US Government Expands Racial Categories
A major effort to capture the diversity of America.
The White House put out a statement from Dr. Karin Orvis, Chief Statistician of the United States, titled “OMB Publishes Revisions to Statistical Policy Directive No. 15: Standards for Maintaining, Collecting, and Presenting Federal Data on Race and Ethnicity.”
Earlier today, OMB published a set of revisions to Statistical Policy Directive No. 15 (Directive No. 15): Standards for Maintaining, Collecting, and Presenting Federal Data on Race and Ethnicity, the first since 1997. This process started in June 2022, with the first convening of the Interagency Technical Working Group of Federal Government career staff who represent programs that collect or use race and ethnicity data. Since that first convening, we’ve reviewed 20,000 comments and held almost 100 listening sessions to finalize the important standards we are announcing today.
Thanks to the hard work of staff across dozens of federal agencies and input from thousands of members of the public, these updated standards will help create more useful, accurate, and up to date federal data on race and ethnicity. These revisions will enhance our ability to compare information and data across federal agencies, and also to understand how well federal programs serve a diverse America.
You can read the updated Directive No. 15 on the Federal Register as well as at www.spd15revision.gov.
[…]
The Working Group’s final recommendations included several critical revisions that have been thoroughly researched and tested over the last decade. The updated standards released by OMB today closely follow the Working Group’s evidence-based recommendations and make key revisions to questions used to collect information on race and ethnicity, including:
- Using one combined question for race and ethnicity, and encouraging respondents to select as many options as apply to how they identify.
- Adding Middle Eastern or North African as a new minimum category. The new set of minimum race and/or ethnicity categories are:
- American Indian or Alaska Native
- Asian
- Black or African American
- Hispanic or Latino
- Middle Eastern or North African
- Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander
- White
- Requiring the collection of additional detail beyond the minimum required race and ethnicity categories for most situations, to ensure further disaggregation in the collection, tabulation, and presentation of data when useful and appropriate.
The updated standards also include several additional updates to definitions, terminology, and guidance to agencies on the collection and presentation of data.
That’s a long way of saying the Federal Government is making three changes to how it collects data on race and national origin. First, it’s adding a MENA category, recognizing that Arabs, Persians, and others from the region don’t think of themselves as “White.” Second, it’s combining race and ethnicity questions, mostly a function of Hispanic/Latino being considered a racial category by most. Third, it encourages people to check all that apply, recognizing that many folks are of mixed race.
Why?
One of the primary goals of Directive No. 15 is to ensure consistent and comparable race and ethnicity data across the federal government. To help meet that goal, the standards instruct federal agencies to begin updating their surveys and administrative forms as quickly as possible, submit an Agency Action Plan for complete compliance within 18 months – which will be publicly available, and finish bringing all data collections and programs into compliance with the updated standards within five years of today’s date. However, many programs will be able to adopt the updated standards much sooner than that. Starting today, the Office of the U.S. Chief Statistician will direct its efforts to help agencies collect and release data under these updated standards as quickly as possible.
In addition, this review process showed that racial and ethnic identities, concepts, and data needs continue to evolve. To improve the ability of Directive No. 15 to adapt and better meet those needs, OMB is establishing an Interagency Committee on Race and Ethnicity Statistical Standards, convened by the Office of the U.S. Chief Statistician, that will maintain and carry out a government-wide research agenda and undertake regular reviews of Directive No. 15. Some areas of interest identified in the technical expert research, as well as by stakeholders and engaged members of the public, lacked sufficient data to determine the effects of potential changes. Those areas of interest have now been identified as a top priority for additional research and data development in advance of future reviews. The updated standards identify several key research topics for the Interagency Committee to focus on initially. For more information on these research topics and the planned schedule for future reviews, see the updated Directive No. 15.
WaPo (“U.S. updates how it classifies people by race, ethnicity for first time in decades“) leads with
The federal government updated how it classifies people by race and ethnicity for the first time in over a quarter-century, aiming to better capture an increasingly diverse country and give policymakers a fuller view of the Americans their work impacts.
and adds:
The changes mark the first time since 1997 that the OMB has revised a policy on the federal collection of such data.
“This is truly a momentous day,” said Meeta Anand, senior director for census and data equity at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a national coalition of over 200 civil rights groups. The combined question, she added, is “one of the biggest changes we’ve ever seen.”
[…]
The changes are expected to show up on a range of federal data collection forms, including the census surveys that the government sends out every 10 years. They will also be reflected in the American Community Survey, which is conducted more regularly and includes more questions.
Such data guides how federal officials analyze everything from health-care outcomes to the redrawing of congressional districts.
[…]
“As a society, we cannot properly ensure equal rights and protections for all if we are not able to properly identify those impacted by overt and covert discrimination through systemic biases in the first place,” read one comment from an Egyptian American attorney who agreed with the new MENA category.
