Mixed answers to multiracial terminology

6 thoughts on “Mixed answers to multiracial terminology”

1. Kind of interesting that the story focuses on people who are European-and-African multis, and kind of assumes that that's what the question of multi-racial/multi-ethnic/check-more-than-one is about.

   Now me, I'm 1/4 European, and the rest is a collection of central and south Asian. In the taxonomy of US census categorization, Central Asia doesn't even exist. The 'Stans were USSR colonies until the wall fell, and when I say "Central Asia" to most Americans, they don't know where it is, despite the fact that we've been executing the longest foreign war in US history there (Afghanistan).

   It's typical of colonial wars that we don't learn the history or culture of the region. If we were bombing people in Europe, damn sure we'd learn German history.

   But people in Central Asia are meant to remain sub-human in order that we don't worry about killing them, so we don't learn the rich cultural history of the region, and how the Great Game — the colonial wars between Russian and England, later the USSR and US — destroyed the kingdoms and empires of the steppes and turned them into proxy states of the great trading empires.

   That is after all, how we got Bin Laden and his thugs, with the CIA training his Mujaheddin up to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan as young men, before they renamed themselves as The Foundation, The Base, from the verb قَعَدَ ‎(qaʿada, “to sit down, to lie in wait, to waylay”). Pay no attention to the history behind the curtain.

   And I "don't look Asian," so when I get a check one, and check Asian, or when I get a check many and check European and Asian, I often get European derived people, "white" people who are the same basic skin tone as me, looking at me as though I were trying to cheat on a test.

   Curiously, my son, who's actually 50% European on his dad's side, has a more pronounced epicanthal fold than I do. He's really embraced the whole thing.

   Man, if I had a C-note for every time a social worker or bureaucrat questioned my checking Asian, I'd be able to pay a few months' rent.

   Go Google Tajik red heads. These are not exactly the people who traveled west to over-run Europe and become the Celts, but they were likely relatives 6000 years ago.

   When you see videos of Kabul on the news and see white people in local dress, with pale skin and gray eyes, those are not Europeans adopting local dress, those are Pashtuns. You see them as whites, assume they are Europeans, because they are as pale skinned as you are, and their hair and eyes run to chestnut to black, from hazel to brown. But they are indigenous to Afghanistan, and have the type B blood of the region.

   All white people are not European type A/O blood folks. So it's pretty hilarious that all the forms in the US don't say "European" but say "White."

   That's amazingly racist. Even in US history, the definition of who got to be white has changed.

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_whiteness_in_the_United_States

   I particularly think it's hilarious that a black Algerian is legally white in the US, because he or she is from North Africa, and we wanted Arab Egyptians to be white.

   None of this is rational because all of it is based on fallacies and culture myths and xenophobia.

   So yes, I am a cosmetically white person of color, from a region assumed to be brown which is actually quite diverse in skin tones.

   That doesn't make the impacts on anyone's lives any less real.

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2. +Shava Nerad Well, yes, given that "race" is a subjective classification, it's not at all surprising that racial labels get applied in weird ways.

   For the US Census, http://www.census.gov/topics/population/race/about.html has the information on racial categorizations. As you note, "White" is defined as "A person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa" — which would presumably also include the Central Asian people for this purpose (the Central Asian nations are sometimes lumped under "Greater Middle East"). "Asian" is focused on East and Southern Asians: "any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent including, for example, Cambodia, China, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippine Islands, Thailand, and Vietnam."

   It would certainly make sense, though, if Central Asians (folk in the various 'stans and former SSRs) would be called out in one or another of the categories.

   (http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/interactives/multiracial-timeline/ has an interesting interactive page on how the census race categories have changed. )

   Interestingly, the Hispanic-related stuff is in a separate question; the Census page notes "People who identify their origin as Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish may be of any race."

   'It's typical of colonial wars that we don't learn the history or culture of the region. If we were bombing people in Europe, damn sure we'd learn German history.'

   There was certainly a lot more education about the Balkans when we were bombing Serbia a few decades back than there has been on Afghanistan.

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3. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/03/24/census-bureau-explores-new-middle-eastnorth-africa-ethnic-category/

   Actually, it's only supposed to cover Arabs, who petitioned the government to be considered "White" when the Asian Exclusian Acts came in. So it was explicitly meant to exclude Turks, Persians, Indians Tatars, Tajiks, Afghans, Pashtuns, etc.

   Politics. 😉

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4. +Shava Nerad Yeah. And I strongly suspect that raising that category recommendation before Congress will encounter its own political issues.

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5. Oh yeah.

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6. What to call people of multiple back grounds in the US?

   Dunno… ‘American’ perhaps?

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