Racial vagueness

[robinturner]

I just had a look at an online survey, which contained the following question:

What is your primary racial/ethnic background?

• White/European American
• Black/African American
• East Asian/East Asian American
• South Asian/South Asian American
• Latino/Hispanic American
• Native/American Indian
• Middle Eastern/Arab American
• Other/Can't remember (specify below).

"Can't remember?" That implies that once upon a time you knew where your roots were, but somehow you just forgot. Now I can just about understand that with a family as complicated as my wife's, which is Turkish/Kosovo Albanian/Bosnian/Kurdish (with possibly a dash of Armenian). But given that the choices there correspond pretty closely to physical types, it's decidedly odd. I'm trying to imagine someone looking in the mirror, and saying "Hmmm, so does my olive skin mean I'm Hispanic American or Arab American? Never could remember that one. Oh hang on, a lot of people from the South of Spain or Italy look a bit like me, so might that make me a European American? Damn my bad memory!"

Comments

[ironed_orchid]

I'm more amused by the fact that race is in question, but nationality is not.

[eve-prime.livejournal.com]

In our research studies, we follow the way it's done in the Census, which is that first you ask the ethnicity question (are you Hispanic/Latino?), and then you move on to race (since Hispanics might identify with any race). Then the choices are something like:

Caucasian/White

African American/Black

Asian

Native American/Alaska Native

Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander

Everyone from Anatolian Turks to the Japanese are lumped together as "Asian" - and if your family came from Egypt or Morocco, should you be African American even if your skin is white? Also, people from Spain sometimes find themselves in the ridiculous position of saying they are not Hispanic, because as Europeans they are probably more privileged than the various peoples who are meant by "Hispanic."

[solri.livejournal.com]

I couldn't work out if it was for USAns only, since, say, "White/European American" can be parsed as

{[White/European] American}

or

{[White] [European American]}.

[solri.livejournal.com]

Yes, that Hispanic thing has always amused me. They should also include ethnic groups that correspond more closely to actual US cultures, such as "WASP" or "Redneck".

[oblomova.livejournal.com]

Perhaps they can't remember because the Men in Black come in every night and erase their racial memories?

[eve-prime.livejournal.com]

There we go.

Good ole boy

Big galoob

Bubba

Trailer trash

[solri.livejournal.com]

The Hills Have Eyes

[solri.livejournal.com]

Or they recently went through the spice agony.

[vret.livejournal.com]

I wonder what Jon Bradley answers to questions like that.

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

I can imagine that. "Great-gran mentioned it once, but I was a kid and it was fairly complex and I stopped thinking it mattered a long time ago."

[solri.livejournal.com]

Oh, to live in a world where someone could say that!

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

Well, if it's any help, my own knowledge on the subject peters out at "I *think* all my great-grandparents were born in various parts of the UK," but I have no idea of their precise racial or ethnic background other than that my siblings and cousins are various shades of pale through light olive. I'm not really any good at telling the fine distinctions between Nordic, Mediterranean, or vaguely Europoid.

For all I know past that, though, I might well have genes from all over the place. Don't know, don't care.

(I wouldn't mind having my little brother's skin genes, though - he never burns in summer, unlike me and my lobster impression. :/ )

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

That's because the survey writers were almost prepared to accept that people can be different races or ethnicities, but everyone knows there's nothing outside America but howling wastelands and barbarian ghosts.

[solri.livejournal.com]

You don't have to go back very far to find genetic confusion. I read an interesting article that came out just after the Da Vinci code film, which used simple maths to show how if Jesus did have children as Dan Brown claimed, pretty much all of us have his blood in our veins.