Momentum toward the changes has long been building, though it slowed during Donald Trump’s presidency. His administration sought to include a citizenship question on the 2020 Census, a move the Supreme Court blocked.
Advocates have especially pushed for a combined question on race and ethnicity, with research showing that the separate questions have hindered data collection among Latino respondents.
“Since many Latinos do not see themselves in any of the race categories under the current standards, a large proportion (nearly 44 percent) select ‘Some Other Race’ or skip the race question entirely,” Anand’s group said last year in a document outlining its case for a combined question.
The 2020 Census marked the first time that “Some Other Race” rose to the second-largest racial group in the United States.
“That means we had a lot of people who were not seeing themselves in the forms,” Anand said.
The Arab American Institute, a Washington-based nonprofit that advocates on behalf of Arab Americans, called the revised standards a “major accomplishment.”
“The new Standards will have a lasting impact on communities for generations to come, particularly Arab Americans, whose erasure in federal data collection will finally cease,” the institute’s executive director, Maya Berry, said in a statement.
At the same time, Berry said the institute has “deep concerns” that Arab Americans will continue to be undercounted because the new “Middle Eastern or North African” category does not fully capture the diversity of those groups.
NYT (“U.S. Officials Order Better Tracking of a Political Flashpoint: America’s Diversity“) leads with
The Biden administration ordered changes to a range of federal surveys on Thursday to gather more detailed information about the nation’s ethnic and racial makeup.
The changes — the first in decades to standard questions that the government asks about race and ethnicity — would produce by far the most detailed portrait of the nation’s ancestral palette ever compiled. And a new option will be available for the first time allowing respondents to identify as part of a new category, Middle Eastern or North African ancestry.
But the changes also have the potential to rankle conservatives who believe that the nation’s focus on diversity has already gone too far.
and adds
American censuses have gathered personal information since the 1790s, but since 1977, surveys have specifically tracked basic race and ethnicity characteristics, originally to help enforce 1960s-era civil- and voting-rights laws. Save for one modification in 1997, the questions have remained largely unchanged until now.
Officials of the Office of Management and Budget, which oversaw the review of the current survey questions, said the changes were needed in part to make surveys more accurate. For example, respondents who separately identified themselves as Hispanic or Latino in the current surveys frequently overlooked choosing a racial identification in the questions that followed, something that may happen less often when all questions are consolidated in a single section.
The changes also are also expected to allow experts to better measure how various populations benefit from federal programs and services in areas like employment, health and education, they said.
The social scientist in me is always happy to see more robust data collection. And, as American society becomes more diverse, it simply makes sense to ensure that people have categories that represent how they see themselves.
Indeed, Election Law Blog’s Justin Levitt provides this form, showing that the detail is considerably more than the above descriptions would indicate:
I’m more leery about the possible policy impacts, however. While I support the broad goals of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs there’s a natural bureaucratic tendency toward box-checking. While the Supreme Court has ruled racial quotas violate the Equal Protection Clause, it’s not hard to imagine more robust efforts to make federal hiring, higher education, and other high-focus sectors “look more like America.”
The more categories we create to that end, the more groups are pitted against one another. Historically, it’s mostly been a Black-White struggle, with Affirmative Action and Equal Opportunity efforts seeking to redress racial imbalances in education and hiring. There, at least, there was the centuries-long legacy of slavery and Jim Crow to rectify. Are we going to start trying to ensure that there is “enough” Middle Eastern representation?
This. It was by design — why did we choose race/skin as opposed to eye color or hair color? We’d learn more about people from classifying them by childhood trauma: Did you grow up hungry or not? With housing instability or not? With neglect and abuse or not? In a safe neighborhood or not? With parents who emphasized education or not?
But it’s hard to unring these hundreds year old bells, upon which landed gentry white supremacists built the American system — to their benefit. Oh well. Maybe sometime in the next 350 years our progeny will get around to that All Men Are Created Equal stuff, with more miscegenation and integration. It is a worthy aspiration, even if they didn’t really mean it.
I think race and ethnicity are fractal. The more categories you have, the more categories you create. People strive for unique identifiers. I knew a woman who endured negativity from her in-laws because her family came from Calabria while they stemmed from Sicily. There are similar divisions everywhere you look. At the same time, DNA testing by commercial outfits have gotten surprising results; a proud Irish guy was told that he was 11% African, and a Cuban guy was told that he was 21% Jewish (I call him Hermano since he told me). In the classification listed in the article, one can identify as White, Scottish, but neglects the important Ranger vs Celtic categories.
I think that I’m the same race as Rachel Dolezal.
