For the first time in 27 years, the U.S. government is changing how it categorizes people by race and ethnicity, an effort that federal officials believe will more accurately count residents who identify as Hispanic and of Middle Eastern and North African heritage.
The revisions to the minimum categories on race and ethnicity, announced Thursday by the Office of Management and Budget, are the latest effort to label and define the people of the United States. This evolving process often reflects changes in social attitudes and immigration, as well as a wish for people in an increasingly diverse society to see themselves in the numbers produced by the federal government.
I mean, the idea of having a census based on ethnicity feels implicitly racist from my perspective, although I get that there may be socioeconomic reasons for it beyond just… you know, segregation, in the US, perhaps.
But… yeah, every time I’ve had to fill an immigration form flying into the US it’s like being given a kafkaesque, Borges-esque critique of the concept of categorization. It’s hilarious. I wonder if they’ll make it better or worse.
You can’t argue you don’t see race when trying to fix a system that has been (and still is) implicitly racist. It’s like claiming asking holocaust vitcims about their ethnicity is racist when Germany was paying Jews reparations.
It’s why I always got pissed when ppl complained about Affirmative Action. Besides the utter bullshit claim of racial quotas (which were illegal when AA was still a thing) you can’t fix racism without specifically helping the victims of said racism.
But is that the same as keeping census data? I mean, you can absolutely provide people with support based on their social status, including ethnicity, you don’t need a set categorization of them or stored census data for that.
In any case, it’s a cultural issue, I’m not American and you guys get to run this stuff however you want. I don’t care.
I do care that every time I land in the US heavily jet lagged I’m asked to retrofit my family background into categories invented by some kind of alien entity that has heard about humans coming in different types but doesn’t quite grasp the concept.
How do you help said ppl without knowing where they are, how many of them there are, and who is eligible (now and in the future) without long term catorgorization? It’s like claiming you can figure out a grocery stores inventory without ever writing anything down. Most countries don’t have this problem because they’re racially homogenous.
Im sorry about your slight inconvenience after circumventing the globe but if you have an issue with it blame Europe (mainly the English).
It’s funny because I’m scratching my head over their comment. I’m a European mutt, my wife is an south/se/eastern Asian mutt. I can recall a couple of times (maybe even only once) where when filling out a form I was stuck with a radio button when it comes to my kids’ ethnicities, and I was left scratching my head. . .but I can’t remember the last time this happened. We have travelled abroad with them a few times, and not once did I feel like it was difficult to fill out some form when we returned.
If you want to know where poverty is found in the US you can just ask the IRS. Effectively every adult is reporting their income and major property every year. Additionally, you could easily look at services for the marginal. How many empty beds are in the this particular homeless shelter, how many people in the area applied for food stamps, etc.
It really doesn’t matter that much. All you have to do is read a single bill that gets passed in Washington and it becomes clear that need of a population has no relationship with funding for that population.
Unemployment / poverty rate / crime rate / homelessness?
I do blame Europe, and specifically the English for most things.
We do have specific eligibility for certain things based on ethnicity and origin, and it’s not a particularly hard thing to manage, honestly. I mean, what’s the difference between declaring it periodically on a census and declaring it at the time of requesting whatever it is you’re elligible for? It’s a self-identification question either way.
Because governments have a budget and keeping a detailed account of population makeup helps with budgeting.
Let’s set aside $2.5 million of aid for group X this year. There’s only like 10000 of them probably. We didn’t count. What do you do if there’s actually 33 million of them? Give them $10 and call it a day
Now the opposite. What if you set aside $5.6 billion but there’s only 1000 of them? Guess we’ll just axe money we were going to use for school lunches for kids to make them the richest race on the planet.
Alright, let me start by restating that I acknowledge socioeconomic reasons why the US may want to do this and that I’m not American and don’t feel about this strongly. Others have provided more detailed examples in this thread and I assume those make some sense. I wouldn’t know.
Now, that being said, either you’re underestimating my awareness of public affairs enough that you’ve reduced this response to absurdity or your view of the whole process is kind of skewed. You absolutely have tools to know how big a socioeconomic group is without needing strict categorization or census data. And I’m going to go ahead and assume the US doesn’t budget public aid based on handing out money to people based on race. That sounds more like a far right fever dream of how that works.
I would argue you do need census data, because that provides the data for where resources should be distributed. If I am trying to combat a racialized system that gives African Americans fewer resources, I need to know where the African Americans are.
Consider the scenarios that result in the practice of redlining. Back in the day, schools were racially segregated. To combat this, the government began forcefully integrating schools by bussing in students who were otherwise considered “outside” of the district. So the racists move further away to preserve their effectively segregated communities, closing their businesses and bringing their wealth with them.
The formerly integrated, now majority-minority neighborhoods are left with little capital to support the growth of business as well as less capital coming in the form of municipal taxes (why that is still a thing is beyond me as well). So a neighborhood with less financial resources through business/tax revenue faces crumbling infrastructure along with brain drain due to academics not willing to serve as educators in these neighborhoods.
The census helps levels of government at higher tiers than the municipal level recognize when areas are being underserved due to racial discrimination and compensate with distribution of state/federal resources. The suburban schools around Boston, for example (which are majority white) are almost wholly funded by property taxes collected in the towns that the school districts serve, but the urban schools in the city receive substantially more state funding to incentivise educators to come in for higher paying jobs and ensure that minority students who were forced back into de facto segregated systems can still receive a quality education and help counteract the effects of redlining.
The state of things right now is definitely not perfect, but it could be a lot worse if we were just combatting racism with colorblindness.
