I grew up in Germany, but the first time I really learnt about the concept of race was when I went to the doctor in the US, where you need to fill in your "ethnicity". Same in the UK. I don't think anything can be more racist than being asked about your race or your ethnicity, because really, what exactly is that? Am I here for a medical appointment, or a psychological and philosophical introspection of myself? I usually just fill in Cosmopolitan there.
For me it was law school in the us. Every other form asked me about my race. Then they made us do a diversity survey with a question: "how much time do you spend each day with minorities?" And "do you want to spend more or less?". I refused to complete the survey. This was Massachusetts. Americans really do not realize how shocking this constant official reference to race is for people from other countries.
The census last year put out a map listing racial makeup in every neighbourhood, with dots representing clusters of people. I was speechless. A government map listing where all the colored people lived. This is normal in America.
In all seriousness though, lots of americans share your sentiment. Lots of us would just like to live our lives, but we’re constantly bombarded with stuff like this.
The obsession with race is everywhere in the US right now. I work for a Fortune 500, non-FAANG company. I’m required to set four annual goals at the beginning of each year. Two of those goals must relate to my performance or the business’s objectives (you know, what I get paid for). The other two must be Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) goals. One of the ways to satisfy these goals is recruit a “diverse” candidate, which is just a corporate euphemism for non-white. It’s creepy.
Different ethnicities get affected in different proportions by some conditions, such as sickle cell disease https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/sicklecell/data.html. It's a genuine medical question, but of course you're not obliged to answer.
I doubt that it can be taken seriously as a medical question, as some of the American "races" don't cluster genetically. Hispanic is probably the worst offender, but Asian is pretty bad too.
Hispanic isn't a race according to the Census Bureau.
> The United States Census Bureau uses Hispanic or Latino to refer to a person of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin regardless of race
The way it's used in popular imagination is as a "race" though. My mom doesn't see Pope Francis as hispanic because he isn't mestizo.
I am a "Hispanic" that lives in the US. I am also European. In my experience what qualifies as an Hispanic varies incredibly from institution to institution, from person to person. A few months ago I was admitted briefly to the hospital, my race (not ethnicity) was marked as "Hispanic". Other times, in other places, I have been assumed to be "white".
Also, you wouldn't believe how much better I am treated when I am perceived as "white".
I read that book when I arrived to the US: really interesting. IMO, the activists that pushed the idea of the "Hispanic" race/ethnicity into the American mindset made a huge mistake. Racializing yourself is a bad thing, even if the government gives you a few pennies in exchange.
Well, I think you’ve missed important context here. Darker skinned Latinos didn’t have a choice to not be racialized; “Hispanic” was introduced as an alternative to the prevailing practice of just using the Spanish-speaking country with the most local expats as an informal race designator. White Latinos could in principle have defected and chosen to identify as just white, but I’m glad we didn’t.
I think that the racialization of Hispanics as a group has been pretty bad for "non-white" Latinos too.
1. You are right that someone that doesn't visually appear "white" will be racialized in the US. However, the magnitude of this racialization can differ a lot. Incessantly repeating that "Hispanics" are a very consistent group of people makes the "otherization" of all Hispanics worse, including for "non-white" ones.
2. Including people of European descent in a group that is going to benefit from affirmative action opens an obvious loophole. Unconscious bias will provoke that the opportunities created by AA end up with people who look/are white, not to Latinos "of color". Hollywood is particularly terrible on that: with most of Hispanic actors looking European (Ana de Armas is a recent example) or coming directly from Europe. I guess they can't find non-white Latinos in LA. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
3. Finally, the idea of Hispanics forming a genetic cluster will be pernicious for all Hispanics, particularly when applied to medicine. It puts our lives in unnecessary danger.
Do any of them really cluster genetically? Compare a person whose ancestors come from Senegal to a person whose ancestors come from Mozambique – Americans will call both persons "Black", yet I would not expect those two people to have many recent ancestors in common, or much "genetic clustering" at all.
You are thinking too literally. It's just a question that opens the door to more discussion. It's another piece of information, not the end of the discussion.
But does it always "open the door to more discussion", or do some medical professionals just make judgements based on which box was ticked on the patient form? Presented with an African immigrant patient, is a US doctor going to realise that the patient may have rather different genetics from most African-Americans, and hence information about health risks for African-Americans may not be relevant to them? I'm sure an above-average doctor would realise that and take it into account, but would a below-average doctor (of whom there are very many) do it?
If more information is better, isn't that a good argument for replacing "race" questions which expect coarse-grained answers with "ethnicity"/"ancestry" questions which expect more fine-grained answers? (i.e. "Chinese" or "Filipino" not "Asian", "African-American" or "Kenyan" not "Black", "English" or "Polish" not "White", etc.)
I put Mix: Normando-French in the "Other" category when Im asked at the census in Hong Kong giggling at their expected confused looks. What the fuck is a race, I look a bit different from a guy in Marseille and a lot different from a guy in Beijing but it's all a gradient, why make it discreet and give names (they split between western and viet for instance in HK... but isnt Vietnam west of China too??), do they also have a guide book so we cull impurities ?
It s insane to use races as a concept for humans when clearly we fuck just as dutifully as stray cats in a gutter. Racism is to talk of races.
Not defending that particular application, but it is probably important for humans to make categories of things to be able to draw lines between them and find useful rules of how to deal with things. People like to make up labels for all kinds of (ir)relevant stuff and try to "other" people who are different in some way or to some degree. "my side, your side" stuff.
The important thing is, that we are also able to look beyond our categories and do not draw wrong conclusions from them. Keeping an open mind.
We have no category given by nature that's for sure. What s important is not to look beyond our category, it s waking up to the fact there is none.
