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Author
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Topic: Thinking Outside the Box (December 2000)
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Pattie Gillett
True Believer
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posted 12-20-2000 01:43 AM
   
A new story is now up in Public Policy, discussing the fight of various interest groups over classification of racial groups on the U.S. census form. Check it out here. |
Kevin Ott
True Believer
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posted 12-20-2000 01:45 AM
It’s not often I’m faced with the reality of just how easy vast tracts of my life are. Being a white guy is always something I’ve taken for granted, and though I’ve never really had any illusions about how much easier my life has been because of that, I never really thought about my racial identity much, mostly because, in the back of my mind, I just kind of figured I was like most of the people around me, even when I was around people much different from myself.OK, I don’t really know what that means either. But while we spend lots and lots of time talking about race – sometimes in a constructive way, sometimes not – we rarely talk about, or seem to take seriously discussions of, our racial identity, or how our ethnic makeup defines how we view the world. It’s something that’s frequently written off as psychobabble, and without good reason, if you ask me, which you haven’t. But it’s simple enough – our perceptions of the world are affected by what we are and how people perceive what we are, and, in turn, that affects how we interact with others and how we handle potentially sensitive situations – like interracial interactions. The idea of defining yourself as Afro-European or Meso-Slavic or whatever is something that’s commonly mocked, and it really frosts my shorts when that happens. If someone wants to be considered the culmination of their heritage, that shouldn’t be considered elitist or picky. It bugged me greatly when the term “African-American” was first being tossed around, and much of the conventional wisdom pointed to the phrase as an uppity one. Sure, we’re all Americans, but terms like that serve to remind us of the wonderful diversity of backgrounds this country shares. We should embrace them. Pattie, I certainly agree with your statement that discrimination is a wrong that can be perpetrated by anyone, regardless of race or gender or creed. To assume that only white people can discriminate is unfair to everyone – it unjustly colors white people (no pun intended) and it grants us a greater assumption of power than we deserve. But I wonder if Shelton’s statement isn’t entirely bogus. If she’s talking about discrimination in a more institutional sense, then she might have a point. The sad fact is, there are probably more whites than blacks in positions to discriminate in a way that involves withholding grant dollars or whatnot. Of course, this may make it sound as if there are a bunch of greedy white men in smoke-filled rooms lighting cigars with copies of the 14th Amendment, and obviously that’s not the case. But when you’ve got large groups of white guys, cigars or no, in positions of power (Congress, anyone?), results are likely to get skewed despite anyone’s best intentions. Some controls on defining race may not be such a bad idea.
I’ll be honest: I get an almost-perverse thrill from diversity. I thrive on it. Some of the most enjoyable times of my life have been the times I’ve been around big groups of black people and white people and Hawaiian people and Latinos and deaf people and ultraliberal feminist lesbians. I don’t know why, I just feel really comfortable that way. Add that to the fact that seven years in ultra-homogenous central Pennsylvania has created within me a sizable prejudice against white people, and you’ve got a total jackass on your hands when it comes to racial issues. Think about that, then reread this post. It may make more sense.
