Please comment against more divide on race and ethnicity

Some friend shared “Revision of Standards for Maintaining, Collecting, and Presenting Federal Data on Race and Ethnicity: Proposals From Federal Interagency Working Group” with me. The link location is https://www.regulations.gov/document?D=OMB-2017-0003-0001. You can comment by clicking at the top right corner.

I can see more divide on race and ethnicity. Luckily they are not talking about culture yet. From my own experience and my participation on OneHoward group meeting several week ago, I definitely believe sometimes culture difference is larger than race or ethnicity difference. This more division will not create harmony everybody try to seek and dream.

We should boycott this kind of absurdity. This is in my mind: five groups– Native Americans, White Americans, Black Americans, Asian Americans, Latino Americans. Sure the best is just one group: Americans.

Take a look at the following proposals. I moved white American to the top just in case more divisions should be created, for example, Russian Americans, or Jewish Americans?

Their division on race and ethnicity are:

  1. For white Americans,  dividing into German, Irish, English, Italian, Polish, and French.
  2. For native Americans, dividing into into Navajo Nation, Blackfeet Tribe, Mayan, Aztec, Native Village or Barrow Inupiat Traditional Government, and Nome Eskimo Community
  3. For Asian Americans,  dividing into Chinese, Filipino, Asian Indian, Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, and an “other Asian” category?
  4. For Black or African American, dividing into African American, Jamaican, Haitian, Nigerian, Ethiopian, and Somali.
  5. For Hispanic or Latino, dividing into separately Mexican or Mexican American, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Salvadoran, Dominican, and Colombian
  6. For Hawaiian or Pacific Islanders,  dividing into Native Hawaiian, Samoan, Chamorro, Tongan, Fijian, and Marshallese.

If following this trend, my wife and I will be classified into two race/ethnicity one day because we speak different dialects since we can always find ways to differentiate or discriminate people.

Where is the end? Look at another reference how California’s new law AB-1726. divide Asian Americans into 25 groups. See my original post: https://chaowu.org/2016/06/10/california-race-narrative-ab-1726/

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One thought on “Please comment against more divide on race and ethnicity”

  1. The game played by the Census Bureau every ten years or so should not be perpetrated. It should be ended. Why should ANY governmental body be putting us all in unscientific, phony, and divisive boxes? Does someone get a kick out of it? What it surely does is encourage people to think of ourselves as belonging in one of those boxes and moving on from that to think of ourselves as either superior or inferior by virtue of being there. This leads to misunderstandings and acts of violence. Does anyone REALLY need this phony information? REALLY? What we all, as distinct individual persons, really need is to be treated equally and without discrimination by our government and, hopefully, by other persons. That, to me, is what “the equal protection of the law” provided in the US Constitution should mean.
    When I respond to the phony question every ten years, I define myself as HUMAN. If everyone did the same, the nasty game would be over. But how we each define ourselves is for us, individually, to decide and I do not and will not define anyone other than myself.

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