Racial classification furthers discrimination

By Alan Wood

We’ve all looked at them. Some checklists contain a lot of
races, some fewer. Some include generalized place-of-origin
groupings such as “Latino” or “Middle
Eastern,” some ask you to define which American Indian tribe
you are a member of, and others only seem to care about which
landmass your ancestors came from.

The 2000 Census followed the Office of Management and
Budget’s 1997 “Revisions to the Standard for the
Classification of Federal Data on Race and Ethnicity” to
classify us. By adding a “some other race” category and
allowing respondents to check off more than one box, there existed
126 different ways for the expression of racial identity on the
2000 Census. UC’s application for fall 2003 included 11
check-boxes plus three entirely different ways to be an
“other.”

What are all of those boxes for? The Census Bureau readily
admits that its racial categories “are socio-political
constructs and should not be interpreted as being scientific or
anthropological in nature.”

Indeed, the Census Bureau is not alone in saying that we
shouldn’t interpret race in any sort of scientific way. For
example, Oxford Geneticist Bryan Sykes was quoted in a New York
Times column as saying: “There’s no genetic basis for
any kind of rigid ethnic or racial classification at all.” In
addition, the Genomic Revolution exhibition at the American Museum
of Natural History explains that “genetic variations between
people within the same “˜racial’ group can be greater
than the variation between people of two different groups.”
In an editorial, The New England Journal of Medicine stated:
“Race is biologically meaningless.” Earlier this year,
members of the Institute of Biological Sciences in Brazil conducted
a study in which people were categorized by their perceived race
and then analyzed for genetic similarities. The study found that
there was no way to determine your race from your genes.

So if it is not scientific, why do we spend so much money (if
passed, Proposition 54 has the potential to save $10 million
annually) collecting and looking at this data? Unless one takes a
truly cynical view of special interests wanting to protect their
ability to take money from one group and give it to another, it is
hard to explain. Deciding which race a person belongs to stems from
the days of slavery and Jim Crow when supposedly serious men
debated and eventually arrived at the conclusion that if you are
“one drop” black, you should be counted as black.

Critics of Proposition 54 routinely argue that we would lose
crucial information and that such a loss would stifle programs
geared around that information. To me, that is a bit like saying
that if the witch hunts never took place, Salem officials would
never have known who the witches were. In applying to the UC this
year, a white boy from Omaha and a Palestinian refugee would both
have checked off “Caucasian” ““ as if that gave
anyone any insight whatsoever into their experience with
discrimination and racism.

We could go the other way and just create a lot more boxes. We
could ask applicants to tell us their religion, political
affiliation, or whether or not they’re gay. After all, there
are many ways in which people discriminate aside from race. If it
makes you uncomfortable to imagine the government tracking that
data, shouldn’t you also be uncomfortable with the government
collecting statistics about something as ill-defined as race?
Eventually, one could foresee a future where there will be so many
boxes, all of your individuality will be confined to someone
else’s idea of which boxes you fit into.

Opponents will argue that we need the data for medical research
and law enforcement. Indeed, the measure includes broad-based
exceptions for those two fields as well as what is needed to comply
with federal mandates like housing laws. Real research should not
be affected by the initiative, and its authors have gone to great
lengths to ensure the scope of the legislation is to stop the
political collection of data, not to stifle scientific studies.

Racism exists because of ignorant generalizations. As
proposition author and UC Regent Ward Connerly said at a Regents
meeting in May, “When the government sanctions racial
classifications, we give legitimacy to the theory that race is
real, that there are, indeed, separate races.” These days,
the government and higher education are the two largest, most
organized racist organizations in the country. Vote
“yes” on Proposition 54.

Wood works as a Programming Analyst in the UCLA Design|Media
department.