It s very american, for some reason, anyway. They were so hung on not mixing up with the slaves they had to draw a line. But stop thinking you're white or black: you re very different from a Russian and a Portugues, or a Malian and a Senegalese. Focusing on skin color is stupid.
My daughter for instance is more franco-chinese than she's whito-yellow (and even that has so many variation that no two french and no two chinese think perfectly alike), it has no meaning, no more than hair color or eye color, at least.
For all intents and purposes, I am white but I am also of French descent. My wife is also, for all intents and purposes "white" - . When my wife was pregnant they asked for our ethnicities but wanted more details than just "white". When they found out that I had French descent, they added initial genetic screening for the baby for a disease which only statistically significantly occurs in people with French descent.
This seems a poor way of economizing on tests. How would someone of (say) German descent be sure that some of their ancestors didn't come from across the border? Very few people can trace their lineage back more than a couple generations.
Keep in mind there is also the chance of false positives on those types of tests. So anything you can do to do them only on people where there is a higher chance of them being meaningful saves not just the cost of the tests but mental anguish for people who would get the false positive results.
I agree, it's not an exact science and I am not a doctor or run a practice so I do not know why they would do it this way. Probably a "best we can do" type situtation.
That's backwards. They shouldn't use your self-described ancestry to choose which tests to give you. The test already has the ability to determine that better than any human.
Understood, but using self-reported race is very inaccurate, so they are wasting money a lot of the time. Instead, a rapid ancestry test would be inexpensive (<$100) and would provide a much better guide to determine if the expensive test should be taken.
I thought genetic screening was most useful before pregnancy, to know if a child would be at risk of inheriting any conditions from their parent’s genes, or to diagnose a disease and guide treatment. What’s the purpose of blanket screening a child that hasn’t shown any symptoms?
In our case, this disease can be detected very early in the womb and children born with it do not survive very long - usually only a few months, 2 years at most if I'm remembering correctly. They do these tests early so the pregnancy can be terminated if the parents choose.
I'm white but I put "Prefer not to answer" whenever I'm asked an equal-opportunity question about my race because what difference should it make?
However, at the doctor's office it matters. Black people are at a higher risk for sickle-cell anemia, there's a significant percentage of ethnic Chinese who cannot metabolize alcohol very well, etc. Having your ethnic background on file helps health professionals evaluate your risks for conditions significantly influenced by ethnicity.
There are genuinely different risk factors and biological predispositions that are impacted by one’s racial background. The idea that we should pretend race is only a social construct is completely unscientific and absurd.
To argue asking about one’s race is racism will absolutely, positively have negative outcomes in providing quality healthcare. A good physician should never be ignorant of such things. And there’s no such thing as a good physician who is willfully ignorant of such things.
> The idea that we should pretend race is only a social construct is completely unscientific and absurd.
Nonsense, "race" is the unscientific and absurd concept when applied to humans. They are human populations which are more predisposed toward certain diseases (e.g. sickle cell anaemia) but these populations aren't different "races"!
Yes, so lets start by distinguishing between the 5 major and 28 minor races of Africa. Saying that 'African American' corresponds to anything medically meaningful is the equivalent of saying 'All Asians look the same'.
Theoretically, yes. However, in practice either one of White, Black, Asian and, notoriously, Latino races carry zero of medically useful information since all of those are polyphylectic. There's more than one distinct things in each.
I think the idea is more, that there is no distinct level at which you can draw a line and can reasonably claim, that everyone beyond that line is or does x. That means, that you probably should not draw any conclusions from that line, even if there are differences in many cases on each side of the line. From each side if the line a person can surprise you by not being or doing what you would expect based on the line you drew, so you need to keep an open mind about the arbitrary line you drew.
Nothing... it means nothing and your inability to define it precisely beyond vague concepts proves it.
Races have a precise meaning in domestic animal breeding, there is a rule book, you cull the offspring that mutates too far away and aim at purity of attributes as defined in the standard. You get certification for your animals by various standard association who measure shape, color and size.
It makes no sense for humans. You can say gene X produce problem Y if you want, but there s no discrete segmentation in humans.
In america it’s important that our ruling class constantly divides all us plebs up by race so that we can all be mad at each other instead of them. It’s incredibly effective.
Sorry, but for QA reasons it's still valuable to track. In the US, medical care is shockingly worse for people who medical staff perceive as one race vs another. Removing the line on the form will not prevent that.
You're welcome to propose that change, but I see it as being impractical. Not only would this require complex and expensive changes to health data infrastructure, but I doubt it would result in significantly better data. How many of the racially biased medical practitioners will correctly report the perceptions they're acting upon?
As Box said, "All models are wrong. Some models are useful." The current model is clearly wrong but clearly useful. You'd have to make the case that switching to your theoretically-less-wrong model would have a high ROI in terms of reducing unfair medical outcomes. But I think that's a very hard case to make.
The current model is 1:1 for patient:race, data entered by the patient. You are proposing a 1:n model with data entered by each practitioner. That is a different model.
And again, you haven't walked through the practical consequences of making this change and how it will improve fairness enough to be worth the cost of implementation. If you're serious about this, please do that. Otherwise it looks to me like you're just bikeshedding, and I don't have time for that today.
I don't think that's true at all. There are a ton of studies that have proved the problem exists, which has led to real efforts to fix the problem. How would we do that without data?
As the article explains, your DNA sample will not show how you are perceived racially by the people treating you. And it's that racial perception that has a big influence on quality of care in the US.
We cannot eliminate the box on the form until we first eliminate the biased care.
> We cannot eliminate the box on the form until we first eliminate the biased care
That is where the article ends: “the need to monitor” etc. But there is no logic to that. The biased care is eliminated by having the care providers not care about race, not by measuring it precisely. You can still record % of people who feel discriminated without doing the discrimination yourself.
