A lot of fuss in the news today about a sensible proposal to allow people to check one box labeled ‘multiracial’ under federal requirements for collection of race data for publicly funded universities.
The trouble with race classification is that it is scientifically meaningless and empirically racist itself.
Statistically we are all ‘illegitimate’ descendants of unknown fathers and racial traits are not always visible. Therefore none of us knows what our ‘race’ is.
What you mark on a box indicating race necessarily misleading as any geneticist or genealogist can attest:
1. Because race is an abstract notion attempts to classify it logically are always pseudo science. Hence government forms almost always end up confusing nationality and religious and cultural groupings.
(I ended up in a fun argument with a mindless bureaucrat at my local council in the UK because I marked myself down as Irish on a form marked ‘ethnicity’. I pointed out that despite having absolutely no connection to Irish nationality, since the form was marked ‘ethnicity’, being ‘Celtic’ meant that ‘Irish’ was a closer match than ‘White’.)
2. People’s definition of race is usually based upon visual stereotypes. If you have an African American father and an Anglo Saxon American (the term is no more preposterous and patronising than African American) mother you will receive genes from both, you may or receive the gene that determines skin color from either parent you may be ‘black’ and your sister ‘white’ but you are not necessarily any more African American than her.
3. Genetic Genealogy based upon Y-Chromosome tests shows that a couple of percent of us are illegitimate without knowing it (this word is a offensive as bastard). If you compound this rate over several generations then we are all illegitimate.
4. Visible traits are biased to whatever is considered preferable by racists. If you are mixed race you are more often called black than white. Bob Marley, whose father was white, was rarely called white.