I’ve no real thoughts on whether this nets out as a good thing or bad, just an observation. Racial categories has moved over the years from a “factual” (in quotes, because race is not a fact based thing, or at least it has no clear basis in genetics) categorization, to an emotional one. It used to be common for people to resent the categorization, but now it seems more likely that people resent not having their identity adequately included. This new data might be interesting to social scientists, but will allowing people who claim Nigerian or Tongan descent check a box lead to any meaningful change in policy?
It also makes me wonder if other groups will make demands to be included. Religious questions are currently excluded by law, but will that change? How about gender identity or sexual preference.
@Slugger:
It shouldn’t be a surprise that ancestries with a history of social stigmatization would tend to be covered up in people’s family trees.
Indeed, I think one of the reasons people carry family stories of ethnic ancestries that don’t hold up to scrutiny from DNA tests or genealogical research is that certain ancestries are substituting for “worse” ones: for example, Native American instead of black. George R.R. Martin thought one of his grandparents was Italian; it turned out the man wasn’t his biological ancestor and that the actual one was Jewish.
@MarkedMan:
I’m not sure that’s an accurate way of putting it, since I think race was always based on emotion–it’s just it was traditionally from the perspective of the dominant race (white) pushing the concept on others. What I think has changed is an increasing acceptance of self-identity, which naturally is going to lead to less uniformity in the definitions.
@Kylopod: My 23 and me test shows that 88% of the population has more Neanderthal DNA than I do. My wife is skeptical. She thought I would have significantly more Neanderthal DNA. Based on personal observation, I guess.
100% this. We’ve been experimenting with some of these data gathering mechanisms at Code for America for a while. I think its good for a variety of reasons:
1. The more people see themselves in a survey, the better the data collection is.
2. Multi-racial/ethnic data collection (check all that apply) is a nod to the fact that racial makeup of families and individuals has always been (and is increasingly becoming more complex).
Prediction: within the next decade the government is going to–correctly–crack the absolutely useless “Asian” category. It glosses over the huge ethnic and cultural differences in the largest category of humans on the planet (as shown in the illustration). We already do that in our data collection.
I do think it’s fair to ask how granular we should go. I don’t have an answer on that. In the past I have seen people go so far as, when presented with an “other [please specify]” field, going all the way down to nation of origin when addressing politically contentious areas.
Ok, WRT:
This is a bit of a cynical framing of the issue. That is to say, there is some truth to it. Why measure something if we are not going to use it?
To that point, census data has been critical for understanding the current state of policy impacts and identifying disparities in outcomes across racial and ethnic categories. That, in theory, can help us start to look for root causes in different places.
Unfortunately, this often gets us into a discussion about the scary and politically fraught concepts of “structural racism” and targeted policies.
But the reality is that, for whatever reason, when we start to dig into policy impact by race we see results that do not match a given race’s distribution in the general population. That’s a huge issue when, by law, certain policies are guaranteed to be race-neutral (like the distribution of social service benefits).
@MarkedMan:
This is absolutely not a correct categorization of race–at least as discussed in social science and policy circles. Race is by and large a “social construct”–but that doesn’t make it emotional or, as characterized by some “all in our heads.”
It makes it something mutable and culturally defined–something that changes over time and whose details vary from culture to culture. In other words closer to something like “money.”
I know it’s a very first-year realization but money isn’t real–it was invented by humans and we all (or at least most of us) opt into believing in it. And yes, people will say “but the world won’t work without it” or “there is no alternative” so we take it as a necessary natural outcome of culture, but it isn’t (and there have been other systems). The same can be argued of race.
This has been a tricky and hotly debated issue in the (social) scientific world for quite a while now. How do we structure our data collection methods — pre-specified categories of race and/or ethnicity vs. free response forms?
The former align with our typical analytic approaches: nomothetic (ie, group-based) statistics. And they have allowed us to identify, among other things, racial disparities in healthcare.
The latter are more often used in qualitative and/or mixed-methods work, and also when analyzing data at the idiographic (ie, individual) level. This approach is in the same spirit as “precision medicine.”
My lab uses some combination of the two, mostly depending on the research question, and also considering participant burden, resources, and other (sometimes “political”) matters. No solutions, only trade-offs.
The feds are way behind on this issue — for reasonable and less reasonable reasons. Eg, here’s a paper from 2016 on how to think about and assess race, ethnicity, and culture (see p10 of the pdf for questionnaire wording).
Questions 22-28 (how do others perceive you and level of cultural identification) have proved especially enlightening to some of my work.
You can better express this as “a fraction of Arabs [etc]” do not think of themselves as “White”” – as certainly on a daily basis virtually every Levantine Arab-American I have interacted with has thought of themselves as White in an American context with the only minor political exception of utility but not in actual ethnic alignment terms. Same for Iranians – with more nuance for North Africans etc of a darker skin colour turn. (which is hardly surprising insofar as Levantines and a broad range of MENA overall phenotypically are not distinguishable from a good fraction of north-end Mediterranians).