Gosh, if it's that easy, why hasn't it happened already?
The truth is that's very hard. And if we can't measure it, it's impossible to tell which bias-reducing interventions work.
I get why white people, of which I am one, want to just ignore the problem and hope it goes away. But if there's anything that history demonstrates, it's that sustained power differentials don't just go away on their own. In the US, that's what both our Revolutionary War and our Civil War were about, as well as our civil rights movement. And things like the First Nadir and the Second Nadir show that even hard-won victories like those don't last without upkeep.
I can assure you, my answer to that question will equally not show how I am perceived racially by the people treating me. Maybe the people treating me should fill it out? Maybe they should also fill out if they perceive me as rather dumb or rather smart, because that might also impact my treatment.
Ok? But this isn't about just you. Enough people will answer this question in a way that it's still statistically useful to helping us work toward fairer outcomes. If you would seriously like to propose a systemic change you think even more effective in making things fairer, have at it. But please grapple at least vaguely with the actual difficulty in implementing your proposed change.
I don't need to grapple vaguely with anything. I don't want that line on my questionaire. You cannot tell me it is helping with anything. So just get rid of the line, and I am sure the world is not going to be a worse place.
Again, this is not about you. I get that you have an opinion. But if you want it to be more than one anonymous goof's quirky and apparently uninformed disposable niche social media comment, you're going to have to put in the work.
My comment is already on the top of this topic, and seems to have resonated with enough people. That's really all I expect from my comment. Maybe a little change will come from that. On the other hand, maybe YOU should put in some work, because you are really coming across as the entitled white male you probably are. The question is, is the data you gain from adding this question to every form in the US really so valuable that it outweighs the damage done by enforcing the conception that you are all different and divided by race? I doubt it, but I don't know. Do you think you know?
Hah! That is exactly the kind of evasion I was expecting from some somebody whose self-declared standard of discussion is "as long as I get likes, it's good."
Well, you didn't answer the question in my previous comment, so a discussion with you doesn't seem to be worthwhile. I think I have a pretty good idea by now what to expect from YOU.
You are entitled, because you do not bring any facts to the table that would support your point of view, just your own opinions, nevertheless you demand "more work" from other people. If that is not entitled, I don't know what is. And the fact that you cannot see it, even after I point it out to you, speaks for itself.
It has helped politicians. And that means if the problem is ever solved, politicians won’t benefit anymore. So lots of tax money is spent but the problem remains purposefully unsolved.
> But precision medicine only works if scientists have studied people who are similar to you. If your genes are rare or unusual compared to those researchers have examined in the past, you could end up getting the wrong treatment. Since the vast majority of genetics studies are done on people of European ancestry, members of other racial groups may lose out on the benefits of precision medicine entirely.
That ratio indicates that there is some biased process leading to the ratio, and that process should be de-biased. Presuming women and men have equal math abilities (I assume this is true) and equal desire to obtain degrees (not entirely sure; this is a very controversial topic) you would expect that an unbiased selection process would generate 50% male/female ratio. Again, many assumptions and conclusions in what i just said are not absolutely certain.
Many departments are currently realizign they play a role in systemic discrimination, and those ratios help them understand how far they are from the mean.
> That ratio indicates that there is some biased process leading to the ratio, and that process should be de-biased.
Or that people have different preferences?
> Presuming women and men have equal math abilities (I assume this is true) and equal desire to obtain degrees (not entirely sure; this is a very controversial topic) you would expect that an unbiased selection process would generate 50% male/female ratio.
If by that you mean that "for each degree, the percentage of the people that want to get it follows the repartition in the population", it is absolutely not true. I don't know why or what mechanism are at play here, but assuming that this is all bias seems very weird.
> Again, many assumptions and conclusions in what i just said are not absolutely certain.
I think this is a really weak reason to collect racial statistics in the first place.
> Many departments are currently realizign they play a role in systemic discrimination, and those ratios help them understand how far they are from the mean.
That's true, but you can also base yourself on things like revenu which seems to be more universal than race.
> Many departments are currently realizign they play a role in systemic discrimination, and those ratios help them understand how far they are from the mean.
I hope you realize this process started over 50 years ago. Most fields turned and are now dominated by women. The few fields that are still not dominated by women are probably that way for another reason than discrimination, women are far too good at taking over fields for some discrimination to stop them from doing so.
Nothign I said in my comment above is my current position, it's a description of the thinking of people who run departments. Note that I very carefully said the idea of whether genders have preferences, is a controversial topic.
In my own field, biology, many subfields do have equal gender ratios (went from skewed to equal over last 20 years). However, having worked in Silicon Valley at tech firms, I can say that they (and the programs that feed them) still have very skewed ratios.
I'm aware of these processes and how long they've lasted; about 100 years ago, Harvard limited the number of Jewish people who could be accepted. Jews were excluded from working at "white-shoe law firms" (the ones that did high-value business deals) and instead generally ran law firms that handled "the dirty stuff" (divorces etc). Eventually, Jews became much more accepted, explicit Jewish quotas at universities were removed, and white shoe law firms hire (and have partners) who are Jewish.
I don't think it's good science to say that every difference comes from discimination. For example, the poorer you are, the higher are your chances of dropping out. This is not discrimination against poor people. But, at least to me, this is a problem that we should try to fix.
Figuring out whether or not there is discrimination is not saying that any differences comes from discrimination. Identifying differences is the first step in doing that, not the last step.
That’s the point of the entire article. It’s a fuzzy problem that can’t be solved by strict categorization like that, which is in itself a form of discrimination. You design your admissions process to be as fair as possible, not “tune it” to get the metrics right.
I believe this, and similar things in job applications, is mostly so they can generate stats that would reveal if there was discrimination going on.
