or Spanish, and the other asking “What is this person’s race?” with checkboxes and spaces to write in answers.
The Bureau is also testing the use of a “Middle Eastern or North African” category within the current lineup.
As Pew notes, the Bureau’s current definitions of race and Hispanic origin are often overlapping, with a white person being someone “having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East or North Africa,” while Hispanics are defined as a person with “Spanish culture or origin regardless of race.”
The Census has asked Americans about their racial identity since the first survey in 1790, though terms have varied over the years, and Americans were not able to select their own race until 1960. Before that, Census workers marked it for them. Beginning in 2000, Americans could select more than one race.
The most important fact about race
Sam Smith, Great American Political Repaid Manual, 1997 - It doesn't really exist. At least not the way many Americans think it does. There is simply no undisputed scientific definition of race. What are considered genetic characteristics are often the result of cultural habit and environmental adaptation. As far back as 1785, a German philosopher noted that "complexions run into each other." Julian Huxley suggested in 1941 that "it would be highly desirable if we could banish the question-begging term 'race' from all discussions of human affairs and substitute the noncommittal phrase 'ethnic group.' That would be a first step toward rational consideration of the problem at hand." Anthropologist Ashley Montagu in 1942 called race our "most dangerous myth."
Yet in our conversations and arguments, in our media, and even in our laws, the illusion of race is given great credibility. As a result, that which is transmitted culturally is considered genetically fixed, that which is an environmental adaptation is regarded as innate and that which is fluid is declared immutable.
Many still hang on to a notion similar to that of Carolus Linnaeus, who declared in 1758 that there were four races: white, red, dark and black. Others make up their own races, applying the term to religions (Jewish), language groups (Aryan) or nationalities (Irish). Modern science has little impact on our views. Our concept of race comes largely from religion, literature, politics, and the oral tradition. It comes creaking with all the prejudices of the ages. It reeks of territoriality, of jingoism, of subjugation, and of the abuse of power.
DNA research has revealed just how great is our misconception of race. In The History and Geography of Human Genes, Luca Cavalli-Sforza of Stanford and his colleagues describe how many of the variations between humans are really adaptations to different environmental conditions (such as the relative density of sweat glands or lean bodies to dissipate heat and fat ones to retain it). But that's not the sort of thing you can easily build a system of apartheid around. As Thomas S. Martin has written:
The widest genetic divergence in human groups separates the Africans from the Australian aborigines, though ironically these two 'races' have the same skin color. ~ There is no clearly distinguishable 'white race.' What Cavalli-Sforza calls the Caucasoids are a hybrid, about two-thirds Mongoloid and one-third African. Finns and Hungarians are slightly more Mongoloid, while Italians and Spaniards are more African, but the deviation is vanishingly slight.
Well, it sure feels like race
Regardless of what science says, however, myth can kill and cause pain just as easily as scientific truth. And regardless of what science says, there are no Japanese players in the NBA or, as anthropologist Alice Brues told Newsweek, "If I parachute into Nairobi, I know I'm not in Oslo."
In fact, give or take a few thousand years, it's unlikely that those of a Nordic skin complexion would stay that way living under the African sun. Similarly, the effects of a US diet are strong enough that the first generations of both European and Asian Americans have found themselves looking up at their grandchildren.
In such ways adaptation mimics what many think of as race. But who needs science when we have our own eyes? If it looks like race, that's good enough for us.
Further, we are obsessed with the subject even as we say we wish to ignore it. A few years back, a study of urban elections coverage found five times as many stories about race as about taxes.
We can't even agree on what race is. In the 1990 census, Americans said they belonged to some 300 different races or ethnic groups. American Indians divided themselves into 600 tribes and Latinos into 70 categories.
| Front teeth | New Guinean-Germans Japanese-Estonians Celtic-Indians |
| Ability to digest milk | Swedish-Indians |
| Nose length | Norwegian-Arab-Nigerians The English-Algerians |
The real reason race is important to us
Even as we talk endlessly of race and ethnicity, we simultaneously go to great lengths to prove that we are all the same. Why this contradiction? The answer can be partly found in the tacit assumption of many that human equity must be based primarily on competitive equality. Listen to talk about race (or sex) and notice how often the talk is also about competition. The cultural differences (real or presumed) that really disturb us are ones of competitive significance: thigh circumference, height, math ability and so forth. We accept more easily other differences -- varieties of hair, degree of subcutaneous fat, prevalence of sickle cell anemia -- because they don't affect (or affect far less) who gets to the top.
Once having decided which traits are important, we assign causes to them on the basis of convenience rather than fact. Our inability to sort out the relative genetic, cultural, and environmental provenance of our differences doesn't impede our judgment at all. It is enough that a difference is observed. Thus we tend to deal neither with understanding what the facts about our differences and similarities really mean -- or, more importantly, with their ultimate irrelevance to developing a world where we can live harmoniously and happily with each other. We don't spend the effort to separate facts from fiction because both cut too close to our inability to appreciate and celebrate our human differences. It is far easier to pretend either that these differences are immutable or that they don't exist at all.
The Catch-22 of ethnicity
And so we come to the Catch-22 of ethnicity. It is hard to imagine a non-discriminatory, unprejudiced society in which race and sex matter much. Yet in our efforts to reach that goal, our society and its institutions constantly send the conflicting message that they are extremely important.
For example, our laws against discriminatory practices inevitably heighten general consciousness of race and sex. The media, drawn inexorably to conflict, plays up the issue. And the very groups that have suffered under racial or sexual stereotypes consciously foster countering stereotypes -- "you wouldn't understand, it's a black thing" -- as a form of protection.
Thus, we find ourselves in the odd position of attempting to create a society that shuns invidious distinctions while at the same time -- often with fundamentalist or regulatory fervor -- accentuating those distinctions.
In the process we reduce our ethnic problems to a matter of regulation and power, and reduce our ambitions to the achievement of a tolerable stalemate rather than the creation of a truly better society. The positive aspects of diversity remain largely ignored and non-discrimination becomes merely another symbol of virtuous citizenship -- like not double-parking or paying your taxes.
Martin Luther King said once:
Something must happen so as to touch the hearts and souls of men that they will come together, not because the law says it, but because it is natural and right.
Sorry, Martin. Our approach to prejudice and discrimination is not unlike our approach to drugs: We plan to simply rule them out of existence. In so doing, we have implicitly defined the limits of virtue as merely the absence of malice.
1 comment:
Discrimination in individual qualities is built into capitalism and is how we got stuck in the first place putting prices on humans for their labor very much as we talked about horses, or today how we talk about cars or football players being drafted in fantasy leagues. It's a cultural blind spot that only a socialist or Quaker or Lakota, etc could clearly see. Ancient problem given slavery arose from culture clashes.
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