Certainly in a native context, over here, the light-skinned North Africans refer to sub-Saharans as “AFricans” not including themselves typically and even darker North Africans differentiate.
Of course when one is an immigrant one recodes one’s identity over time but the black-and-white statement (ironic) is simply not an accurate one – or fully accurate one (and one more of political positioning than ethnic identification in my fairly substantial exposure to Arab-Americans over time, re-expatriated or not).
@MarkedMan:
It is better to say that the American coding of big four races as truly distinct categories is not well-founded, ‘race’ has some clear basis in genetics but only as a rough grouper (which I acknowledge is not what Americans understand as race) and with a goodly number of phenotypic False Friends (as like Asian negritos).
@Matt Bernius: yes agreed, theallusion to money as well – race being socially factual but also not being utterly without genetic foundation (although not the kind of genetic foundation the racialists believed and not the kind to establish racial policy on – but one can understand the simplification as the very nuanced expression tends to lead to gross misinterpretations).
@Lounsbury:
That’s correct and extremely difficult to talk about for the racial essentialism reasons you bring up. It doesn’t help that there are a lot of “hard scientists,” especially within the Alt-Right/IDW, who have revealed themselves to be racialists and racial essentialists, making those discussions even worse.
@Mimai:
That’s the approach we tend to take too. Also TY for that article!
Also, one nice thing about collecting more detailed data is that you can always collapse it (and often do) when it’s time for analysis. By that I mean you may still collapse all of those pesky Asian categories back together when push comes to shove and depending on your comparison data.
This is another reason why this change is so helpful for those of us doing research work–census data is a really critical control/contextualizing data source. So we often pull it into our analysis process. And you are always constrained by the least detailed data you have. At least along racial and ethnic lines, that’s usually the census data. So having more fidelity there is really important.
BTW, the census is a perfect example of the type of activity that–if you are running a government like a business–doesn’t necessarily make sense to invest in (at least from a short-term profit-maximizing perspective). And yet the data it produces is so critical to so much of the work done within the US and definitely worth the investment. It’s a great example of the liberal enlightenment forethought of the drafters of the Constitution.
@Matt Bernius:
A lot of the reason for the rise of the term “Asian” was in response to a backlash against the term “Oriental” (which itself has a vague history, as it was originally a term applied to the Middle East and North Africa), and this led to a narrowing of the word relative to its literal meaning; almost nobody today uses it to mean “from the continent of Asia” anymore. It typically means East Asian, and often South Asian as well, but never Middle Eastern or West Asian.
A while back I looked into the history of Oscar nominations given to actors of Asian descent, and I discovered that the Wikipedia article on this topic uses the broadest definition imaginable. It includes Cher (partially of Armenian descent), F. Murray Abraham (partially of Syrian descent), Natalie Portman (Israeli-born Ashkenazi Jew), and even Angelina Jolie (no continental Asian ancestry or birth whatsoever, but adopted Cambodian citizenship later in life).
I looked at the discussion page, and found a ton of people complaining about this, but most of the messages were from over a decade ago.
@Kylopod:
The concept of race goes way, way back and covers all cultures. Race is just the latest name for “that group of others who are not like us in this crucial way and therefore we don’t have to treat them the same”.
@Lounsbury:
I agree, but one point I’d add is the impact of religion on racial identity—which may sound odd but which is definitely a factor, as from what I’ve seen Arab Christians are much likelier than Arab Muslims to be thought of as white, and there’s a common tendency to include all majority-Muslim nations within the PoC category. I recall one of our hosts casually describing (Turkish-born) Dr. Oz as nonwhite, which ruffled some feathers here.
The US government’s racial/ethnic/cultural classification system has always been weird and arbitrary, and this change does make it marginally less so, but it is still incomplete and problematic.
Despite the claim to evidence-based standards, the addition of the new MENA category is primarily thanks to political advocacy and a lot of work by Arab-American lobbying groups who have worked for that particular change for many years and for reasons that very much have to do with federal government policy.
My view is that this change doesn’t go far enough, with major regional and ethnic categories still completely unrepresented.
And I’m sure there are going to be people who are upset that the MENA category has “Israeli” but not “Palestinian.” Nor are there more generic categories like “Arab” or “Jew.” Israel, after all, is a multi-ethnic country.
Central Asia, Eastern Europe, and East Africa are all missing. Sure, you can write something in, but this is 2024, and we have databases, and adding more checkmark options is easy. And it’s not really clear since the categories are carried over from the way the government originally created them. Is someone from the Caucuses supposed to write their ethnicity in the “white” box or the “Asian” box? There is still no clear option for the large number of Central and South Americans who are Mestizo.