I mean, like I said, I’m not American, I don’t have a horse in this race at all…
…but am I the only one surprised that in a country driven by of anarchocapitalism and endless Hobbesian paranoia white rich guys seem to be unusually fine with specifically this quirk of government oversight? Because it’s not super usual, it’s a rather American thing.
I get that you do want to correct specific, race-driven bias in things like those, and I get that the absolute insanity of some of the pushback necessitates different measures, but if the racists have the tools to enact the racist policy surely so do the policymakers pushing back.
I don’t want to be disingenuous, either. I fully understand that the US starts from a pre-segregated baseline. Part of the reason you don’t need those tools as much here is there was never a similar push for outright apartheid, so you’re not trying to make up for geography and ethnicity at once to the same level. But still, for a country that thinks having universal government ID is a step away from tyranny the willingness to ask broad questions on protected categories like ethnicity or religion seems… surprising to me.
You can do the same thing with standardized test scores. You don’t need to violate the privacy of people to know that the school their children go to is underperforming.
If you need information to, for example, determine if FHA loans are weighted unfairly towards people considered to be white or appearing to be white, then you need demographics information. Having a self-assessment of race is really the only way to get it even if it might not be as accurate as we might hope.
Amazing, and accurate as fuck. Can I ask you to shit on people for me?
We can and we do.
We straight-up outlawed ethnic categorization.
Because we have a different history than the US. Last time we had a Big Ethnic Event™ some motherfuckers wearing Hugo Boss came in and went through every bit of census information we had to commit genocide against people that are otherwise indistinguishable from the general population.
Also positive discrimination is viewed, even by some progressives, as “bad” as in “on a philosophical level I think it’s wrong” (I this is largely due to the stronger influence of Humanism and much lower penetration of CRT). I have to stress, this is not a matter of whether positive discrimination works, it’s a matter of philosophy.
So with THAT in mind it’s not hard to see why Europeans are culturally very put off with America’s approach of putting everyone in labelled boxes. There’s still a debate being had about CRT, but I think everyone agrees that the state MUST NOT have an “ethnic database”.
I wish I had a buck for every time I heard an atheist in Europe complain about having to identify with a specific church for tax purposes.
The one country I know does this is Germany. My experience is centered around Belgium/France, where the catholic church holds baptism records but does not share them with the government (and neither would the government even be allowed to ask in the first place AFAIK). As for ethnic categorization, I don’t know of a country which does that.
The church can share this information with the German church, damn leech trying anything to steal our money
I see. So your government has literally no knowledge whatsoever about the Roma for example?
Another thing I love about Europeans the No True Scotsmen approach to things
“No European nation does that!”
“What about this one that does?”
“Well that is only one”
“Ok what about this other one that does it?”
“Well that doesn’t count because of X”
“Ok what about this third one?”
“Well that also doesn’t count cause of Y”
Why don’t you just say “Paris” or whatever your favorite city there is next time instead of the continent of Europe? It would be so much more accurate.
Oh and btw Finland also does religious surveys for taxes. Let me guess the Finns aren’t Europeans either?
There’s no registry of them no. We discriminate the old-fashioned way, such as by outlawing camping outside of certain areas which indirectly targets their way of life.
I also didn’t say that Germans aren’t European, but if all you can find on religious/ethnic state cataloguing in Europe is Germany and Finland doing some funky tax things, I think that only strengthens my point that we are VERY far from the US’s “please tell us your exact skin tone for, uh, statistics” approach. Europe is not a monolith but my goal was to show a different perspective, which I believe I have achieved and I don’t know why that offends you so much.
EDIT: I guess I could have been more clear in my first comment, but it’s pretty obvious to me that I don’t claim to speak for ALL of Europe since literally nobody can. I further clarified that my experience is that of someone raised in a Franco-Belgian culture but that I believe that it applies further in Europe, which I don’t think is as broad or incorrect of a claim as your make it to be.
About 60 seconds of research. Research you could have done.
UK and Ireland collect race and ethnicity, Hungary and Romania both ethnicity and language, the Netherlands and Norway collects on birth place of your parents and religion, Bulgaria on ethnicity, Poland on ethnicity and allegiance to another country, Czech lets you volunteer the information, the swiss ask you race ethnicity and religion, and Greece asks you about religion.
All of those countries don’t count as part of Europe! They must be like some weird ass quantum state European or not European depending on what point the user wants to make, causing the superposition state to collapse. Amazing the absolute flexibility of the human mind and it’s total willingness to embrace tribalism over all facts to the contrary.
As I told you the next time you feel the urge to say Europe just say Paris instead.
I don’t support the US government asking these questions. It is a gross violation of the 13th and 5th amendment. Whatever value this data could possibly have there are easier and better ways to get it. If you want to know where is poor it is easy to find that out through taxes. Me not supporting this practice doesn’t mean I get to pretend that it doesn’t exist elsewhere. And at the same time just because I don’t support the practice doesn’t mean I get to think the very worse things about those that do. Attack ideas, not people.
While that be MIGHT be true that you can’t solve a problem unless you know the exact extent of the problem I question how you know the motivations of people gathering this data. Especially since it started well well before the civil rights movement.
When I see bigots doing x,y,and z and people claiming to stop bigots doing x,y I wonder if z is coming later. Specifically do you really think the last census was going to ask about citizenship information to ensure racism would be diminished?
I think the opposition to that often comes from the fact that victims of racism are selected on the grounds of race and those not being helped are similarly excluded from it based on race