Mar. 30 - The hyphenization continues apace:
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 problem with the U.S. government categorizing people by race and ethnicity isn’t how it’s done. The problem is that it’s done.
But even if it were how it was done, is the accurate counting of people who identify as Hispanic, Middle Eastern, North African actually something the census ought to concern itself with? The minute someone uses “identify as” instead of “is” or “are,” they’ve moved from reality to theology.
You can identify as a witch, a butterfly, a tomato: that’s your right. But when we get into the tedious real-world business of counting and measuring and trying to make sense of things, then how you identify yourself to your self is irrelevant because it’s not—what’s the word?—real.
Elizabeth Warren still identifies as Native American. Good for her. Science, however—real science—has determined that claim to be about as valid as a glass of grape juice claiming to be a grand cru burgundy.
On the other hand, we should remember that while skin color is obviously easy to observe and describe, ethnicity and ancestry are not. People are often mistaken or confused—or dishonest—about their own family histories. For example, when going through papers after my parents died, I discovered our family name was not Nagan but Nagilonis. That’s the name on my grandfather’s birth certificate. Not only that, but it identified his parents as Russian rather than Lithuanian. His wife, my paternal grandmother, was the daughter of a German merchant mariner whose own family history, we have finally learned, was more Danish than German. That’s just the family history on my father’s side: there’s just as much weirdness on my mother’s.
All of this is to say: despite the obvious scientific inaccuracy of asking people what ethnicity they “identify as,” it’s at least intellectually honest. Most people have no idea where they came from. Just think of the recent stories about American public figures shocked to learn they were descended from slave-owners (including every living president except for Donald Trump).
But let’s get back to the text of this AP article.
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.
Here’s how Americans ought to be labeled and defined: by their age and sex. That’s all any government needs to know. At least, it’s all they ought to need to know.
“You can’t underestimate the emotional impact this has on people,” said Meeta Anand, senior director for Census & Data Equity at The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. “It’s how we conceive ourselves as a society. ... You are seeing a desire for people to want to self-identify and be reflected in data so they can tell their own stories.”
I don’t know what that means, do you? Does anyone?
Anand seems to be saying that Americans base their individual views of society on census categories of race and ethnicity. That would be sad if it were true. It’s not true. Leave that aside for a moment, however, to digest the last sentence: she says we’re seeing “a desire for people to want” something. Let’s leave the “something” out to make the parsing of her weird assertion easier. What we’re seeing, she says, is a desire for people to want something—with no indication of where that desire is coming from. She’s not saying it’s something people themselves actually want, but something some people want people to want.
And when we look to see what that thing is, it turns to be an ability to choose their own identities and see their chosen identifications reflected in the census data, as a precursor to their being able to “tell their own stories.”
Make sense of that. Go ahead, I dare you.
Meeta Anand has a BA in political science and a Master’s Degree in Economic Development, International Trade and Finance, and Human Rights from Tufts University, and a JD from Harvard. She also attended Oxford. No question she’s a bright woman, fantastically educated, worldly and wise. So why can’t she say what she means in plain English?
Maybe she can, and could, and did, but the journalist messed it up.
Mike Schneider has a BA from the Univesity of Wisconsin at Madison and a Masters Degree in Spatial Analytics from the University of Pennsylvania. He’s been a journalist for 30 years. He covers “census, demographics, Florida, and related topics” for the Associated Press. Maybe he was having an off day and made a hash of what Anand was trying to say?
I don’t think that’s the case, either.
I think Anand knows exactly what she means and I think Schneider understood her perfectly. I think the problem is that the idea itself is so broken and stupid that it cannot be communicated simply and plainly without sounding like the opposite of what they want it to mean.
That idea is that everyone is, and knows themselves to be, a unique blend of inherited influences—but nevertheless wants to see themselves as part of a larger bloc of people just like them.
It’s an understandable contradiction—we all want to think of ourselves as unique and special, and we also all want to feel that we belong to a larger group—but it’s still a contradiction.
“I’m a Filippino-Argentine Jew on my mother’s side, and an Irish-Navajo Buddhist on my father’s side, and I’m proud of who I am: why does the U.S. census not let me express all that? Why can’t I see how many other Filippino-Argentine-Irish-Navajo Jew Buddhists there are in my zip code, my town, my state, the country? I don’t feel represented!”
But you are, my dear. You are represented by the count of Americans.
There are no Irish-Americans, African-Americans, Japanese-Americans, Arab-Americans. There are only Americans. America is a creed, not a tribe. If the Irish-, African-, Japanese-, or Arab- prefix is more important to you than the simple label “American,” you’re missing the entire point of America and maybe you ought to consider moving back to the land of your prefix.
The changes to the standards were hammered out over two years by a group of federal statisticians and bureaucrats who prefer to stay above the political fray. But the revisions have long-term implications for legislative redistricting, civil rights laws, health statistics, and possibly even politics as the number of people categorized as white is reduced.