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Dave Thomer
Guardian of Peace and Justice in the Galaxy
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posted 12-20-2000 01:46 AM
I have two responses to this story, The first is my usual “enemy of poor thinking” response. I want to take the NAACP by the shoulders and shake them until they realize how hypocritical they’re being, how they’ve giving their opponents one more piece of ammunition to justify the ridiculous argument that advocates of racial equality are just looking for a government handout, how much they’re allowing themselves to be manipulated into a false “us vs. them” battle. Ethnic and racial categories are purely social constructions, and the love and trust that forms between individuals is one of the greatest ways to break down those artificial barriers. My father was Irish-Italian-German; my mother was Polish-Irish-English-Dutch. It was no big deal when they got together and had four kids. No one’s ever asked me to figure out if I’m really German, since that’s what my last name says, or really Irish, since that has a slight plurality when I try to break my ethnic background down by percentages. No one’s ever tried to say that it’s somehow unnatural that I should have both Polish and German ancestry, or Irish and English ancestry . . . it’s just never come up, never been something that was used to define who I am, Maybe I’ve lost something by not being more strongly connected to my heritage. That’s certainly a possibility. But at least it’s let me figure out who I am as a person, and it’s let me get along with people of many different backgrounds. Any group that advocates racial harmony should be applauding those goals, and if there’s some technical consideration that gets in the way, then that’s the problem that should be attacked. The second response is more personal. I remember when Pattie and I first talked about this, and I realized that this was going to be an issue for my kids. The mere thought that someone would try and make these hypothetical kids’ lives difficult, that they’d be pegged and pigeonholed as something other than who they were for the sake of some number-crunchers’ convenience, bugged the hell out of me then, and it still does. I just wish I knew what to do about it.
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Dave Thomer
Guardian of Peace and Justice in the Galaxy
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posted 12-22-2000 01:20 AM
Kev, I really like your middle point about our struggle to come up with accurate names for all these categories we insist on coming up with. I wonder how much of it is specifically tied to discomfort talking about the fact that a lot of our categories are social constructions, and thus subject to change, and how much goes to the larger issue of many people not being as concerned with being precise and accurate in their use of language. I know how often people want to smack me around for being too persnickety, and that's on words that aren't tied to hot-button items like racial identity. |
Pattie Gillett
True Believer
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posted 12-22-2000 06:38 AM
Dave, maybe they want to smack you because you use words like "persnickety." I'm just saying and before anyone admonishes me, I'm kidding.
I think people can be careful and precise about language when the subject matter is salient to them. It has been my experience that people don't take the time to even consider the language of race because they've always considered themselves to be one thing and one thing only. All my life I've been asked, "What's the big deal, can't you just pick one?" or, my favorite "What do you consider yourself, really?" Lord, that question annoys me. As if me saying "I'm mixed." isn't a good enough answer. You can see why the OMB is now on my hit list.
I'm certainly not speaking for all mixed-race individuals. This is a very personal thing. Many children of white/black unions consider themselves to be black, regardless of skin tone, while Tiger Woods, who may look black, honked off the black community en masse when he stated that he didn't consider himself to be.
There are a lot of factors complicating this issue, one, as I agreed, is language. Another, I think, is that people don't like the idea of not being able to trust their on sight judgements. People like being able to tell by looking at a person, "what" they are. For more and more people, that is no longer the case. |
Kevin Ott
True Believer
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posted 12-22-2000 09:37 AM
Dave, I'm not sure that people think of race as a social construction when they're using it to describe themselves. When I think of myself as white, it's hard to think of that as something that I call myself because generations of individuals have collectively come to use different adjectives to describe themselves based on their geographic origin and melanin levels. I'm just white, and that's the way it is. I'm sure other people think that way too.So I'm not sure it would be useful to say that people might be reluctant to talk about something like that, because I think people think of race as a much more personal issue than something they could define with sociologist's terms. It might even insult some people to say that race is a social construct. And I think that people probably are concerned to some degree about language -- otherwise they wouldn't be so reluctant to talk about race for fear of making mistakes. As a white guy, this is easy for me to say, and I fully expect to get smacked around a bit for it, but I think the secret is for people to relax a little bit, in the naming and in the reacting. I once knew a guy who had a black father and a white mother but was raised by a white family with a strong Jewish heritage (Top that, Pattie). What struck me most about this guy when I first met him was how incrdibly big he was (6'6", 275 lbs). He was mixed, and he didn't make a big deal out of it, and when people thought he was black, he didn't really react, and when people thought he was white, he didn't really react. This set me and a lot of other people at ease. And in my interactions with people, I think I've succeeded in not really caring about the potential heritage of someone I've just met (Don't ask me how I did it). Pattie, I didn't think about your racial identity much when I first met you; to me, you were the woman who was marrying Dave. |
Dave Thomer
Guardian of Peace and Justice in the Galaxy
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posted 12-22-2000 10:40 AM
quote:
Originally posted by Kevin Ott:
[B]Dave, I'm not sure that people think of race as a social construction when they're using it to describe themselves. When I think of myself as white, it's hard to think of that as something that I call myself because generations of individuals have collectively come to use different adjectives to describe themselves based on their geographic origin and melanin levels. I'm just white, and that's the way it is. I'm sure other people think that way too.
