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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"!
Seems like in matters of perception, the person to interrogate is the one perceiving, not the object being perceived.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/medicine-is-getting-mor...
"Why are 2/3 of our maths grads white men?"
"Hmmm, don't know. What were our applicant demographics?. Ooh, they are only 60% white men. Lets dig..." etc etc.
If you don't have the data you cannot identify where in the pipeline an anomaly starts
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.
I'm sure they have some affirmative action equivalent over there.
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".
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.
https://www.history.com/news/how-the-nazis-were-inspired-by-...
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?
> 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 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.
> 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!
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?
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.
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.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/interactive/2022/cong...
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 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...
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.
source: a yankee
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_suffrage_in_the_United_S...
https://www.history.com/news/slavery-new-england-rhode-islan...
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/why-black-people-a...
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.
Here, the government, media, etc, generally prefer to refer to people using fine-grained ethnicity/nationality terms, not in terms of coarse racial categories.
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.
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.
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.
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!!!"
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.
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.
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.
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...
Why is the child of both black and white parents considered black?
This seems racist to me, fundamentally.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond#Political_beli...
>Eric S. Raymond: Political beliefs and activism
>[...] 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]
[28] http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=26
[29] http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7239
[30] https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/8/17092684/great-slate-fundr...
http://esr.ibiblio.org/index.php?p=129
>"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
http://armedndangerous.blogspot.com/2002_09_15_armedndangero...
"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
https://quotepark.com/quotes/1862991-eric-s-raymond-when-i-h...
>"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.
https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/780839196231630848
>"The average IQ of the Haitian population is 67... Haiti is, quite literally, a country full of violent idiots." -Eric S Raymond
https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/816449724127608833
>"... 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
Race is what you define it to be, such as in this ambiguous title. Whether we should have a concept of "race" is another matter.
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.
[0] https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2017/science-genetics-res...
