Do you see anything wrong with American institutions non-anonymously categorizing individuals by their ‘race’?

29 comments

1. Man, where do these people come from.

2. Are you confusing keeping statistics on race with “non-anonymously”?

3. No, because race unfortunately affects many outcomes in our society it’s in our interest to catalog it. How do we know if someone is being discriminatory without the data to back it up? How do we know if we’re being equitable without the data to back it up?

4. IIRC, self-reported categories of ‘race’ are highly predictive of a person’s ancestry and genetic traits. In other words, they’re usually accurate.

5. “Race as a concept is sketchy outside of the US”

   Really? What country are you from that is so blind to race and ethnicity?

6. What do you mean by “non anonymously” categorizing individuals? Race is self reported in every instance.

   It’s always helpful to track race in order to understand a certain community in relation to others.

   I don’t understand what you mean by race as a concept being “sketchy” outside of the US.

7. I have never seen this happen in my life.

   “Race” is often self-reported anonymously on census data and optionally collected (and somewhat unlinked) for things like hiring and college admissions to ensure/provide evidence for non-discriminatory hiring/admission practices

   Race is generally seen as a sociological concept in the US and not the scientific theory that ran in Western circles over a century ago

8. I’m personally not a fan of racial classifications as the categories seem too broad, but understand how data could be useful.

9. I’m sorry, I’m confused. Are you under the impression that the country that publishes the most scientific data per capita in the world is unfamiliar with the lack of a scientific foundation for the belief in biological races? Or are you thinking we actively segregate on a national scale?

   Your question is incoherent, and you seem to be looking for a specific answer to back up some sort of blatantly ignorant preconceived notion.

   Edit: got to check out your post history. So what this person really wants is for Americans to state that they’re blatantly against Latinos because that is what they believe. Living in a majority Latino state, across the street from an almost entirely Latino neighborhood, never having lived in a place that was less than 60% Latino until my 20’s. I’ve got to say… if we were that backwardly racist, day to day life would be completely impossible.

10. I think you’re misunderstanding why people talk about race.

    Race is of course a social construct. The classifications are all inconsistent, and none of it corresponds to anything measurable.

    But a lot of times people confuse “social constructs” for “doesn’t exist”.

    Things like sexuality, class, and nationality are also social constructs. But they exist. By having these ideas out there in the world they have effects.

    Racism, homophobia, classism, colorism, and nation based discrimination are real.

    There’s basically two schools of thought for how you can get rid of these things. Don’t talk about them and hope they go away, or talk about them with the idea of making it better.

    The US generally buys into the idea that in order to make things better, you have to talk about the problem.

    I tend to agree. Everywhere on earth we’ve been together, people treat me, a light skinned man who speaks with a standard American accent, better than my fiancée, a brown skinned woman who speaks with a northern Mexican accent.

    I want a vocabulary to explain why that pisses me off.

11. Race is recognized as pseudoscientific (at best) in the US too. But it’s still socially relevant, so including it in people’s records makes it easier to track the effects of race’s social salience, which makes it easier to identify where we need remedial action.

12. … alright. lets get the obvious out of the way before asssuming the worst when you say “race”.

    When Americans and other english speakers say race, we mean some common factor in background, not a different species.

    In Animal terms, the american equivalent to race is breed, not species.
    We’re comparing shepards to laboradors, not wolves to bears.
    Same DNA, Same geneology far enough back, same species, differing traits like size, temparment, hair color…

13. …What?

    Edit: Oh, you’re just fishing for stuff to post to shit Americans say. Got it.

14. I think sometimes there is too much focus on race. With that being said, someone’s race generally isn’t a secret.

15. It’s seen as racist to many Americans too.

16. OP isn’t coming here for good faith discussion. Just look at their posting history. They have an opinion and pretended to pose it as a question. It is a pretty common internet dweeb strategy for pretending to be inquisitive when they just want to preach.

17. >Do you see anything wrong with American institutions non-anonymously categorizing individuals by their ‘race’?

    No.

    >This is seen as racist to many non-Americans.

    Ok. The US is its own country with its own culture, customs, and norms. So that’s not really relevant.

    >Even race as a concept is oftentimes seen as pseudoscientific outside of the U.S.

    Weird take that your country doesn’t understand sociology, but okay.

18. >Even race as a concept is oftentimes seen as pseudoscientific outside of the U.S.

    Then why do Europeans throw bananas and make ape sounds at black athletes?

