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| GeoCommunity Mailing List |
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| Mailing List Archives |
| Subject: | GISList: race and census |
| Date: |
12/26/2001 12:52:08 PM |
| From: |
Rebecca Morrison |
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> To my memory he's correct about the hispanic being a question of decent,
not
race. That question always confused people when I had to ask it after
asking the race question.
You must have worked on 1990 or before. They switched the order for the
2000 census because of that issue. And Hispanic is one of the two official
ethnicities of the US census. The descent question has many more options
(e.g. Irish and Welsh).
> I did love asking black people what race they
were. I got quite a few laughs from 'em. :-)
In the old days (before about 1960) they didn't ask. At one time, the
census used to give their workers diagrams of eye, nose, and lip shapes so
they could "correctly" categorize people.
Think about the terrorist they've got in London whom they thought was Sri
Lankan, but he turned out to be British/Jamaican. I'm using National
categories here, but race is not easily distinguished by sight. I once
asked two women sitting next to each other if they were sisters, but one of
them was from Nepal, and the other was from the South Pacific! The truth
is, race is a social construction, and physiognomy varies more within the
so-called "races" than it does between them. If we can tell the difference
between black and white, it's because we're ignoring a lot of other
differences and similarities. Most black people in the United States have
both European and African ancestry, for instance.
But don't get me started...
Beckee Morrison
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