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

[sorry for plugging this at the top...]
Catch this--I saw a form a couple of days ago that
asked you to mark race as (roughly) "White",
"African-American", "Native American", "Asian
American", "Multi-racial", and "Spanish Surname".
Okay, so there was this lady I knew from Guatemala who
married a "White" (the only one referred to by colour,
notice....).  So, somehow, upon her wedding she
changed races.

And I'm glad that they have "multi-racial" for blokes
like me--I remember my senior year of high school,
this girl of half Japanese, half Anglo-American
descent being forced to fill out a form saying what
race she was--she was asked to disinherit herself from
half her family.  But "multi-racial"--what's that?
According to that, I'm of the same race as the girl I
just mentioned, or of Tiger Woods, or whatever.

Clint

--- "Thomas R. Wier" <trwier@...> wrote:
> 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

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
HotJobs - Search Thousands of New Jobs
http://www.hotjobs.com