It feels weird because you're providing the information to the people who are being held accountable, and the idea is to get to a place where the information they are asking you for doesn't matter, but life is complicated.
They will always have an option “would rather not say” and are used for reporting. Universities in particular are keen to ensure they have a mix of students that isn’t skewed.
Which is racist. It’s good intentioned, but it’s also almost the definition of racism.
I don’t particularly mind affirmative action policies but I wish people were more honest with themselves how it’s really an imposition of one kind of injustice in an attempt to remedy another.
The world is messy and complicated, it may be warranted, but it seems to me these kind of measures really have to be viewed as temporary measures and aimed to phase out as soon as a certain level of “target equality” has been achieved.
> Which is racist. It’s good intentioned, but it’s also almost the definition of racism.
I tend to agree with that. I think the idea is that positive discrimination can offset previously encountered negative discrimination to some degree and level the field by doing so. I don't have strong opinion about it, but it seems like the best method we have to make a real impact. Everything else seems too slow.
But it also could brew resentiments that end up making people hate eachother. Affirmative action should help people of a similar socioeconomic background somehow without involving race. People do need that helping hand but if they happen to tick off the wrong boxes they’re out of luck.
Every time affirmative-action comes up for discussion in HN, someone in the comments entirely re-invents european style social-democracy from first principles just to avoid giving any advantage to African American's based on race.
I'm never sure whether to be saddened or hopeful about this phenomenon. Is it a new generation growing up and realizing that race is an outdated social construct and they could just help everyone and anyone with sensible policies, or is it just people repeating "You know who the real racists are?" style talking points, it's hard to tell.
I'm confused as to how asking to be evaluated on one's merits and not race has anything to do with European social democracies. Affirmative action/"positive" discrimination occurs in Europe as well.
The comment I replied to was talking about helping people from a specific socioeconomic background.
The implication, and very sensible one at that, is that just because you are from a poor family, doesn't mean you don't have "merit". Some portion of an Ivy League credential reflects not your merit or potential or contribution to society, but inherited privilege, connections, luck etc.
Meritocracy in such a situation is like having a fair race when one competitor has a motorbike. Yes they are objectively faster than the runners in certain circumstances, but that's not due to their merit as a runner, from a combination of natural aptitude and years of dedicated training and focus, it's because they're on a motorbike.
If you really need something delivered quickly, then the short term solution is to ask the guy with the motorbike. If the aim is to get the human race moving faster in general, then giving everyone a motorbike is the answer, not pretending against all evidence that the people with motorbikes are inherently superior beings and just naturally good at running.
Then you can choose the best motorbike rider and get something that approximates a real meritocracy.
> re-invents european style social-democracy from first principles just to avoid giving any advantage to African American's based on race.
What "just to avoid"? Many people on HN are from such European style social democracies, there is no "just to avoid", we just think that is a much better system than the racialized democracy American democrats wants.
> the racialized democracy American democrats wants.
This doesn't describe anything I recognise as reality and I thought I'd already headed this off by mentioning the "You know who the real racists are?" talking points.
I'm glad we all agree that racism and sexism is bad now, I suppose that's progress of some kind.
In Germany we learned in school about Hitler's race theory and how ridiculous the whole idea was. But compared to attempts like the one described in the article Nazi Germanys version sounds incredibly well thought out, including rigorous criteria to determine the race of a person (as ridiculous as those were).
Which is by all means not meant as an endorsement of 1930s ideology, more as a "wtf is that, that's backwards in more ways than I'm comfortable with".
I think "this is the weird phenotype/culture hybrid people treat this person and their family as" is a less backward approach than "here's some pseudoscience to try to disprove that Jews and Aryan ubermenschen are of intermixed ancestry and actually pretty difficult to distinguish physiologically [at least without looking for specific genetic markers we fortunately haven't the technology to identify]", even before we get onto the why is this being looked into question.
Conceding a socially significant category isn't actually very analytically rigorous and might as well be treated as just a label shows more thoughtfulness than inventing a lot of nonsense to try to give it the appearance of rigour.
If you describe it like that it sounds like a classical descriptivism vs prescriptivism argument. Nazi Germany leaned hard into prescriptivism, trying to have hard rules for everything, while the US goes with a descriptivism "whatever the people call it is right".
But that sounds fundamentally incompatible with having a fixed list of categories, with that approach surely it would have to be a free text field (or at least a couple categories, along with either a text field or an "other" category, like with gender nowadays)
> But that sounds fundamentally incompatible with having a fixed list of categories, with that approach surely it would have to be a free text field (or at least a couple categories, along with either a text field or an "other" category, like with gender nowadays
I agree, but generally it is, in my experience, as well as almost invariably being completely optional.
The Nazis literally copied these rules from America. They actually made them slightly more "reasonable" in the sense that they didn't go as far as the "one drop rule".
Yeah, the question always irks me as well and I usually leave it blank.
The recent Covid stuff about prioritizing vaccines depending on race (which thankfully got rejected) shows there is reason to be suspicious of it imo.
“Race” is such an arbitrary and bad classification scheme. A third rail topic, but an alien observing humanity would find our obsession with certain characteristics but not others weird, particularly when we’re all the same species anyway.
My hope is we can one day get past it. There’s some evidence of this with previously coded “races” no longer being explicitly thought of that way in the culture. Cultural variance is interesting, but identity classifications seem harmful and with racial categories primarily a social construction anyway - just strange?
This was a fascinating article. I recommend reading it all the way to the end. One of my favorite sections:
> Though many people clearly believe that racial and ethnic classifications are somehow linked to science, I observe that their relationship to genetics is a lot like astrology's link to astronomy. The analogy is imperfect, however; very few government officials are willing to publicly admit that they plan their lives around astrology (though some apparently do), but nearly all of them publicly plan their programs around ethnic classifications. Indeed, the government pours millions of dollars each year into reaffirmation of this belief and requires that private industry join in the massive delusion.
