Who was running the surver? If it was a survey from an opinion poll or from a major party, I’m surprised by their simplistic choice of possible answers. Simply because it would be impossible to make meaningful conclusions from the resulting figures.
It was an opinion poll survey - a Greenfield Online poll, to be exact. I agree it would be difficult to form conclusions, yes, but just wanted to show everyone an example. 
I first heard the term “Politically Correct” in the early 1980’s from Canadian friends who always talked about it as a Canadian thing. It was years later before I heard it in connection with the U.S.
Okay, we get it - you think that you’re amazingly straightforward. I personally think that that question and its categories are idiotic and a simple-minded, hamfisted attempt to ape American-style racial catagorization that wouldn’t even work the same for the UK, but then that’s just me.
This particular example is hamfisted, I think we can all agree on that. But I fail to understand why you think it’s not possible for the UK to use race catagorisations? I linked to the 2001 census race statistics earlier - and here’s some further explantion of the question used there:
Do you think that is ‘apeing’ anything? It came across to me as a well-thought-out attempt to get a real idea of how British residents identify themselves.
I don’t know everything about British history, so maybe I’m completely wrong, but as far as I know (and am concerned), the UK has two groups: natives and immigrants. In the US, our racial groups actually mean something leagally. Whether you’re black, white, Native American, or an immigrant dictated your legal status throughout the nation’s entire history. We didn’t just come up with these separations for fun of pidgeon-holing - they’ve leagally dictated the social structure of our nation since its inception. In the UK, what’s the point of lumping a French immigrant into the white category with natives? Would he get the same set of legal and social priviledges as a native and yet a set different from that of an Indian immigrant? And would that Indian immigrant have a different legal status from a Chinese one?
Yes, because our categories for forced into existence in order to hold our social structure together, we didn’t draft them to help our citizens better identify themselves like you admit you did.
Nope. It’s immigration all the way. Asians, Caribbeans, Jews, Vikings,… I’m not being facetious. There’s no homogenous ‘native’ Britons.
But none of that applies to present-day America, does it? And it doesn’t explain the “Italian-American”-type designations.
Perhaps here in the states, and the U.K., the categorization of ethnic groups is still a very political condition, y’know, the govt’s way of monitoring their growth, voting district lines, etc… as I recall in Pol Sci 101, if certain ethnic groups were growing proportionately larger than others, in order to stunt their potential voting power, politicians would alter voting district lines,so in that respect, keeping up with the #s of ethnic growth was/still is, very important… and filling out variious hospital, college, employment forms, designating which group you belong to, is also measuring/monitoring method… so while many of us (in the melting pot) have ancestry in other countries, saying “I’m Italian-American,” or “German-American” doesnt really mean much (IMHO), unless you’re required to select one of the listed groups, which also includes, “Other” for those who feel ‘it’s none of your fuck’n business.’
What do you do when your parents list their ethic group appropriately on a birth certificate, yet admins at the hospital list the birth child you as “White” just what in the fuck does “WHITE” mean anyway? And why in the fuck would hospital admin do that? Maybe he/she was instructed to do it? If so, why? I did a little research on other births from this particular hospital and 3 dif ethnic families experienced the same thing…hmmmm… i smell sumpthin fishy.
It’s worth pointing out that gerrymandering (especially that seen with American redistricting) is completely illegal in the UK. Redefining electoral boundaries is always done by independent comissions.
Do American birth certificates really contain this information? I’m surprised.
I ate a lot of Negerköpfe (aka Negerkuss) (Negroheads/Negrokiss) in Germany in the mid 80’s and everybody seemed to use the word quite unconsciously and without shame…that was just what they were known as and it even said so on the box. Times change and there was a push for a politically correct name for these awesome chocolate marshmallow candies, they are now known as choco-kisses and other less whimsical names.
Which is where virtually all the ludicrous PCisms came from (vertically-challenged, and so on.) It’s amazing how well it’s worked as a propaganda device: people present those terms as though there was some sort of organized campaign to force us to use them, when in actuality they were all invented by either standup comedians or hack pundits speculating on what was next on the slippery slope of PCism.