Whatever the word race may mean elsewhere in the world, or to the world of
science, it is clear that in America the categories are arbitrary,
confused, and hopelessly intermingled. In many cases, Americans don't know
who they are, racially speaking. A National Center for Health Statistics
study found that 5.8 percent of the people who called themselves black were
seen as white by a census interviewer. Nearly a third of the people
identifying themselves as Asian were classified as white or black by
independent observers. This was also true of 70 percent of people who
identified themselves as American Indians.
Robert A Hahn, an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention, analyzed deaths of infants born from 1983 through 1985. In an
astounding number of cases, the infant had a different race on its death
certificate from the one on its birth certificate, and this finding led to
staggering increases in the infant mortality rate for minority populations
- 46.9 greater for American Indians, 48.8 percent greater for
Japanese-Americans, 78.7 percent greater for Filipinos - over what had been
previously recorded. Such disparities cast doubt on the dependability of
race as a criterion for any statistical survey.
"It seems to me that we have to go back and reevaluate the whole system,"
Hahn says. "We have to ask, 'What do these categories mean?' We are not
talking about race in the way that geneticists might use the term, because
we are not making any kind of biological assessment. It's closer to
self-perceived membership in a population - which is essentially what
ethnicity is."
Racial statistics do serve an important purpose in the monitoring and
enforcement f civil rights laws; indeed, that has become the main
justification for such data. Hiring practices, jury selection,
discriminatory housing patterns, apportionment of political power - in all
these areas, and more, the government patrols society, armed with little
more than statistical information to ensure equal and fair treatment. "We
need these categories essentially to get rid of them," Hahn says.
The unwanted corollary of slotting people by race is that such officially
sanctioned classifications may actually worsen racial strife. By creating
social welfare programs based on race rather than on need, the government
sets citizens against one another precisely because of perceived racial
differences. "It is not 'race' but a practice of racial classification that
bedevils the society," writes Yehudi Webster, an African-American
sociologist at California State University, Los Angeles, and the author of
The Radicalization of America. The use of racial statistics, he and others
have argued, creates a reality of racial divisions, which then require
solutions, such as busing, affirmative action, and multicultural education,
all of which are bound to fail, because they heighten the racial awareness
that leads to contention. Webster believes that adding a "multiracial" box
to the Native American, Asian-Pacific, black, and white racial options -
and Hispanic ethnic option - in the racial self-identification section of
the U.S. census, as some advocate, would be "another leap into absurdity,"
because it reinforces the concept of race. "in a way, it's a continuation
of the one-drop principle. Anybody can say, 'I've got one drop of something
- I must be multiracial.' It may finally convince Americans of the
absurdity of racial classification." - exerpt end
As per the Oxford American Dictionary:
ethnicity - ethnic background, trait
ethnic - of a racial group
racial - of or based on race
race - 1. one of the great divisions of mankind with certain inherited
physical characteristics in common (such as color of skin and hair, shape
of eyes and nose) 2. a number of people related by common descent
descent - lineage, family origin
lineage - ancestry, the line of descendants of an ancestor
Peace...Jordan