> The widespread delusion about racial and ethnic classification has not been confined to the nonscientific world, unfortunately. As Lancelot Hogben remarked 56 years ago [2]: “Geneticists believe that anthropologists have decided what a race is. Ethnologists assume that their classifications embody principles which genetic science has proved to be correct. Politicians believe that their prejudices have the sanction of genetic laws and the findings of physical anthropology to sustain them.”
> While there often are visible differences between people from areas that are widely separated, these differences are very small compared with the physical similarities of all humans
I've always found it interesting (as a Muslim from the Middle East) that Middle Eastern is almost always lumped under White. I have some Turkish blood and so am on the lighter side, but much of my friends and family back home are definitely not "white".
I did have some friends from back home who moved to the US, and would tick "African / American" since we're technically from the African continent, though being from the North we wouldn't fit that in the traditional sense either.
I guess we'd all be mongrels. I sometimes wonder what it will mean for my sons' sense of identity as they grow up seeing themselves grouped under the White group.. While still feeling like a minority due to the way they look/speak.
This isn't really a problem with computers so much as with taxonomy. You pretty much always end up with sorites-esque delineation paradoxes when imposing taxonomies onto nature. No matter how refined your system of categories is, it's never complete.
> The attempt to use computers to assist in racial classification tasks has helped sharpen the issues because computers can't deal with fuzzy concepts. If you try to define an ethnic code that is logically complete, consistent, and determinable for every person using current technology, you find that you can't.
> There seems to be a silent conspiracy to deny the existence of mixed racial groups in the United States. Most such people have acquiesced to this conspiracy and don't even think of themselves in those terms. Instead, they go along with the idea that they are members of one of the races recognized by the government. In fact, they often identify with a traditional race that represents only a small fraction of their genetic heritage!
Computers can deal with fuzzy concepts just fine, the problem is that we don't want fuzzy answers.
Any reasonable way to get a computer to determine race will yield a fuzzy answer: based on your family tree you are 36% European, based on facial recognition the algorithm is 60% certain you are white, based on genetic sequencing you are 4% of African descent. All those are perfectly valid fuzzy answers.
If you then try to match those to ridiculous categories like "Black, not of Hispanic origin" it obviously goes wrong quickly. What exactly is "Black"? Does one Spanish great-grandfather disqualify you from that category? Or only if that great-grandfather was from Brazil instead of Spain?
> What exactly is "Black"? Does one Spanish great-grandfather disqualify you from that category?
Interestingly you might get a very different answer to that question in Brazil than you would in the USA. I saw an interview with a Brazilian footballer that looked black to Americans sounding surprised when asked by an interviewer asked how racism affected him. His answer was, paraphrasing from memory, “what are you talking about I’m not black.”
Meanwhile race in the USA is of major political importance. It matters for college admissions, government loans and contracts, and so on. By and large it’s on the honor system. So far at least there haven’t been many white presenting Americans identifying as black or mixed race when their DNA test shows 4% African ancestry.
There is a tension between the utility of categories, which is very much real; and their limitations, which are also real and inevitable.
We absolutely need to categorize the world to make sense of it, even if the categories themselves are never going to be 100% complete or accurate. I think the takeaway should be awareness of the inherent limitations of categorization, not its attempted abolition.
There may be a point in revisiting categories though, as they tend to ossify and become less useful with time; you can't step in the same river twice, and that map your grandfather drew may not quite be accurate anymore.
The problem isn't the clustering. The problem is choosing which individual points belong to which clusters, because every time people have mixed-race (or mixed-mixed-race) or whatever kids, which has been happening for millennia, a new 'cluster' gets invented.
Basically, there are no nice separations between the clusters, there are just denser and sparser regions in the feature space, so assignment of a point to a single cluster doesn't make sense.
it's almost a textbook case for unsupervised learning. Like, almost as if you could train a manifold that separated out people by genetic history (much of which was super-regionalized, and did lead to large phenotypic differences that clustered spatially)... and in that manifold "mixed-race" people would probably fall on points between two well-separated clusters.
In fact there are entire scientific papers (mainstream) doing exactly this. We've learned all sorts of interesting things, like the total genetic diversity in africa is larger than the african/eurasian diversity split.
I love this as an exploration, but I think it doesn't go quite far enough. Are (socially defined) racial categories ridiculous from a biological lens? Sure. Does that mean they are not real? No.
Humans are primates for whom social power structures are deeply important. (And not the only ones; see de Waal's "Chimpanzee Politics" for how it plays out in our nearest relatives.) As a species we are extremely good at building eusocial power systems, and we use that to get a lot done. But those can depend on a lot of effectively arbitrary markers to do that. Look at the British class system. What outsiders would call slight shifts in accent, clothing, and manners mark major division in social power.
The US wasn't nearly as classist, but it undeniably started out as a racialized and gendered power system. (E.g., 1700+ members of congress owned slaves [1], with slaveholders being in the majority for the first 30 years. It wasn't until 1870 we saw a black person in a federal elected seat, and the first woman was in 1917.) So it's not a shock that state and federal bureaucracies would be extremely interested in which box a person fits into.
These categories aren't biological, they're social, standing waves in our interactions. As a white man, there are many, many situations in the US where I get treated better just because of that. It's that lasting differential in social power that is what really defines racial categories. If we want to eliminate the categories, we first have to eliminate the power differential. Then the categories will go away on their own, the same way a lot of ancestry questions have become moot among white people (e.g., having ancestors of English vs German vs Irish vs Italian ancestry used to matter a fair bit). But as with the English class system, that power differential will not go away on its own; it has to be studied, recognized, and actively dismantled.
