{"id":1735,"date":"2010-04-13T07:41:20","date_gmt":"2010-04-13T11:41:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nicholsclan.com\/tinblog\/?p=1735"},"modified":"2010-04-10T16:16:57","modified_gmt":"2010-04-10T20:16:57","slug":"the-censuslessness-of-race","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/2010\/04\/the-censuslessness-of-race.html","title":{"rendered":"The Censuslessness of Race"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hopefully, by now you’ve completed and returned your census form.\u00a0 (Except for Kim, who so far they have refused to count.\u00a0 This may be confirmation that she is but a figment of my imagination, which in turn makes my imagination way better than I thought. But I digress.)<\/em> Probably the most contentious question on the census is about your race.<\/p>\n

Blacks who are not African American are annoyed they are lumped in with other Blacks.\u00a0 And everyone is annoyed about the term “Negro”, expect\u00a0 those who apparently wanted to check the box.\u00a0 Hispanics are annoyed they are an ethnicity and not a race.\u00a0 Not to be left out, I’d like to be annoyed as well.<\/p>\n

I was left with checking the box next to “White” as the only real option\u00a0 available to me.\u00a0 However, while marking the form I couldn’t help thinking that white is a color, not a race.\u00a0 Looking for a little validation, I did a bit of research.\u00a0 I expected to find that Races of human beings were the four I had learned at school: Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Negroid, and American Indian.\u00a0 To my surprise, it turns out that race is actually a much more subjective grouping.\u00a0 Different cultures define race differently.\u00a0 The four races I learned were a popular 18th century delineation, but by no means the only accepted one.<\/p>\n

It seems the only thing known for sure about race is that it is a grouping of people based on heritable physical traits.\u00a0 By that definition, the\u00a0 Hispanics have an argument about why they should be a race.\u00a0 You can usually reasonably tell a Hispanic person by sight.\u00a0 Certainly more easily than you can distinguish a Jamaican from an Ethiopian.\u00a0 And as an exceptionally pale man of northern European descent, should I really be lumped in with all the olive skinned Greeks and Italians?<\/p>\n

All of which begs the larger question, why does anyone care?\u00a0 The census has an interest in groupings of people for purposes of allocation of resources, but this has more to do with cultural groupings than heritable physical traits.\u00a0 My college educated corporately employed dark skinned neighbor is more usefully grouped with me than with urban homeless African Americans in Phoenix.\u00a0 Similarly, please don’t group me with the excessively light pallor of the nuts at a typical Tea Party.<\/p>\n

The ultimate goal of creating cultural groupings as part of the census does make sense.\u00a0 But I’m having a lot of trouble rationalizing why race, per se, is a useful question at all.\u00a0 Perhaps a lot of this angst over census questions could be eliminated if we just asked better questions\u2014perhaps the ones we really wanted answers to.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hopefully, by now you’ve completed and returned your census form.\u00a0 (Except for Kim, who so far they have refused to<\/p>\n

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