Census 2010 - Race & Ethnicity

Ordinarily, I obviously couldn't care less about the census. It is a tragically and permanently flawed entity that pretends to count people and take in a little biographical information about them as well. It counts very poorly and takes in very little data. And a massive number of human beings are actually employed to walk around and count people. Truly massive. I mean, it's just obviously idiotic but so are a lot of things (not keeping subway trains running on schedule during rush hour comes to mind).

But this year, they're switching things up in the race section. In fact, dramatically so. Hispanics/Latinos etc. are no longer a race - they are an ethnicity and they get their own question, separate from the race question.

At first that seemed kind of cool. I get irritable when I have to guess at checking boxes to define who I am on a form. I've called and complained and refused to fill things out on this basis. And I don't appreciate the idea that one of my ancestors should trump another in terms of government or statistical importance. But then I noticed the second part - that there was no hispanic for race.

Then, I was confused. I know there are people who feel strongly that this is the case - hispanic is an ethnicity, not a race, and that's cool. But I just don't know what the heck you are supposed to check of what is left in the "race" section.

(Here is a copy so I don't go painstakingly through it)

You basically get to choose white, black, native of some area where we care about natives, or asian. For some categories (natives and asians) they give you a lot of options in terms of identifying yourself. For others (whites and blacks) you get an extremely cursory discussion. I mean, really? The Alaskan Natives get to write down the individual tribe they are in and you expect people to check a box marked with a color because some of their ancestors were on the same continent with a bunch of other people?

So annoyed with this, I do some quick research and stumble upon the decision to make this change. It's a bit of madness throughout, with, for example, small groups of people insisting on recognition but then there was a pretty fascinating bit of information about one of the race categories - as of this census, "American Indian" includes natives of central and south america.

You may have no idea why that matters. It matters to me, for example, because then I get to check a box that feels more racially exact than marking a color. Like many Hispanics, my Hispanic heritage is a mix of native Spanish and native Mexican. Which means, in part, I am now officially for census purposes, American Indian.

Moving forward one more step, imagine if a lot more people (including those crazy liberals I mentioned who count people individually on the street) think this through? I have a feeling there will be a massive upsurge in the number of American Indians. So that's one issue.

But before I found the entertaining bit about defining my own race, I started searching because I realized I really had no idea what they were basing these categorizations on. Why did a race suddenly turn into an ethnicity and what was that supposed to mean? (it sounds absurdly offensive to me, while I understand and respect that the opposite is true for others)

So I searched rapidly, again, and stumbled on this article.

I read the first fellow/person's first few sentences and shook my head out of its reading slumber as I realized I was reading something very very old. Dalton Conley states you can only have one race and makes the incredibly weird comment, "You can identify ethnically as Irish and Polish, but you have to be essentially either black or white." So, a) do you mean that there are only two races? why two and not one or two and not four? why?, and b) assuming you are not absurd and do not believe there are only black and white people, why would all people of Irish or Polish heritage have to be black or white? I mean, it was weird and I assumed, I think quite reasonably, that it was an old racist thing. Nope. 2003.

Okay, so I read on. "The fundamental difference is that race is socially imposed and hierarchical. There is an inequality built into the system. Furthermore, you have no control over your race; it's how you're perceived by others." Wow. I mean, that's just wildly incorrect. If you read it closely, rather, it is. See, the sentence structure actually says that "race is socially imposed," which means it is not an independent thing. It's just magically invented by society. Weird. Then it says, reifing the earlier point, that you can't "control" race, that it is defined as how others perceive you. First off, those two phrases contradict each other because if something is controlled by how others perceive you, you can always change yourself to change the way others perceive you. But regardless, it's useless as it just sounds like prattle to me.

Next up: John Cheng. John, unfortunately, is way off base too. "Ethnicity isn't just a question of affiliation; it's also a question of choice. It's also a question of group membership. And it's usually associated with a geographic region. It's also often confused or conflated with nationality, but that's not the same thing. Today people identify with ethnicity positively because they see themselves as being part of that group. People can't just simply say, "Well, I want to become a member of that race." You either are or are not a member of that race. Whereas, if you wanted to look at ethnicity based on culture, you could learn a language, you can learn customs - there are things that you can learn so that you could belong to that group."

John totally weirded me out because he makes ethnicity sound like a club you can join. You CANNOT join an ethnicity. That isn't how it works. He doesn't seem to understand at all how it works. It also is not optional and has zero to do with choice. In all truth, ethnicity is basically a way we came up with of defining cultures that don't rise to the level of being interesting enough or don't have stories sad enough to define as races. As someone pointed out later, Irish used to be a race in America, back when Irish weren't allowed in places and signs were posted saying they wouldn't give any work to the Irish. Then they moved up and suddenly, they're just white, with a little Irish "ethnicity" dropped in. See that I also find offensive. But it's not worth going into the struggles of the Irish.

Next up, Sumi Cho: "In the law, I think there's a failure to seriously grasp the significance of the impact of racial exclusion and white supremacy in this society." Huh? Really? What cases have you been reading? It's pretty much explicitly spelled out and has been addressed about a million times over in lower court rulings and legislation. It's also a really dated view - I would appreciate it if these "scholars" picked up on the fact that they are staring into a class/wealth divide, not a race divide. But let's continue on.

"There are many who don't believe that racial divisions are much different from ethnicity-based divisions; i.e., what African Americans have faced in this country is little different from what Irish Americans or Italian Americans have faced." Given that I just brought up the Irish and their treatment, I'll bite. Yes, not the same thing. But I'll give you that only because of course it's not the same thing as we're not talking about the same thing. (quick side-bar, the italians were WAY better off than the Irish - that is an offensive comparison) That really doesn't help with defining race at all and the situation is WAY WAY more complicated than simply comparing apples to apples between the irish and african-americans, but whatever.

To finish up: "There's an asymmetry that's important to keep in mind when we're talking about race versus ethnicity. Yet politicians deliberately further this non-distinction between race and ethnicity, especially conservative politicians who want to downplay the significance of racial discrimination in this country." I think the irony here is that I am going through all this trying to find out what a "race" is. I started because I was trying to figure out what I was meant to check on the census form. And as I was going through I started thinking about friends of mine and wondering what they would check, how they were supposed to define themselves in a little box under "Race." I'm trying to think of groups I see discriminated against (old people, homeless people, ugly people, fat people, young adults) but none of the pictures that are coming up are racial. Sure, the imaginary people or memories of people I'm conjuring up have colors, and if I had to I could put some of them into one of three big categories, but it really doesn't play into the everyday.

By which I don't mean to say there isn't discrimination because of course there is and as I told my high school students a few years back, don't forget that racism goes in every direction and comes from every conceivable source. But I think there is a very significant generation gap here, perhaps even in the course of a decade, I don't know. But things have really changed. You see it in people socializing together. You see it in who people are willing to vote for. You see it in (something that always drove me insane) people not being described to you in part via their race. Which begs the question of why I care that I lost a race. I see a racial categorization as society's way of saying it cares. Losing that means society doesn't care anymore. Making it an ethnicity that has its own race diminishes the significance of my heritage. So I'm offended. It's not some "decision" I made about people I want to hang out with or cultural traditions I want to carry on - I have no traditions and don't hang out with anyone who does. It's the opposite of that, it's the race that he was defining. It's something you are born with and that is that.