At 4:05 PM -0800 3/14/00, Bill Stewart wrote:
>
>Tim ranted about racial/ethnic classifications.
>A former boss of mine had a coworker named "Mueller" who lost one
>job opportunity to a reasonably-well-qualified minority during
>some of the early affirmative action stuff. Mueller _was_
>a Puerto Rican, but the bureaucratic definition of the time was
>"Spanish-Surnamed", so he didn't fill their quota.
>Do Americans from North African Arab backgrounds get to be
>"African-American", or do they just have to check "Semite"?
I got my form today. It's worse than I thought. Though I got the
version written mostly in English, not the Ebonics version.
"White" is apparently the catch-all for Celtic, Nordic, Czech,
French, Polish, Afrikaans, Jewish, Arabic, Jordanian, Gypsy, Spanish
(but not Hispanic), German, Greek, Russian, Uralian, Kazakh,
Azerbajani, and Urbanian peoples.
Just "white," never mind how dark one is.
There's a special question in which one is required by law to
specifically say one either is or is not Hispanic. (Though I think a
person born of Spanish parents--real Spanish, as in Spain, not as in
the barrio--get to call themselves honorary white people. Confusing,
isn't it?)
By contrast, Asians get a whole _bunch_ of PC categories:
Asian Indian, Japanese, Native Hawaiian, Chinese, Korean, Guamanian
or Chamorro, Filipino, Vietnamese, Samoan, Other Asian (print race),
Other Pacific Islander (print race).
I guess nobody has the heart, or the willingness to be politically
incorrect, to point out that the Hamming distance between Koreans and
Chinese, or between Chamorrans and Samoans, and so on, is a helluva
lot less than the Hamming distance between Kazakhs and Swedes or
between Sephardic Jews and red-haired Irishmen.
And no guidelines on what constitutes a race, on why a person with
one black parent and one parent of mixed race is to be called "black"
even though the white blood is 75% of the total. (This is the way
race is reported...I was only slightly joking when I said earlier
that anything more than 1/64th negro makes one a negro...Himmler
would be proud.)
Mighty white of them.
--Tim May
--
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
ComSec 3DES: 831-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
"Cyphernomicon" | black markets, collapse of governments.
