On Sun, 2 Nov 2003, Ray Thomas wrote:
> Maybe Dave Gordon was talking to the wrong people in Washington. The
> people who need convincing that race is not a scientific construction is the
> US Bureau of Statistics. The Bureau actually has a heading on their
> website that lists about 200 "Racial statistics news releases" that go back
> to 1996. One of the more recent, dated June 12, 2003, starts as follows:
It would be silly to conclude from the effort devoted to measuring "race"
by the U.S. Census Bureau that they believe that race is a scientific
(much less biological) construct. Collection of "race" information is a
statutory requirement upon the Bureau, mostly due to laws intended to
monitor compliance with civil rights provisions with respect to
legislative districting and a number of other issues. Modifications of
the "racial" categories have taken place over the years to make the
answers more reliable (in the measurement sense, i.e. to maximize the
extent to which the same answer will be provided by the same person at
different times and in different data systems) and in response to
political pressures, often from the affected groups.
There is no doubt that "race" is a widely used social categorization in
the U.S. and furthermore corresponds to a significant extent to the lines
along which social goods are inequitably divided (even after controlling
for measures of social class such as income or occupation), hence the
widespread use of racial categories in measuring disparities of various
kinds within the U.S. population. Of course when racism has vanished then
we won't have to worry about that any more, but in the meantime ...
Alan Zaslavsky
Harvard Medical School
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