This was a missed opportunity to rethink how to collect this info based on more standardized and recognizable criteria instead of the weird mix of arbitrary and vague racial, ethnic, and cultural categories that are less relevant in a more diverse America.
@Matt Bernius: I was pretty clear that I meant it wasn’t real in the genetic sense. Which means that the race you are is the one that you or others feel you are. There is no genetic test that will absolutely define you as black or white, Asian or African. I never claimed that these labels didn’t have a huge effect.
What nonsense. Why not categories for star signs? I’m a proud Leo. Oh, so very proud of that identity. I’m also a blond, though evidence of that is lacking at this stage in my life. And I’m tall, a tall person, with tallness identity. So very proud of all that we tall people have done. I’m also part of the astigmatic culture, the right-handed culture and the mildly sensitive to mangos and cashews um let’s say race. My three years in French schools mean I am (3/69=0434) let’s say 4% Français. And I’m half Okie, and despite never having met the Okie sperm contributor in question, or spending more than a Greyhound bus rest stop in Oklahoma, I feel my Okie identity deep in my Okie bones.
My actual, real identity? 50% waiter, 50% writer, just a single letter difference, but of so meaningful. Put down that tray! That’s my culture you’re appropriating! And don’t invent characters unless you are a registered writer. Certainly I would find it insulting if you created characters while hefting a tray. I mean, unless, like me, you are W/W bidentitarian.
The two most racist societies/governments I’ve ever had experience with are the Japanese and the Chinese. The Japanese concept of racial purity is deeply, deeply ingrained in government policy. I was talking with the Chief Medical Officer of the very large medical device company I worked for shortly after he had his first trip to Japan as CMO and he was actually shaken up a bit. The government had requested time with him and it turned out they wanted to show him a slickly produced explainer about why medical companies cannot assume clinical tests done on non-Japanese apply to them. Long story short – “thousands of years” of racial purity on an island nation has caused them to branch off from the rest of humanity.
The Chinese government is racist and colonialist, a very bad combination all throughout history. Wherever they colonize, they replace local officials with Han Chinese, and help Hans start businesses in competition with or simply in place of existing indigenous ones. In extreme cases such as the Uyghurs, the locals are sent to concentration camps or prison.
But there are also many other highly racist governments (and presumably, the citizens). Syria, Iran, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, and the list goes on.
I don’t see WASP on this list.
@MarkedMan:
Korea is another one, and then there are the ME monarchies, as you mentioned.
The Americans who think the US is the most racist country on the planet clearly haven’t spent much time in some of these far more racist societies.
@Mister Bluster: How many Murkans are white and Anglo and Saxon and Protestant anymore? It’s a phantom designation.
@just nutha: I’ve very often heard the term “WASP” applied to people who aren’t Protestant, such as Irish Catholics, and even sometimes to people whose ancestry isn’t primarily in the British Isles. It’s just a way of saying that a person seems broadly Northern European white and “not ethnic” (which itself is an odd phrase).
@Andy: Lived in Korea for 8 years, almost to the day, and yes indeed, racism is alive and well there. Maybe worse than here, maybe not, either way, were I to become reincarnated as a person targeted for racial animus, I would pick Korea over the USA.
American racism is unique in its violence.
@Kylopod: Exactly!
@Andy: To be honest, it’s always struck me as a backward form of exceptionalism to say that whites/europeans/westerners are the cause of all the problems in the world.
@just nutha:
Worse than Korea? I’ll defer to your experience. But unique in its violence? Ask the Hutus, the Uighurs, the Timorese, the Yemeni, the Kurds, etc, etc, etc
@MarkedMan:
All the world’s problems can indeed be traced back to a single race: homo sapiens sapiens. Those people are assholes.
@just nutha:
Cool, what did you do in Korea?
To me, it would depend on the circumstances. For example, I’d rather be reincarnated as an upper-middle-class Nigerian immigrant in America than a female Filipino immigrant maid in South Korea. Korea is also a very sexist society compared to the US, and being an immigrant, female, poor, and low-status is a combo with a very high chance of sexual assault with little avenue for redress or justice.
@Kylopod: Yes most definately with respect to religion.
@MarkedMan: it is not coherent in a genetic sense, however there is a degree of reality genetically. It is rather better to say incoherent genetically.
@MarkedMan: It does strike me as extremely dubious and sort of inverted exceptionalism to claim US is unique in its violence – it certainly is fairly unusual in its categories, and the manner it was structured but in-group – out-group violence, not particularly unique.
(listing the Kurds is … ah Americans…. so naïve and so shallow in historical reading)
@Michael Reynolds: I think you are being Sapiens Sapiens centric…. the whole of Homo.