But are you actively dismantling it by making race a core part of everyone's identity?
Seems to me, the outcome of the current movements might as well be that one group will have unfair privileges in one area while another group might have unfair privileges in another area. In the end, that seems as it would lead to embedding racial divides even deeper into society.
I didn't make race a core part of everyone's identity. America did that long ago. What I am doing is pointing out that system still exists and how much trouble it still causes.
I understand why "ignore it and it will go away" is appealing to people. It sounds like way less work! But part of the way racism and sexism operate is by discouraging examination of those systems. By making the empowered group the default, the norm, and refusing to look at the differential treatment. For example, look at Mitch McConnell's recent division of "Americans" vs "African-Americans": https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/2022/jan/21/mitch-...
And that's just one example of a very widespread phenomenon. Here's another https://xkcd.com/385/
So ignoring the problem ends up supporting the problem. However much we would like to pretend that this problem will get better on its own, history tells power systems rarely if ever just give up on their own: https://thenib.com/great-moments-in-peaceful-protest-history...
Good points - also, to be clear, that was supposed to be a plural "you", apologies for the ambiguity.
I think (as a white non-american) that there is a difference between seeing race-blindness as the ultimate goal - which is not yet archieved and won't be for the foreseeable future - or seeing race-blindness as an explicit non-goal.
I think the OP is arguing for the first variant. My impression is, current anti-racism/identity movements are more advocating the second variant and are emphasizing blacks and whites as fundamentally separate groups, which cannot and should not be reconciled.
If this is really the case, I believe this is some major shift of objective - and I'm honestly puzzled what the "ideal society" that we should work towards would actually be in the second case.
There is also a difference between past atrocities which must be made up in some form and discrimination that continues in the present. I agree that the history of slavery and genocide in the history of american settlers is far from being appropriately processed. This is something that must be taught in schools and attempts to make up for the evils must be made - maybe even as some form of reparations, though I have no idea how that could work in practice.
However, it's also clear you cannot punish persons that live today and had no choice about whether or not those atrocities took place.
I think more talk between black and white people about some kind of positive vision of the future that all could work towards for would be more constructive - if it's possible at all to build such a vision.
I think what you're missing is that arguing prematurely for race blindness is a important and frequently used tool in preserving America's white supremacy. A major way white men practice identity politics is by complaining about "identity politics". You can see that going on nakedly in our fight over the next Supreme Court justice.
Do I think race blindness is a good goal for 200 years from now? Yes. Do I think race blindness should be an explicit non-goal for the next 50? Also yes.
I agree that more talk about positive visions for the future is useful. But I think you're placing that in false contrast with frank and explicit discussion of current problems and of the necessary awareness needed to make visions real. And I think you should read MLK about how this sort of "can't we all just get along" thinking is a barrier to solving problems: https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham....
Successful slave traders at the time of the Age of Expansion (1500s) used race mercilessly to define most trading of human captives. However, slave traders have been hated and banned by others at the same time. All 13 colonies of North America had their own laws from the beginning. Essentially, it was the Virginia colonies and similar that fit your description. The northern group forbid slavery, preached against it, and had strict laws to protect people of all races. This fundemental difference is more important than many people realize now, and eventually was the context for the US Civil War.
And that's just the basic legal stuff, like not being property. When you look at actual attitudes, Northerners were quite racist. You could read, for example, Foner's "The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery". It covers quite well how even Lincoln was quite racist in a way typical of the time.
You might also read Loewen's "Sundown Towns" which shows these attitudes not just persisting, but leading to ethnic cleansing across the US during the Nadir (circa 1870-1920). That includes New England: https://thenewpress.com/books/sundown-towns
There were of course excellent abolitionists and activists from New England, and there were pockets of goodness. But you can't paint New England as a magic exception.
ok, you got me. I am rethinking this a bit.. but, may I suggest changing "Northerners were quite racist" to be "Northerners were quite tribal" ? I think the survival of communities in those harsh days required more immediate survival interactions, and very importantly more cooperation in healthy child-rearing. Humans act in groups.
It's a plausible question. But to show that you'd have to demonstrate that Northerners were not only less hostile to non-white people (especially Black and Native residents) than was common in America, but also equally hostile to their neighbors from other European countries. Given the high levels of immigration, the US definitely had intra-white hostility between different European ethnic and linguistic groups. But I have seen no evidence that was nearly as bad as anti-Black sentiment or action.
So I think "Northerners were quite racist" is a pretty reasonable statement from the historical evidence. Tribal too, as that's a common human characteristic. But when you look at things like America's ethnic cleansing and de-facto segregation, let alone chattel slaver, it's pretty clear there's something more going on than garden-variety cooperative healthy child-rearing.
> America's ethnic cleansing and de-facto segregation, let alone chattel slaver
but there you go .. from a reasonable observation of very real tensions among certain people and groups, you then "mix" all of that into the worst, and call it American. It is at the least unfair to those that stayed true to teachings of real liberty for all people.
What would you think of somebody who refused to look at bug reports because they thought it was unfair to those that stayed true to the teachings of building high-quality software?
Sorry, but you can't pick and choose like that. Does America have a history of high ideals? Sure. Did America always live up to them? Obviously not. All non-Indians live on stolen land. All white people have benefited from the exploitation and suppression of black people. All men have benefited from the exploitation and suppression of women. Whether we meant to or not, and whether we like it or not.
If you really want to stay "true to teachings of real liberty for all people", then you have to look at where and how we've fallen short. Otherwise we'll never live up to the goals.
yeah - we definitely do not agree on this, and I have an important point that I think you miss entirely, and that is .. That the design of the USA is legally, exactly NOT a single entity, it is a collection of States, each of which have a set of laws to govern important parts of it.
