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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: geode00 who wrote (172376)	10/12/2005 2:49:30 PM
From: Sun Tzu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

On Politics and Race As far as I know most (all?) Hispanics are counted as "white". From the census perspective you belong to one of 6 categories: White, Black, Yellow (Asian), Red (native/Alaskan), Brown (Hawaiian/Pacific Islander), Other. So where do you think the Hispanics fall? Starting in 2000, you may check mark more than one group, so in theory we have 126 different "races". I read an interesting article on the changing rules of census and its legal/political ramifications...for the life of me I cannot remember its details. But a clear conclusion of the essay was that "Whites" remain the majority for another decade or two only because Hispanics would be counted as "white". While we are on the subject, I found this little tid-bit interesting: ... There is, for instance, a test developed by social scientists to measure the attitude of college students on the question of race. Some of you may be familiar with it. Students are told to imagine that they are sitting at home one evening, when a messenger from on high knocks at their door. He tells them that there's been a terrible mistake - you were supposed to have been born Black. What's more, in order to set things straight, you are going to become Black at the stroke of midnight and live that way until your death 50 years from now. You'll still be the same person, but no one will recognize you. It's not your fault that this has happened, and we're prepared to compensate you for the trouble this will cause you. Just name your price. The most common answer students give is $50 million - one million dollars for every year of being Black in America. Now, ask yourselves, in a truly colorblind society, would having a Black skin warrant such generous payment? Then there is the study published in February by the New England Journal of Medicine, which found that doctors are 40 percent less likely to order sophisticated heart tests for African- Americans than for whites. The study was carefully controlled. The doctors saw actors posing as patients on video. They asked each patient the same questions, and got the same answers. After correcting for statistical errors, the researchers concluded that these life and death decisions were the result of racial bias. Now, I assure you that the great majority of these students and doctors did not consider themselves biased in any way. On the contrary, they probably would describe themselves as colorblind. Such is the role of self deception in the politics of race... ltg.ca.gov You may also want to read through this carnegie.org for some historical perspectives: Census 2000 and Liberal Democracy Since the nation’s founding we have counted and classified ourselves every ten years—but it was not until the 2000 census that Americans were given the opportunity to declare themselves as being of more than one race. This may appear to be a technical adjustment in how we classify racial groups, but the “multiple-race” option on the census form goes to the core of the tension between unity and diversity. The multiple-race option, I suggest, has set off tremors that signal a political and social earthquake to come. This earthquake will occur against a backdrop of far-reaching shifts in the nation’s demography. We are in the early stages of diversifying our population in a manner historically unprecedented. We start with the fact that the foreign born cohort of our population is now ten percent. This may not seem significant: after all, as a frontier nation built upon immigration, we have always had high levels of foreign-born people living within our borders, with rates occasionally rising well above ten percent. Our liberal democracy has adjusted itself accordingly, embracing both assimilation and accommodation. Certainly there have been rough moments, yet we have generally found ways to work through them. But something new is underway. The 19th and early 20th century immigration patterns transformed a nation initially based on a northern European population into one that became pan-European. A nation that started the 19th century as a Protestant stronghold ended it as an amalgam of Protestants, Catholics and Jews. This transformation, though consequential, was qualitatively different from the situation that we now face. The U.S. has become home to people from, literally, every civilization and of every nationality, and speaking almost every language. Not in recorded history has there been a nation so demographically complex. So it falls to us, the American citizens of the 21st century, to fashion, from this diversity, history’s first “world nation.” Since the first census in 1790, which recognized only a few population categories—free whites, other free people and slaves—those who count and classify us have tried to keep up with changing demographic realities. But looking to the future, how will we deal with our extraordinary and ever-growing diversity? Will newly arriving groups be counted and sorted in some yet-to-be-designed racial and ethnic taxonomy? If so, the issues to be worked out are daunting: will Sudanese refugees, for example, be assigned to the same “race” as seventh-generation African Americans? Will Arab Americans become an independent racial group? Is “white” one race or a residual category for everyone not noticeably something else? Resolving these issues justly is a challenge for our fractious politics...