When faced with an ethnicity form like the one in the OP, we should tick every box, plus enter every race we can think of in the box for additional options: Romulan, Yeerk, Ent, Ferengi, Nessie, Wookie, Balrog, Kraken, Bigfoot, Centaur, Hork Bajir, Leprechaun. . .
@Michael Reynolds: It is nonsense. It’s weirdly necessary to have some kind of nonsense though, because people have been making decisions and excluding people based on that very nonsense for hundreds, if not thousands of years.
And I have never worked even for an hour as a waiter, and I make up characters all the time. So there!
Also, I am of the “short guy” tribe, even though I was raised by a “tall man”. That makes me a member of a racially blended family!
As far as Okies go, I got next to nothin’ I spent a week in OK once. I was an intern for Weyerhauser, and we were testing some sawmill software. Not super typical of OK, I don’t think.
Tomorrow’s headline:
Author Michael Grant Makes Disparaging Remarks about African Race
@Matt Bernius:
Same. Though it can get mighty tricky at times to collapse into workable (ie, readily analyzed) categories. Thank you community partners who bring lived experience to these deliberations.
More generally, I appreciate the perspective of folks who cast a critical eye on the whole endeavor of such data collection. I really do.
And I encourage such folks to consider the downsides of not collecting these data. And/or the downsides of spoiling the data by checking all the boxes.
What will we miss seeing if we stop collecting such data and/or if the data are spoiled?
Another way of considering this is to ask: What have we been able to see (and do!) because we have collected such data?
At the end of the day, one might reasonably conclude that the cost-benefit analysis favors the stopping of such data collection. I’m just here advocating for a full(er) consideration of the issue.
True story: I once had a meeting with a psychologist, and when she later completed her report, I noticed she listed my ethnicity as “Jewish”–even though I was never asked for my ethnicity and I never told her directly that I was Jewish, I simply commented at one point that I kept a kosher diet.
I dont actually see many people claim the US is the most racist, mostly what I see is a concentration on the US and ignoring what goes on in the rest of the world. Telling people that other countries are worse doesnt matter to them that much since they only worry about the US.
On topic I think more data is almost better so I like this. As noted above you can always collapse data if you want but at least you have the option. It would be nice to have even more categories and if all you are doing is adding checkboxes it should be easy, but then you run into making the form too long. Trade offs.
Steve
@Michael Reynolds:
True. But all creatures are assholes. Homo Sapiens unique in that they defined what an asshole is.
@steve:
I pretty much agree, I’d just add that the conversation in American discourse is usually taken from the perspective of liberals and progressives trying to push back against attempts by conservatives to deny or minimize the reality of historical and present-day racism in the US. I’m not sure I’ve heard anyone state explicitly that the US is the most racist country on earth, but I have occasionally seen people react with surprise if you tell them there are a lot of countries that are more racist than the US.
@Kylopod:
It’s such a ridiculous race-to-the-bottom discourse. Is being racist but less racist than other racists supposed to be a bragging point? I don’t get the dick measuring content between low standards. I’ll grant that being hundreds of thousands of dollars is less bad than being millions of dollars in debt, but to pretend like you don’t still have a problem is asinine.
It’s reminiscent of the discourse I sometimes hear about whether Hitler was a worse killer than Stalin was a worse killer than Mao was a worse killer than Pol Pot. Like…who cares? Is there an award for being the least bad mass murderer?
Another couple of ways to look at this:
1) It is useful for the agencies to know how Americans think of themselves in these categories, since the categories won’t be eliminated for some time.
2) It is useful for Americans to know how other Americans think of themselves. It is a way to erode the easy assumption that we’re all white European men and therefore white European men can speak for all of us, while other voices may be questionable.
Matt has addressed the first point. But it’s time to break the white European male monopoly. And if you think that’s been done, I have a bridge in the Baltimore harbor to sell you.
Do more categories drive more division? I could see that going either way. Germany has a shifting half dozen or more parties. I would imagine there’s a lot of ticket splitting between, say, Christian Dem and Green. Does the multiplicity drive sharper division or blurred lines?
It has been largely Black and White, but always with room to spare for Jews, Irish, Japanese, Polacks, … The bigots never seem to have any difficulty defining these categories. I’ve observed before that conservatism is largely a game of make believe: let’s pretend trickle down econ works, let’s pretend the Founders wanted a Christian nation, let’s pretend Donald Trump is a successful businessman, and so on. And now that Blacks, and various browns, are making some progress, conservatives want very badly to pretend racism doesn’t exist.
As to Middle Eastern, I should think that with the current level of prejudice against Muslims, or anyone perceived to maybe be Muslim, that we should be taking steps against such prejudice.
@Kylopod:
The two archetypal WASPs of the second half of the 20th century were William F. Buckley, Jr. and Grace Kelly–both Irish Catholics.
