Race: What is it good for?

Great Debates
1

The following note was sent home today with my son’s assignments and other Things to be Signed:

First, I’m struggling to see the potential value in collecting this information. The accompanying note claims that “the Department of Education does not report individual data to the federal government but does report the total number of students in various categories in each school.” They do not say that they don’t retain this information on a state level; it is implied that they do.

I understand that many people naturally associate themselves with these types of groups, and that too many it is a comfort to feel part of one or more groups. But to what end is this information important to the federal or state government? Surely data that groups persons by artificial race constructs could just as easily be replaced by geographical or income based information. If schools are failing, then they are failing whether or not we label the children that attend them as black, white, hispanic or any other category. Brown v Board of Education issues can be taken into account with “black or white”, since Brown v Board of Education has never, to my knowledge, been taken into account to redress inequities for Latino, Native American or other “disadvantaged” groups.

And that does not begin to address the issue of when does someone start or cease to be Hispanic or any other category – note that Native Americans can evidently opt out by failing to maintain tribal affiliation and then become maybe White or perhaps Uncategorized.

My kids don’t fit easily into any of the identified categories, either for Hispanics or Race, and it’s likely that as time goes on many folks will be mixed into the soup so far that these will become tougher and tougher to disentangle. If we go by the old “one drop” rule then they can fit into almost all of the above.

I propose that we should address failing schools, regardless of the ethnicity of those served by those schools and just scrap the whole race thing. I’d prefer that we all just become “human” and “American”.

2

The primary purpose of such statistics is to be able to tell if anyone is discriminating based on them. If more black students fail a class than white students, even when you control based on economic status, then presumably there’s some sort of discrimination going on, and finding out that it exists is the first step towards rooting it out and eliminating it.

3

That’s a pretty big presumption. First, they aren’t controlling for economic data, since they don’t request it. Second, there can be a lot of other factors in failure beyond discrimination. Some influential factors would be early childhood nutrition, parental involvement and control, peer group influences, etc. Discrimination may be a possible cause, but is hardly the only potential cause.

4

I was reading in The Guardian just today that there is currently a debate going on in France as to whether they should start collecting Ethnic statistics. French plan to break taboo on ethnic data causes uproar.

5

Warren Beatty in Bullworth (excuse my mis-quote): “I think everybody oughta eff everybody else, till we’re ALL the same color!”

To answer the OP:

IMHO: “Absolutely NUTHIN!”

Q

6

Knowing who to bet on‚ and not bet on, in marathons.

7

That’s Kenyans and Ethiopians in the men’s marathon. Bet on Gambians, Namibians, Nigerians, Congolese, Zimbabweans and Mauritanians at your own peril.

8

Heh. Yeah save you’re money for the Gambian in the sprint. But whatever you do, don’t bet on the Caucasian or Asian in either.

9

How come there is no mid-east category?It seems they left an entire ethnic group out.

10

When has a Gambian ever won a sprint? Sure, you lose that money of yours, I’m betting on the Jamaican… or any of these Japanese guys: Naoki Tsukahara, Shingo Suetsugu, Shinji Takahira, Nobuharu Asahara.

11

Whats annoys me is here in Texas, when we signed the kids upto the school, we had to fill in details if we spoke English, or Mexican etc, and yet every time we get a letter from the school it is in both languages. I have no idea how much the school wastes a year in paper and ink, but one has to assume that money could be going to educating the kids instead of this waste.

12

Here:

13

But are mid-easterners technically white? If they think they are( and I have no idea what they consider themselves) that is all that matters and they are white. I’m not sure if a north African or a middle easterner consider themselves white. I do remember there was quite an uproar years ago when they had a black actor cast as Anwar Sadat for a movie. Would it be the same if a white actor was cast?

14

If not white, at least Caucasian. But grouping all Caucasians together wouldn’t be very helpful in most contexts anyway. If the data are being collected to check for discrimination (I can’t think of any other reason why they would gather such data), then it would make much more sense to have white and middle-eastern as separate groups.

15

But then you’d have to decide where to include European Mediterraneans, who are physically identical to ME/NAs. Are they white? They’d surely say so. But in that case what does excluding the ME/NA kids tell you about discrimination of they can’t be physically distinguished from the Greeks and Italians.

This sort of thing is why the whole concept of race is is so cockeyed. If you want to check for discrimination then get the person to identify their country or region of origin. Leaving it to individuals to decide what race they are in tells you nothing.

16

bah, Greeks and Italians (like all other Europeans) can always be called white, the Arabs on the other side of the Mediterranean and the Arabian peninsula are tougher but lets just mark them as white and just get that discussion over with… We’re marking RACE here people. If you think too hard about it, then this will never work…

17

I’m not sure if you are being ironic, but that’s precisely my point. If you think about race it doesn’t work, in any context. If the school had asked for data on regional or national background I could see it giving useful information. But “Race” tells us nothing. Especially when race includes separate divisions for people who are are physically and genetically identical (eg Amerindian and Asian) while including under one umbrella people who are radically different in appearance and genotype (Indian and Japanese both under Asian).

Jeez. We’re worrying about whether ME/NA is white, but we cheerfully lump classical Caucasoid Indians in with classically Mongoloid Japanese. The Indians have far more in common with whites, in every possible sense, than they do with Japanese.

This sort of racial classification tells us nothing, about anything.

18

I agree the race classifications are stupid. Let’s just put check marks in all the boxes. We all originated somewhere in Mesopotamia anyway.

19

No, we all originated in southern Africa. All non-African groups probably passed through Mesopotamia on the way out, but they never originated their. And the African groups never even saw Mesopotamia.

20

There’s a thread right now in GD about whether Cleopatra was black or white that gets into this. By our federal definition(?) Anwar Sadat is white.

The reality is that almost everyone should be much more finely sub-defined if we want to be ethnically accurate; since this is implausible, we should scrub race as a definition altogether.

I suspect that a big reason that “Middle Eastern” or “Semite” is not a separate classification is for politically correctness in dealing with Jewish folks from Israel. Jewish people tend to be kind of sensitive about being called out as a separate race, with good reason, although they obviously embrace their separate cultural identity.