You may think of yourself as "just white", but that doesn't change the fact that being "white", like being "black" or "Hispanic" or "Hispanic (Caucasian)" is dependent on the way in which society -- not sociologists per se -- categorizes people. It's not a purely physical question. And why is it that "white" is a term I use to describe myself, not "Irish-Italian-Polish-German-English-Dutch"? Why does that combination make me pure white, but if I had a Native American great-grandfather I'm now "interracial" even though in this hypothetical situation there's nothing different about my skin color? You're right that a lot of people take their racial identity seriously -- but it's as much of a cultural identity as something based on a physical characteristic. The people who say you have to be black to understand the blues or to appreciate jazz aren't saying there's some gene that people whose ancestry is in Africa have that we don't. They're saying there's a shared cultural experience that black Americans have that's important to appreciating this art form. The problem in this society is that we assume that anyone who's of a certain skin color or certain ancestry shares the same social and cultural experience, and so we expect them to "act black" or we accuse them of "trying to pass" or "denying their race." And I would question whether people's concern over how to talk about race can be traced to a desire to be accurate and how much just goes back to a fear of offending or saying something that would bother someone else. Because if it's merely a question of accuracy, you can do research and talk to people and find out the "accurate" way to use words. But there are some people who wouldn't use a term like Pan-European even if they know it's the most accurate term for fear of insulting someone or being made fun of themselves. |
Kevin Ott
True Believer
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posted 12-22-2000 12:11 PM
By being accurate, that's pretty much what I meant: People want to be as accurate as possible to avoid offending someone or misreading their racial identity. In this case, being as accurate as possible usually means being as vague as possible (saying "black" or "white" instead of "Afro-European" or something). People likely become uncomfortable because they're afraid of offending someone without meaning to, and as a result being labeled insensitive.And all I meant when bringing up the social construction issue was that it's hard for us to speak in two languages at once when we're having this discussion. We can describe race as a social construct (you're right -- that's what it is), but for many people, that's not their first thought. Their first thought is likely to be more personal and less academic. It's a tough discussion to have, since we're trying to talk about people's emotional responses to something in more clinical terms. |
Dave Thomer
Guardian of Peace and Justice in the Galaxy
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posted 12-22-2000 12:38 PM
quote:
Originally posted by Kevin Ott:
(saying "black" or "white" instead of "Afro-European" or something). People likely become uncomfortable because they're afraid of offending someone without meaning to, and as a result being labeled insensitive.
Part of the problem here is that 'black' and 'white' aren't the vague, easy, generic terms that people want them to be either. They would be if the words strictly applied to complexion and skin tone, but they've become affixed to cultural and social groups that you can belong to without possesing the requisite physical characteristic. So I think the continued reliance on these terms has more to do with convenience and the desire Pattie mentiond to be able to catalogue somone on sight than with a desire to use a non-descriptive term to avoid offense. quote:
And all I meant when bringing up the social construction issue was that it's hard for us to speak in two languages at once when we're having this discussion. We can describe race as a social construct (you're right -- that's what it is), but for many people, that's not their first thought.
And that's exactly what we have to change. And it can be done -- it just happens slowly. |
Pattie Gillett
True Believer
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posted 12-22-2000 01:26 PM
quote:
Originally posted by Kevin Ott:
And in my interactions with people, I think I've succeeded in not really caring about the potential heritage of someone I've just met (Don't ask me how I did it). Pattie, I didn't think about your racial identity much when I first met you; to me, you were the woman who was marrying Dave.[/B]
That's the key isn't it? That's what we're supposed to be moving toward, right? Of course, we can't turn around hundreds of years of thinking in a few generations.