To your idea about stolen land.. I do empathize with that, and in fact have gone to native American gatherings to be silent and support, so you know. BUT every land in the entire world, has been stolen. All of it, at one time or another, by violence or otherwise. So, not a happy idea, but I claim it is true.
You think... that I don't know the United States is composed of states? If that's what you're getting out of this, I don't think I can advance the conversation any further.
In Australia, I've never seen a government form asking your race. They'll ask questions about country of birth, language spoken at home, indigenous status, etc – but none of those map exactly to "race" as that concept is understood in the US.
Here, the government, media, etc, generally prefer to refer to people using fine-grained ethnicity/nationality terms, not in terms of coarse racial categories.
> In Australia, I've never seen a government form asking your race. They'll ask questions about country of birth, language spoken at home, indigenous status, etc – but none of those map exactly to "race" as that concept is understood in the US.
That's because a majority of Australians are one generation or less removed from being immigrants. It's rather hard to sell the idea of a united white/brown/yellow/black race to people whose grandparents won't talk to each other because of the last genocide.
> In trying to apply a computer to a task that humans do, we often discover that it doesn't work. One common problem is that humans are able to deal with fuzzy concepts but computers are not -- they need precise representations and it is hard to represent a fuzzy concept in a precise way. However, if we look closer at such tasks, we often discover that the weakness actually lies not in the computer but in ourselves -- we didn't understand what we were doing in the first place.
This was still published before the latest iteration to evade the insight that your question is ill-posed took hold: AI magic!
Why go through the trouble to ask yourself if your classification system makes sense if you can just draw up some random examples and train a classifier? And if the classifier happens to perform poorly, it's clearly the fault of the algorithm and not that your classifications are completely arbitrary.
Modern algorithms are even smart enough to find out what you're "really" looking for and will happily detect skin color as the most significant feature for racial classifications.
race is strongly correlated with major continental population groups; e.g black-identifying americans have roughly 400x african genetic markers vs white-identifying, forensic anthropologists can identify the continental ancestry of skeletons at ~80%, etc. it is of course a human and particularly bureaucratic taxonomy so it breaks down at the margins, but it points to something that exists in reality and can be used to establish useful correlations (for instance, medical issues) on average.
Nobody argued that country-of-origin isn't real, or that there aren't physical attributes related to the physical location of one's ancestry.
The Irish used to be a "race" unto themselves. Jewish people still are according to many people (I wonder if an Ethiopian Jew is of the Black race or the Jewish race?). Ukrainians were called their own race in my part of the world, Western Canada, during an immigration wave 100 years ago.
I suppose it's possible that all those old guys had it wrong and used "race" improperly, but we're doing it right now because we use skin tone as a proxy for race instead of other factors.
yes, as i mentioned 'race' is mostly used as a bureaucratic (and hence political) taxonomy, and under different conditions the lines may be drawn differently, but this doesn't mean that all categories are arbitrary. there is a deeper biological reality that our categories grope towards.
All of that is true, but it has little to do with why race exists as a persistent meme. We don't segregate ourselves by blood type, height, or BMI, even though they have certain genetic and medical correlates.
The purpose of race is social differentiation, not medical. That's why identifying himself as mongrel got the author in trouble. He was punking the social order. That's what needed to be upheld, not their data codes. Doubtful they would've grilled him for hours for writing an EBCDIC-incompatible circumflexed vowel in his surname.
That's also why identifying oneself as mixed-race can be problematic. People don't know where to place you in the pecking order, and if you're on their team. It's not like people are concerned for your health, "B-b-but if you put the wrong race you might get a contraindicated blood pressure medication in 30 years!!!"
There are severe height biases in medicine. Taller (and thus larger) people fall well outside most "norms" of medical statistical analysis.
For example, did you know a large male human will have a larger prostate, which itself will generate a larger PSA number than a "normal" human? This in and of itself, at a certain age, will cause some doctors to attempt to stick a needle assembly you know where to sample the prostate. If one just goes along with this statistical oddity, instead of demanding the other (more modern) tests out there, one could literally end up fighting a nasty infection, or worse a spread of cancer if it was actually found.
I would say fighting hidden biases is more frustrating that fighting obvious ones, but both need to be fought and fought well.
Yes, however they aren't clearly delineated, which is the point OP is trying to make. You can have categories, but you can't assign individuals to them because they have lots of overlap.
But this "aren't clearly delineated" gets pedantic sometimes. The same issue is true for assigning hours into morning/day/evening/night, yet no-one talks about issues there. Stratifying something continuous into categories suddenly becomes bad when talking about ethnicity.
That's because the hours don't get personally affected by their classification. I suspect it would suddenly be a big deal if the minimum wage for day vs. night work was different.
And anyways, is 4am morning or night? You'll get different answers in a city compared to on a farm, for example.
What makes you think that doctors are correct about this?
Do doctors ask this question in countries besides the US?
>Unlike sex, race is not firmly biologically based but rather is a “construct of human variability based on perceived differences in biology, physical appearance, and behavior” (IOM, 1999). According to Shields and colleagues (2005),
>>with the exception of the health disparities context, in which self-identified race remains a socially important metric, race should be avoided or used with caution and clarification, as its meaning encompasses both ancestry … and ethnicity …
>Both race and ethnicity can be potent predictors for disease risk; however, it is important to emphasize the distinction between correlation and causation and to explore interactions among factors, while rejecting a unidirectional model that moves from genotype to phenotype.
as other people pointed out, it's an imprecise proxy. It doesn't have no scientific or empirical basis, but it's very imprecise. The scientific community moved on to using the term "genetic history" which makes more sense.
