Re: CHAT: US ancestry [was Re: FWD [OT but interesting] Arctic people seek common alphabet]

Quoting Steg Belsky <draqonfayir@...>:

> On Fri, 16 Aug 2002 02:48:58 -0500 "Thomas R. Wier" <trwier@...>
> writes:
> > Perhaps most curious of all about these two lists is the glaring
> > nce of some category to represent African Americans', Hispanics'
> > and many Asians' ancestries, who seem to be lumped into an "Other
> > groups" category with a whopping 83,110,113 people in it, while
> > Germans and French both have three categories, and Scots have two.
[snip]

> Where are these lists from?  If i remember correctly my filling out the
> census form, i was suprised at the sheer number of subdivisions within
> the "Hispanic" and "(East/South-)Asian" categories, while in contrast
> everyone whose ancestors came from the large and varied area roughly
> bounded by Iceland, Morocco, Iran, and (European) Russia were all lumped
> together into the cateogry "White" (or maybe "Caucasian").
I got those from the US Census website.  I looked for other
kinds of ancestry listed, but I didn't find any then.  It may
well be that all caucasian ancestries are grouped to gather,
all mongoloid ancestries, etc.  Which would still be worrisome,
since it implies that race *does*, somehow, have meaning.

 =========================================================================
Thomas Wier
Dept. of Linguistics  "Nihil magis praestandum est quam ne pecorum ritu
University of Chicago sequamur antecedentium gregem, pergentes non qua
1010 E. 59th Street   eundum est, sed qua itur." -- Seneca
Chicago, IL 60637

Replies