Kevin, I typically don't raise the issue of my race unless someone inquires. Unfortunally, people inquire quite a bit, particularly in an "official" capacity. For example, for EEOC compliance, every human resources rep I've ever encountered has brought it up when I've tried to leave that question blank on applications and other forms. Apparently I screw up their percentages when I refuse to answer (even though refusing is an option).
It's one thing to try not to "make a big deal" about something, it's another thing to live ina world where it's still a very big deal. |
Dave Thomer
Guardian of Peace and Justice in the Galaxy
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posted 12-23-2000 09:46 PM
quote:
Originally posted by Pattie Gillett:
For example, for EEOC compliance, every human resources rep I've ever encountered has brought it up when I've tried to leave that question blank on applications and other forms. Apparently I screw up their percentages when I refuse to answer (even though refusing is an option).
It's stories like this make me understand, at least a little, why conservatives have a fear of government programs and regulations. It seems like every solution only creates a new problem. On the other hand, I think that's probably true about just about everything human beings do, and the trick is just to apply equal industry and creativity to solving the new problems. Hey, wait, that's what we're doing here, isn't it? Bully for us, then.  |
slgorman
One of the Regulars
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posted 01-03-2001 07:43 PM
quote:
They would be if the words strictly applied to complexion and skin tone, but they've become affixed to cultural and social groups that you can belong to without possesing the requisite physical characteristic.
And herein lies the problem. Because I look a certain way, I must have a certain upbringing and cultural education going on. I think what needs to happen is to emphasize that just because someone is a certain look does not give anyone the right to assume they understand that persons cultural background or social group. When did people stop being individuals?I have a mixed race cousin. Frequently, during that phase in high school where having your wallet crammed with photos of all of your friends and relatives was "the thing," people would ask me who he was. I would reply, "My cousin." To which they would ask, "But he's black" or "Is he black?" or some other type of assinine question. I was always very proud of my answer, which remained, "He's my cousin." Never really mattered to me what color he was, he was what he was. I would also like to point out, as a white female, I love the fact that I now live in a state where I am in the minority. And not based on my gender, but on my ethnicity. Very cool, indeed. |
Pattie Gillett
True Believer
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posted 01-04-2001 02:15 PM
If you happened to be conscious today, you probably heard and/or read about the $5 billion racial discrimination lawsuit against Microsoft. Without commenting on the veracity if the charges (because so few actual details have been reported), I thought I'd point out that the attorney for the plaintiffs is using both data from the Census and the Bureau of Labor Statistics to bolster their case. In a nutshell, they've argued that even though blacks make up roughly 11% of the workforce, only 2.6 percent of Microsoft's employees are black.I seem to recall that the plaintiffs in the recent Coca-Cola lawsuit made similar use of census data. Perhaps some would argue that as long as there are cases like these, there is a need for the racial data on the census. I'm not sure I would agree with that. Any thoughts? [This message has been edited by Pattie Gillett (edited 01-04-2001).] |
Dave Thomer
Guardian of Peace and Justice in the Galaxy
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posted 01-04-2001 02:55 PM
quote:
Originally posted by Pattie Gillett:
Perhaps some would argue that as long as there are cases like these, there is a need for the racial data on the census. I'm not sure I would agree with that.
Well, I would suggest that the presence of cases like these point to the need for census data to be as accurate and informative as possible, and for the people who use that data to have a thorough understanding of exactly what the data represents. But maybe I'm asking for too much here. |
Dave Thomer
Guardian of Peace and Justice in the Galaxy
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posted 01-04-2001 08:49 PM
quote:
Originally posted by slgorman:
I think what needs to happen is to emphasize that just because someone is a certain look does not give anyone the right to assume they understand that persons cultural background or social group. When did people stop being individuals?
