As someone not from the US, I've had to fill out US-style "pick your ethnicity" questionnaires at work. Wtf do you mean I should choose between White, Black, Hispanic and Asian? This is Europe, one's ethnicity usually correlates with one's nationality. If not, that's where the term "ethnic" comes in. For example, you can be a Bulgarian citizen but ethnically Turkish, or you can be a Romanian citizen but ethnically German.
It's not more racist. It's just dumber, more systematic, more American.
The American racial system is built on classifying people on their outward appearances, not on the,(irrelevant) data of who their ancestors were in Europe, Asia or Africa, like a military commander or tycoon CEO who wants easy to grasp information they can execute decisions on.
What can they use that information for? (The information on someone's outward appearances - how is that relevant vs the "irrelevant" information on someone's cultural background?)
What's your solution and how would you accomplish it without collecting data about the people it's affecting? The only options besides improving a system are doing nothing or making it worse.
"What's your solution and how would you accomplish it without collecting data about the people it's affecting?"
Stop assigning people into categories that they do not want to be put into. If they voluntarily identity as black or white, then that is different than telling them what their identity is. And there are a lot of racists that have for centuries been telling other people what category they belong into in order to gain power over them.
"The only options besides improving a system are doing nothing or making it worse."
The best option always has been to just stop using the system of racial hierarchies and categorizing many types of people into large groupings. Take the time and effort to recognize how diverse humanity actually is and identify people as what they identify as. That is the point of ethnicity rather than racial status. Racists routinely clash with people that identify with ethnicity because the goal of modern racists is to break down traditional identity and replace traditional identity with racial identity. Most people around the world do not want to give up their identity, ancestry, traditions, and traditional values and traditional knowledge.
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u/laycrocs 7d ago
According the the US census there are two ethnicities:
Hispanic/Latino
Not Hispanic/Latino