The observations here are astute, and I appreciate the novel computing angle. I mostly agree with the conclusion.
I would add though that it is possible to construct a taxonomical, biological account of race, given our understanding of population genetics and phenotypes. This is basically what 23andMe does. However, with the exception of understanding and treating very specific medical conditions, these correlations are mostly meaningless or superficial at best.
Obviously, this is not what anyone means by "race" in the ordinary sense, which is mostly incoherent and only serves as a shorthand to categorize people superficially.
Computers cannot cope with illogical concepts such as race. Race as applied in the US is a thousand contradictions trying to justify the emotions of a minority of the population who needs a visibly identifiable underclass to make themselves feel more secure in their position in life. Which is why race makes little sense — it changes over time to suit the needs of whatever political interests exist at any given point. It’s a purely emotional concept with no consistent definition in any physical reality.
As all scenarios that involve databases and "semantics" of the various fields, the actual meaning is heavily dependent on what the fields are supposed to be used for. In case of the US, the whole confusion seems to be that one would rather like not to talk about the use-cases as the whole topic is still politically sensitive.
Maybe a more honest question would be "Are you a descendant of colonial-era slaves? Yes/No? Are you a descendant of colonial-era settlers? Yes/No?"
> Maybe a more honest question would be "Are you a descendant of colonial-era slaves? Yes/No? Are you a descendant of colonial-era settlers? Yes/No?"
But I suspect that the answers "both" and "neither" would be extremely common, and the fuzzy self-identified physical appearance based proxy for that would map much better onto people's actual social status...
It's interesting that today, in the United States, many people from the "middle east" (depending on their religion) classify themselves under the BIPOC umbrella and not category "5" as described in this essay.
Not sure how in an American context you can qualify people from the Middle East as Non-Minority? If anything they would have to be category 2 (Asian or Pacific Islander), since the Middle East is located in Asia. But really, that list is missing a couple dozen categories, or at least an "other" category.
Two of my four grandparents are from Gaza, expelled in 1929. That side of the family has been there for “ever” as far as we know. (The other two grandparents are from Belarus of mid-Eastern ancestry). We are not considered a “minority” in the United States for purposes of “diversity hiring” because we are Jewish.
With Jewish it is equally confusing as they are considered white while at the same time a minority of sorts if taken by religion, though there are jews of many varied ethnicities. The moral of the story is that trying to clasify people into incongruent groups is a nonsense.
That's exactly what the article says. It's a chronicle of the authors experience with the government demand that he, a man of mixed race, classify himself into rigid racial boxes, and how those boxes don't actually exist in reality.
The same could be said about literal colors, they exist along a continuum. Where does "very dark grey" become "black", or "very light grey" become white? If something is blue-green, is it blue or green? Etc etc
>[...] Raymond has claimed that "Gays experimented with unfettered promiscuity in the 1970s and got AIDS as a consequence", and that "Police who react to a random black male behaving suspiciously who might be in the critical age range as though he is an near-imminent lethal threat, are being rational, not racist."[28][29] Progressive campaign The Great Slate was successful in raising funds for candidates in part by asking for contributions from tech workers in return for not posting similar quotes by Raymond. Matasano Security employee and Great Slate fundraiser Thomas Ptacek said, "I’ve been torturing Twitter with lurid Eric S. Raymond quotes for years. Every time I do, 20 people beg me to stop." It is estimated that as of March 2018 over $30,000 has been raised in this way.[30]
>"In the U.S., blacks are 12% of the population but commit 50% of violent crimes; can anyone honestly think this is unconnected to the fact that they average 15 points of IQ lower than the general population? That stupid people are more violent is a fact independent of skin color." -Eric S Raymond
"A clash of civilizations driven by the failure of Islamic/Arab culture (though I would stress the problem of the Islamic commandment to jihad more than he does). I think he [Steven den Beste] is also right to say that our long-term objective must be to break, crush and eventually destroy this culture, because we can't live on the same planet with people who both carry those memes and have access to weapons of mass destruction. They will hate us and seek to destroy us not for what we've done but for what we are." -Eric S Raymond
>"When I hear the words "social responsibility", I want to reach for my gun." -Eric S Raymond When receiving an award from an organization called Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. "Geeks Win: A survey of the oddballs who write the codes that make the 21st-century world go round". The New York Times Book Review: p. BR18. 4 November 2001. ISSN 03624331.
>"... The minimum level of training required to make someone effective as a self defense shooter is not very high... unfortunately, this doesn't cover the BLM crowd, which would have an average IQ of 85 if it's statistically representative of American blacks as a whole. I've never tried to train anyone that dim and wouldn't want to." -Eric S Raymond
To clarify, race is a construct too often abused to implicate stratifications of groups of people. "Races" don't naturally exist, rather only a continuum of ethnological and physical differences across the rainbow of the human genome [0].
As it's used today, race can be very divisive and polarizing. While I'm white, I've toured and been deeply moved by the Apartheid museum in Capetown and driven past the Townships that show how severe and pervasive the only recently struct down laws that ensconced the white elite in private neighborhoods while relegating everyone else to shanty towns were, and still are years after said laws were struck down.
While collecting racial data certainly plays a role in correcting for the still evident scars of past wrongs (and avoids denying the past), it strikes me as also reinforcing the existence of such racial constructs. I can only imagine what it feels like to be a teen in a minority group checking the box that they are that group on forms for every tooth filling, credit card application, warranty card, standardized test, and survey they take.
I sincerely desire my future grandchildren can see a title like this article and think it's a discussion of footrace algorithms, that we can live in a post racial society at some point. We certainly are not there yet. There is much inequality to resolve and too many latent scars to heal. Will we make it in my lifetime? That's on all of us to affect.