    That’s not even mentioning how they treat the Roma.

19. Race is a misnomer, biologically-meaningless.

    I will continue to yell about this until I drop dead. Ethnicity sure.

    BUT THERE ARE NO RACES.

20. Race in the America is almost universally viewed from a sociological perspective rather than a biological perspective. A lot of foreigners misunderstand this.

21. It’s used to collect data on equal opportunity, affirmative action, bring funding to immigrant communities whose first language might or might not be English, use census data to draw maps (for good or bad purposes). It also brings grants to communities and schools. For example Hispanic Serving Institutions (colleges with over 25% Hispanic/Latino enrollment) get grants from the government.

22. Context is important and anyone saying that no scientist uses it is a sycophant. Race absolutely plays a factor in certain sciences including biology, psychology, sociology and softer sciences such as economics or political science.

    Tracking racial information is important to combat the damage caused by racism and make society as a whole more equitable. I also find it interesting that the people who tend to be the most vocal against collecting it also happen to be the same people who like to be racist, value clearly racist policy decisions, or engage in ethnic cleansing.

23. I think it’s a lot bigger than just institutions. It’s the whole mindset of identity politics. It’s arguably tearing the country apart from within, at least socially. (And it parallels, and perhaps causes, the infamous “polarization.”) I don’t think anyone intended this result, but it’s not good.

    For what it’s worth, I’m a gay white male, so I feel, at the same time, pulled in many different directions, but also kind of stateless. Because, you know, I’m a WHITE MALE (evil), but also LGBTQ+ (oppressed).

24. What specific things do you see being problematic? Do you have a specific instance we can discuss?

    Generally, my impression is that demographic data is optional, willingly given, and anonymized before analysis. but perhaps there is some egregious situation you’re thinking about?

25. As I have said many times, the “race” categories on the US Census aren’t even pretending to be representing the debunked concept of physiological races. That’s not what it’s about. It’s about the social history of the United States. Those categories are stand-ins for cultural groups as represented in the history of the United States. They apply to no other country because no other country has our history. For instance, no sane person in the US thinks of all Asians as sharing one physiological set of traits. What those categories do is reflect broad social history as the United States developed through immigration and westward expansion and where you might fall in that social history that goes back 200 years. Within those cultural groups are broad shared experiences. That’s all it is. The fact that you don’t understand it and therefore think stupid thoughts about it is not our fault. You’re the problem in that case because you are blind to the purpose it exists and the motivation behind it, as part of an attempt to redress past unequal treatment. Ignoring it didn’t actually work and the people affected didn’t want to live that way anymore and pretend it wasn’t a problem.

26. Not collecting data on race in various European countries is one of the reasons I’m hesitant about visiting them. It makes it harder to demonstrate how some group receive more harassment than others. It also allow them to prevent that they’re not racism happening in their country because “officially” there isn’t proof of it happening.

27. no

28. I am guessing that English may not be your first language.

    You seem to have made some mistakes in your word choices!

    Generally, “Categorize” means to examine objects and assign them to categories. Categorizing people by race would not be considered acceptable in the USA, because this would imply that someone is examining the person and determining what race they belonged to. That’s wrong.

    Institution is also a fairly bad word to use here, too. It makes things sound very weighty, and important. Using words like “government organization” or “business” would be more specific.

    Pseudoscientific is also a word that you might want to avoid, because generally, it is used by people to describe things that they don’t like and thus don’t agree with, regardless of how many people study it and how accepted it is.

    It is quite unfortunate that your lack of language skills has lead you to use these words, combined, they make you sound like a right wing racist. Like you are some kind of neo Nazi. Word choice important, and it will change the kind of answers you get to a question, as will tone.

    For example, this question might be better asked as:

    ”I have heard that American employers ask applicants for their racial identities as part of the hiring process. Why is this?”

    To that question, you would get responses like:

    I know it feels weird, but by asking race questions, an applicant can be tracked and the results of the hiring process can be validated to ensure that the hiring process is handled in a non-racist way. By knowing how many candidates who are members of tracked groups are presented and then hired, it can be determined how likely the results are to be due to racist hiring procedures. If this information is not tracked, it is virtually impossible to see if the hiring process is racist or not.

    By American standards, not hiring a person from these groups is not considered racist, but not hiring people from these groups loosely reflecting the membership of people in the applicant pool is.

    Instead, well…

29. I see something wrong with anything that takes race into consideration.