@Michael Reynolds: It tends to be generic white dudes who think this way. People whose perceived identity has never affected their life in negative ways.
I think it’s similar to Libertarians — they tend to come from very privileged backgrounds, and naively think that people will just act better if we don’t have all these rules.
Anyway, those people should absolutely put in nonsense like mixed Writer-Waiter on these forms, since we should be identifying and tracking them.
@Andy:
I’m amused that the Biden administration is taking away Israeli Jews’ whiteness.
Race has always been nonsense, but very meaningful nonsense, with whiteness expanding to encompass groups such as the Irish and Italians in the 1900s, and Jews always being kind of “provisionally white” at best, if they are from the right countries and don’t act too Jewish.
And to be very clear, whiteness is acceptance in America, and non-white is the “other.” We value the former far more than the latter. It’s stupid, and wrong, but it is there.
If the definition of Israelis as Middle Eastern were to take hold in American consciousness, it would change how America treats Israel, which has often been treated like an outpost of Europe (or European Whiteness) stuck among the (savage) Arabs — we ally with them, protect them, and value Israeli lives more than the lives a few miles away, because they are considered closer to “us.”
I expect some people to be claiming that the updated racial categorization is antisemitism, and the caliper-carrying phrenologist crowd to be arguing that if you measure the slope of the brow…
@Gustopher:
Except that I’m not a generic White guy, I’m a Jew, even my DNA agrees that I’m 50% Ashkenazi on my mother’s side.
It is also an opinion that conflicts with @DK’s observation that these racial categories were created by White people for their own benefit. To be a bit more global, elites create categories that excuse or explain their privileged status. I’m denying the entire notion of racial (or class, or gender) status which would be an own-goal given that I can pass as gentile.
It is clearly to the advantage of the largest group, in this case Whites, to insist on ‘identity politics.’ It is clearly to the disadvantage of smaller groups to buy into a paradigm designed to ‘other’ them, if I may appropriate some progressive-speak. I understand that smaller groups have perhaps given up on ever being able to extricate themselves from the imposition of these labels, but that doesn’t change the fact that they are tacitly accepting elite-imposed parentheses, which will, inevitably, give sanction to ‘White identity,’ which is not the preferred outcome, IMHO. As a Jew.
@Andy: I was a teacher of English in Korea. And I’ll acknowledge the plight of the Filipino woman in Korea but note that she won’t need to worry about being lynched or killed by barricading her in her house and burning it down.
ETA: I’ll also note that being reincarnated as “an upper-middle-class Nigerian immigrant” probably fails the “target of racial animus” part of my thought experiment, unless you include “saying mean things to me” as persecution, ala White Evangelicals.
@Gustopher:
And that’s very dumb to equate acceptance with a color IMO. It’s one of the reasons I’ve always been against the binary construction of “white” on one side and “POC” on the other that some have promoted. And I think the last thing anyone would want is for “white” people to start behaving like a coherent racial identity group interested in specifically furthering the interests of “white” people.
There are a lot of Jews who aren’t “white” and a lot of Muslims who are. The notion that Jews are part of “whiteness” (and similarly, how some seem to identify Islam as a non-white racial identity group) is another one of those ignorant and weird Americanisms. Similar to how sometimes certain “Asian” groups are called “white adjacent” for, as far as I can tell, having too many bourgeois values.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Wow, I bet that was a fantastic experience! It may not seem like it from my comments here, but I really liked Korea and the Korean people, who were mostly super friendly. I was there with the military, so it was quite a different experience from yours, I’m sure.
Who is getting lynched or barricaded in their house and burned alive in 2024 in America? If this were happening, I would think it would be big news.
Statistically, America is just a very violent country compared to much of the world, especially Korea. Getting reincarnated into an area with a lot of poverty and gang violence would be my biggest concern, hence why I picked something upper-middle class, which doesn’t see much violence regardless of race.
@Andy:
“Start,” Gracie?
@Andy:
The modern-day lynching of Ahmaud Arbery was indeed very big news. Of course we only found out about it because the 3-man gang in question in were stupid enough to record video.
I suspect that most like-minded people know they cannot gather in mobs and record evidence — although that didn’t stop bigots in Coeur d’Alene from reducing the Utah women’s basketball team to tears with racial intimidation last week. Unsurprising in the state where 31 white nationalists were thankfully arrested before they could execute their violent plot to against a 2022 gay Pride parade.
Too bad they couldn’t get to Dylan Roof before killing nine blacks his Charleston church shooting. Or Payton Gendron, the white supremacist who killed 10 Black people at a Buffalo supermarket in 2022.
I can’t believe that some people are actually naïve enough to think that if racism and racially-motivated violence doesn’t make the evening news — or doesn’t take the same form as it did one hundred years ago — it’s not happening.
Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.
@Andy: My experience may not have been a different as you might imagine. The first place I lived was Daegu, so I had a fair number of Korean adults who were associated with Camps Henry and Walker.
@DrDaveT:
I wonder whose interest the Georgia police lieutenant caught on dashcam in 2016 telling a woman “we only kill black people” thought he was serving?
I suspect he thought he was acting in the interest of the majority of white voters who voted for Trump in 2016 after he launched his toxic political career targeting the first black president with racist birther lies. And again in 2020, after he tweeted a White Power video on June 28th of that year — and after Trump’s anti-immigrant hate rhetoric was echoed by Patrick Wood Crusius, who in 2019 killed 23 people in El Paso, targeting Latinos.
Trump is somehow again poised to win a majority of white voters, even after Trump dined in 2022 with Nick Fuentes, a literal Nazi who has called for the death of Jews and non-Christians. That barely made a blip in the news. But that’s how most of us roll, in America.
@MarkedMan: a lot of the xenophobic commentary is actually to cover up the fact that one set of Japanese keiretsu have gobbled up the market and aren’t going to let anyone else get their mitts on it, Japanese or foreign.
(Not to say that Japan isn’t xenophobic, but it’s weirder than just that.)
@Michael Reynolds: Note that I said “perceived identity” — passing for the majority (or dominant minority) is pretty awesome.
You’re an atheist, probably don’t keep kosher, and are completely assimilated at first glance, even if you do pull out your Jewish ethnic background occasionally for a bit of color.
You choose when people see that. Just as I, being a bi/pan/whatever dude with zero natural swish, choose when people see that.
@Andy:
Oh yes, I agree 100%. But that’s not the world we live in. We live in a world where “whiteness” (particularly cishet whiteness) short-circuits a lot of thinking.
The “whiteness” of Jews (a provisional whiteness, that depends on who is standing next to them) is a large part of why the Israel-Palestinian fiasco is viewed as special and important, rather than whatever goes on between Saudi Arabia and Yemen that almost never enters the American consciousness.
I suspect this “whiteness” is very carefully maintained and promoted — not because Jews are crafty and manipulative, but because there is so much advantage to being “white”, even provisionally white, from a standpoint of discouraging hate crimes (with a side of supporting Israel). When you have white supremacists mouthing the words “Judeo-Christian values,” despite being the inheritors of Nazi race ideology, it’s pretty clear that this has been gently spoon-fed to the inbred.
The white supremacists will show their true colors with a little scratching, but they can be pointed towards Muslims before that happens.
And you can see a lot of Islamophobia in the pro-Israel arguments recently. And a lot of “othering” and grouping all the Palestinians as Hamas. I would go so far as to say that the Netanyahu-enthusiasts are weaponizing the “whiteness” of the Israelis.
And then there are the antisemites (primarily the left’s antisemites) who claim that all the European Jews are really Europeans (often Khazars) and that they are colonizers in Israel, attempting to use the “whiteness” of Jews to delegitimize Israel.
(IIRC, the Khazar theories were promoted by someone who was trying to discredit antisemitism in Europe by saying the Jews there are the same people as everyone else in Europe, and there’s no ethnic difference)
(I really need to reread Milorad Pavic’s novel Dictionary of the Khazars to see if the novel I loved in college was really just antisemitic propaganda)
@DK:
Ain’t denying the existence of racially motivated hate crimes, I’m familiar with all of those. The claim I was specifically responding to was about lynching and burning people alive in their houses. While the murder of Arbery was a brutal and heinous crime, it’s not a lynching by the common and historic definition of the term.
And to the larger point, while all the crimes you list are extremely serious and condemnable, the fact is that they are rare. The contention that was alleged is that one wouldn’t want to be reincarnated in the US for fear of being a victim in such a crime is – at best- a statistically improbable one. America is a comparatively violent country, but the vast majority of that violence is much more mundane, so the actual chances of getting lynched or burned alive for one’s race – or becoming a victim in the ways in the incidents you describe – are extremely low.
@Gustopher:
The problem is the whole concept of “whiteness” short-circuits thinking.”Whiteness” is another academic concept that’s an interesting thought exercise, but one that can’t be operationalized in the real world and should never have left academia.
Yes, and it’s interesting how comparatively little attention they get.
It’s barely begun.
And it’s being enabled by some of these popular ideas on the left, like “whiteness,” that seek to purposely divide people, ideas, and things into a binary – with one being coded as the bad “white” side. Which, perhaps not ironically, is exactly how white supremacists on the right divide things up as well. The more that binary construct becomes normalized and enforced in the culture and our society, the more that normie white people will start to adopt it, and when they do, chances are they are not going to become like Robin DeAngelo or a similar kind of “White Ally.”