It dawned on me after several conversations about race or to be more accurate about color, that a huge change can be effected by marking the racial checkbox differently. If you are of mixed race, put white instead of black; put Asian instead of white; put white instead of Hispanic; put black instead of white.
Now, many of these checkboxes have an opt out. I often X that box, because the data is irrelevant at this point.
Only 11% of the earth is white and even that can likely be called into question. The US is approximately 60% white and rapidly changing. The checkbox can be important for medical purposes from sickle cell to Ashkenazi specifics to the size of our ducts for transplant purposes. But this too will change because according to current demographic projections, the United States is expected to become a “majority-minority” country by the year 2045, meaning that no single racial or ethnic group will make up more than 50% of the total population.
And even more challenging, one human may be many ethnicities; which box are they supposed to check? This is largely due to the projected growth of various racial and ethnic minority groups, particularly Hispanic and Asian populations. Yet demographic projections are subject to change and can be influenced by a variety of social, economic, and political factors. Additionally, the concept of “people of color” as a racial identity is complex and can vary depending on cultural and historical contexts. And of course, the concept that one drop of African blood should force your hand to choose how you identify is ridiculous and harmful, despite the fact that it persists to this day.
The origins of the race checkbox can be traced back to the United States Census Bureau’s practice of collecting data on race and ethnicity in the 1970 census as a way to standardize a database of our residents. Since then, the checkbox system has been widely adopted, however, the use of checkboxes to collect data on race has been criticized for oversimplifying the complex nature of racial identity and perpetuating racial stereotypes.
The terms “black” and “white” have been used to describe race for several centuries. In America, these terms were first used in the 17th century to describe the racial categories of enslaved Africans and European colonizers. Over time, the meaning and usage of these terms has evolved. For example, during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, the term “black” was reclaimed by African Americans as a way to assert their racial identity and challenge racial discrimination. There are many terms used globally to describe people of color, and the specific terms used can vary depending on the cultural and historical context. Here are a few examples:
– In Latin America, the term “afrodescendiente” is often used to describe people of African descent.
– In South Africa, the term “coloured” is used to describe people of mixed racial heritage.
So how and when may this checkbox phenomena change?
Thankfully it is underway. According to Newswise — The Biden administration is proposing changes to forms for the 2030 census and federal government surveys that would include a new checkbox for “Middle Eastern or North African” and a “Hispanic or Latino” box.
Monica Cornejo, assistant professor at Cornell University, says: “The new checkbox proposed by the Biden Administration does not only highlight the limitations of governmental forms in accurately capturing the unique identifies (and experiences) of its social citizens, but it provides an avenue to challenge the homogenization of ethnic and racial minoritizes in the United States.
Indeed, the new checkbox would enable individuals to select the identity label that best describes their self-view and unique experiences, which might promote positive identity reconceptualization among these communities. Although a small change, the new checkbox is a step in the right direction in acknowledging and revising previously accepted procedures that create stigma among ethnic and racial communities.”
And it is about time as the one drop rule is stigmatizing not only on a global level but also a very personal one. Here is when it came to a head. One of the most famous cases of this was in Homer Plessy, a man seven-eighths white and one-eighth black. Plessy, who had predominantly white physical characteristics, was categorized and segregated as black because of his distant black relatives; he refused to abide to segregation laws while boarding a train car and was subsequently arrested. The resulting court case, Plessy v. Ferguson, would go down in history as a crucial probe on the 14th Amendment, but it also persists as a prime example of the enduring impact of the one-drop rule in structural racism. It fundamentally classified and compared races in relation to each other — one race being deemed the “one-drop” contaminant, a pollutant to the “ethnic purity” of a racial whole.
Luckily today we have Nicholas Jones and Roberto Ramirez, of the Census Bureau’s population division. They are two of the lead designers of the proposed changes countering that a combined question will lead to better data on race and ethnicity, including for Afro-Latinos. They and their team spent more than a decade testing the proposed change, with the 2010 Census Race and Hispanic Origin Alternative Questionnaire Experiment and the 2015 National Content Test, both of which had combined questions. Ramirez described the 2015 test as “the largest ethnicity-and-race content test we ever conducted at the Census Bureau, with over a million housing units sampled.”
Thanks to the lengthy “Origin Code List,” the Census Bureau now tracks far more subgroups, including more than eighty designations that apply specifically to Latinos. For example, the subgroups may contain Chapín (from Guatemala), Zonian (from the Panama Canal Zone), Arauco (from Chile), Taíno (Indigenous from the Caribbean), and Garifuna (Afro-Indigenous communities primarily from Honduras and Belize). In fact, a recent Pew Research Center survey found that about one in seven Afro-Latino adults (eight hundred thousand of six million total) chose not to identify as Hispanic.
Sooner rather than later all of this will and should only be a matter for healthcare professionals to help diagnose, transplant, prescribe and gather research. Today it is still mired in irrelevant corporate, financial and government positioning creating categories which are not even accurate.
Having participated in the data collecting for the Census one year, it is easy to see how unreliable the data is. 23andMe will no doubt be instrumental in clearing up all of this, since many of us don’t even know ‘where we come from.’ I have friends who were shocked to learn they were not who they thought they were genetically. And as many of us know, that can go even deeper with undisclosed adoptions, a straying mother, and simple Ellis Island hurried name changes. Last but not least, tune in to Who Do You Think You Are on NBC to learn a little more about the impact of excellent genealogical research and the surprises that even a well-documented family may encounter as they delve back into their histories.
Cheers to change!
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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