They don’t “prefer to stay above the political fray.” They prefer to stay under the radar—and for good reason. The business they’re engaged in is nasty, sordid stuff. It’s destructive and divisive.
The only impact the census has on redistricting has to do with body counts. That’s actually the purpose of the census. Redistricting on the basis of racial or ethnic lines occurs, but only to the extent that racial and ethnic groups can be mapped to political preferences. (Which, alas, they all too often can be.) We could eliminate racial and ethnic districting overnight by removing those classifications from the census.
The only civil rights laws America ever needed were baked right into its Constitution: are you American? Then you have the same rights as every other American. Your color, ethnicity, religion, sex, sexuality, and music preferences are irrelevant. Yes, yes, I know America hasn’t always lived up to that, but it didn’t need civil rights laws to fix its shortcomings: it needed lawyers and judges with the balls to enforce the incontrovertible equality of all American citizens. (Also Abraham Lincoln and the Union Army.) We can all agree America underperformed its ideals for a long time. That’s tragic and unfortunate, but few countries, if any, have done better at overcoming the human propensity to prejudice, bigotry, and division.
If census counts of ethnicity and race have “long-term implications” for health statistics, then the census is being used in ways it was never intended to be. Certainly there are diseases and illnesses that affect different racial and ethnic groups disproportionately. Those differences matter to individual doctors treating individual patients, but why should it matter to the federal government?
And then there’s the journalist’s troubling obsewrvation that census classifications can have long-term implications for politics because “the number of people categorized as white” will be reduced.
If the number of white (or brown, or black, or red, or yellow, or purple) people has a serious impact on American politics, then American politics is in a very dangerous place: a place where policy is linked to skin color.
The best thing that could happen to America would be to drop the division of its citizenry into ever narrower boxes. There will never be any kind of American unity so long as Americans keep hyphenating themselves into clans and tribes.
Mozelle Ortiz, for instance, is of mixed Afro Puerto Rican descent. She feels the changes could eliminate that identity, even though people can choose more than one answer once the race and ethnicity questions are combined.
“My entire lineage, that of my Black Puerto Rican grandmother’s and all other non-white Spanish speaking peoples, will be erased,” Ortiz wrote the interagency group.
Good. It should be erased. You’re American, Mozelle. You can revel in your “identity” as someone of “mixed Afro Puerto Rican descent” all you want, just as I can revel in my Russian-Lithuanian-German-Danish-British-Austrian—Ashkenazi-Jew identity, but your passport, your flag, and your government are—like you, and like me—American.
We’ve both got that going for us, and it’s a wonderful thing. Cherish it!
I’d end there, but one last thought needs to be expressed: I expect progressives to back me up one-hundred percent on this. After all, if a person born with a penis and testes, and with Y chromosomes in nearly every single one of the 30-40 trillion cells of his body can nevertheless be a woman, then someone with a Chinese father and Jamaican mother ought to be able to identify as an Austrian-Inca American. Race and ethnicity are just social constructs, meaning any attempt to count them is meaningless.
So why bother?
Georges Seurat died on March 29, 1891. Mr. Seurat was a dotty artist who painted the world as he saw it. His eye condition was never treated.
On March 30, 1853, Vincent Van Gogh was born. Exactly 134 years later to the very day, his painting “Sunflowers” sold for $39.7 million. Van Gogh’s life was full of such eary coincidences.
On March 30, 1870, Texas allowed the United States to rejoin it.
On March 31, 1968, U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson wrapped up a speech about the Vietnam War by announcing that “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.” This established a precedent that many Americans suddenly find wildly intriguing.
March 29 was the birthday of Jennifer Capriati (1976), Lucy Lawless (1968), Elle Macpherson (1964), John Major (1943), Eric Idle (1943), Pearl Bailey (1918), Sam Walton (1918), and Cy Young (1867).
It was Commemoration Day in Madagascar, Youth Day in Taiwan, and Icaka New Year in Indonesia (unless that's a Lunar holiday, in which case it's probably some other day around this time).
March 30 is the birthday of Celine Dion (1968), Paul Reiser (1957), Eric Clapton (1945), Warren Beatty (1937), John Astin (1930), Peter Marshall (1930), Frankie Laine (1913), Vincent Van Gogh (1853), and Moses Maimonedes (1135).
It’s also be Spiritual Baptist Liberation Shouter Day in Trinidad and Tobago.
March 31 will be the birthday of Ewan McGregor (1971), Al Gore (1948), Rhea Perlman (1948), Gabe Kaplan (1945), Christopher Walken (1943), Herb Alpert (1935), Richard Chamberlain (1935), Shirley Jones (1934), Gordie Howe (1928), César Chávez (1927), Leo Buscaglia (1925), Henry Morgan (1915), Octavio Paz (1914), Joseph Haydn (1732), and Rene Descartes (1596).
It will also be Independence Day in Georgia and Freedom Day in Malta.
And Easter.
Happy Easter!
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