There is something really interesting in the fact that you followed up a statement about membership in cultural or social or ethnic groups with a question of when we stopped being individuals, but I'm not sure what exactly it is. It seems pointless to deny that there are such things as ethnic, social and cultural groups -- that sense of being part of a shared experience seems vital to people. At the same time, there are very few people who could be said to be members of all the same groups, which makes each peron unique. So in addition to the problem of figuring out which groups a person belongs to, we have the problem of some people not bothering to find out the totality of who the person is and rushing to judgment based on membership in one or two groups. Now my head's starting to hurt. |
Pattie Gillett
True Believer
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posted 01-05-2001 11:40 AM
quote:
Originally posted by Dave Thomer:
Well, I would suggest that the presence of cases like these point to the need for census data to be as accurate and informative as possible, and for the people who use that data to have a thorough understanding of exactly what the data represents. But maybe I'm asking for too much here.
Maybe, but that's what we're here for, right? Microsoft's own internal EEOC numbers are being used here as well, and those figures could very well be questioned, too.
I think one major lesson from all of this is that we should learn to question statistics. In particular, the source, means of collection, and how they are being used. As Dave pointed out in his Education piece, depending on the interests at stake, people can use the same set of stats to some to two or more entirely different conclusions. I admit to using stats a great deal in my career and in my writing but I always try to remember that they are not above reproach. |
Dave Thomer
Guardian of Peace and Justice in the Galaxy
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posted 01-05-2001 01:56 PM
quote:
Originally posted by Pattie Gillett:
As Dave pointed out in his Education piece, depending on the interests at stake, people can use the same set of stats to some to two or more entirely different conclusions.
Although in that case, I would argue that the Heritage Foundation statistics were accurate and simply used improperly -- they weren't capable of measuring what the author said they were, and any reasonable examination of what the data did and did not include demonstrates that, I think. Whereas here we're not just talking about the proper context for staistics, we're talking about how to compile the staistics properly. |
Pattie Gillett
True Believer
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posted 03-18-2001 07:05 PM
OK, the data is coming in. Salon.com has a great article about what it could mean here.As always, this is not a simple issue, and the change in White House Administrations does not help matters much. [This message has been edited by Pattie Gillett (edited 03-18-2001).] |
Dave Thomer
Guardian of Peace and Justice in the Galaxy
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posted 03-18-2001 08:20 PM
It was interesting to see how statistical sampling ranked right up there with the issue of the multiracial categories as concerns of the NAACP. I have to admit, even though I support the staistical sampling, I understand why people are afraid of it. Everyone can understand forms and interviewers, but the formulas and tools that would be used in a sampling process are somewhat esoteric -- and so some people just won't be able to feel comfortable with them. Chalk up yet another concept we need to stat introducing into the educational system. |
Pattie Gillett
True Believer
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posted 03-19-2001 09:18 AM
I can understand it to a certain extent but if statistical sampling can cut down the numbers of miscounts or undercounts, we should start understanding it. Also, you do have that percentage of the population that find the interviews and forms unreasonable and how long have we been using those? |
Pattie Gillett
True Believer
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posted 05-25-2001 01:37 PM
Now comes the "numbers juggling" phase. Read this. |
Dave Thomer
Guardian of Peace and Justice in the Galaxy
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posted 09-27-2001 08:01 AM
The story in your link appears to have moved on to the Electronic Great Beyond, Pattie. Is there anything new on this front? (My reasons for bringing this topic up again should be fairly obvious if you've been following other threads. ) |
Pattie Gillett
True Believer
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posted 01-02-2002 08:39 AM
Sorry it took so long to respond to this, Dave, but you know how the government is at counting things. The OMB announced that the data from the 2000 Census indicates that there are as many as 249 racial and ethnic combinations within the population of the United States. | |
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