race

Another Other.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 2 Comments

I came across something in the vein of ‘others’ yesterday when I was researching ‘TikTok, History and Issues‘.

It was in ‘Young Americans are defending the U.S. after TikTok videos criticizing it went viral‘ (emphasis mine):

“…Shami, who grew up in a multi-language household with a Syrian father and Irish-Catholic mother, said she often feels she’s labeled as “other” because she’s an American who wears hijab. She said Sara Falcon’s videos struck a nerve with her because they played into the idea that the U.S. looks, acts and speaks exclusively one way.

“My grandparents raised cows and corn,” Shami said. “I don’t know how much more American you can get.”…”

So this is likely an example of another ‘other‘. That would be about the only commonality I would have with her, but that’s the beauty of being an ‘other’. She’s multicultural, clearly. I don’t know that I agree with her take on things in that article since in my lifetime it’s been black or white in the United States.

She must have a very interesting perspective on things. We all do, with our own mixes of identities and cultures, lacking the monotone of the pseudo-science of race that racism is built on.

I imagine she might be asked “Where are you from” a lot when she meets new people. Well, she’s clearly from the United States. What more has to be said?

Find The Others.

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When I was basically told off by some people who thought I was ‘looking for a cookie’, then dug into the history and growth of ‘Some Other Race’ in the U.S. Census, I was surprised. I had no idea how many people didn’t fit neatly into the categorizations of race existed in the United States, and how much they had grown.

It’s a far cry from when I grew up. Of course, because the people who claim some other race are so diverse, there is not much to connect them other than the U.S. Census which is as flawed as the concept of ‘race’.

Speaking for myself, I just don’t like being pigeon-holed, sent into a color-coded box to make someone else happy. That’s not my identity and it never will be.

It is simply extraordinary that there are so many people out there with their own stories. People who group people together diminish the stories of individual identity, of not feeling like one fits in to a system that tries to force people to fit in. It begs the question why the system exists in the first place.

In perusing around some more on the topic, I came across the famous Timothy Leary quote, the last 3 sentences of which are in the pictures.

I could not find the source of the quote, which bothers me a bit because it’s something that, before reading the quote, I lived.

“Admit it. You aren’t like them. You’re not even close. You may occasionally dress yourself up as one of them, watch the same mindless television shows as they do, maybe even eat the same fast food sometimes. But it seems that the more you try to fit in, the more you feel like an outsider, watching the “normal people” as they go about their automatic existences. For every time you say club passwords like “Have a nice day” and “Weather’s awful today, eh?”, you yearn inside to say forbidden things like “Tell me something that makes you cry” or “What do you think deja vu is for?”. Face it, you even want to talk to that girl in the elevator. But what if that girl in the elevator (and the balding man who walks past your cubicle at work) are thinking the same thing? Who knows what you might learn from taking a chance on conversation with a stranger? Everyone carries a piece of the puzzle. Nobody comes into your life by mere coincidence. Trust your instincts. Do the unexpected. Find the others…”

Timothy Leary (attrib), no source found.

The others. Generally, the most interesting people I have found could resonate with this quote. The ‘others’. The ones who defy the need to fit in, who identify more as themselves than what others expect them to be, either by peer pressure or societal pressure to belong to a group. Those in groups are at least partly defined by the groups they identify with, and all that comes with it.

It’s not about ‘race’, or any of that other nonsense – and it is nonsense. To be defined by a color or nationality or a job description is limiting. If all you are is defined by society, then you have been shaped by society more than you are shaping it.

Leary was right. We do need to find the others, the gente real, the real people out there who don’t want to be defined by someone else’s hatreds or acceptances. Maybe, just maybe, if we connect, we can create a better system, more granular, of people who have more to contribute to us solving our puzzles than attempts at hierarchy that implicitly demean.

We have more original cookies, I think, or at least we don’t pretend someone’s cookies are better than others based on categories.

We “Others”

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 4 Comments

‘Some Other Race’, or as I say, ‘Other’, is a growing demographic as I mentioned yesterday. Had I not been given as much resistance in discussion, I would have gone along thinking that

A Colorful History

The United States Constitution (Article I, Section 2) established representation in the U.S. House of Representatives was based on population determined by census. It’s a very interesting read – I encourage the reader to follow links I provide to get a feel for the broader picture. In writing this, I am writing specifically about the growing demographic that is of ‘Some Other Race’, or ‘Other’.

Of course, the census was quite different in 1790. The questions asked were:

  • Name of head of family
  • Number of free white males age 16 years and upwards, including head of family
  • Number of free white males under 16 years old
  • Number of free white females, including head of family
  • Number of all other free persons [free African-Americans]
  • Number of slaves

This basically slotted everyone into one of 3 categories: free whites, all other free persons and slaves. To date, while there are discussions about other races, the one that pulls all the oxygen out of the room is just the same from the outside looking in. There is reason for this, but with such a growing demographic as ‘Other’ has been, the choice to use ‘some other race’ is increasingly a larger minority made up of many types of people.

‘Free Whites’ was a part of the 1790 Nationality Act. Only white, male property owners could naturalize and acquire the status of citizens. Women, people who were not recognized as white and indentured servants could not. In so doing, a legal category of “aliens ineligible for citizenship” was created and racial restriction for citizenship was not completely eliminated until 1952. If you were not eligible for citizenship, you weren’t permitted to own property, be represented in court, have public employment and voting. At this time this affected a lot of Asians.

Mulatto was added in 1850, bringing the categories to 4, and it was all based on whites and blacks. By 2010, there were 63 possible race categories. Of related interest and reading is the ‘One Drop Rule‘, which culturally still seems to be used. We’ll get back to that.

From 2016, we have this:

“Something unusual has been taking­­­­­­ place with the United States Census: A minor category that has existed for more than 100 years is elbowing its way forward. “Some Other Race,” a category that first entered the form as simply “Other” in 1910, was the third-largest category after “White” and “Black” in 2010, alarming officials, who are concerned that if nothing is done ahead of the 2020 census, this non-categorizable category of people could become the second-largest racial group in the United States…”

“The Rise of the American ‘Others'”, Sowmiya Ashok, The Atlantic, August 27th, 2016

It’s awkward to say that ‘Other’ is a racial group, which presents the inherent bias in a system designed to track people by race – a cheap attempt at color coding humanity into things to manage. As Kermit the Frog might say, it’s not easy being green.

From 2018, we have:

…The United States census breaks our country into six general racial categories: White; Black; Asian; Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander; American Indian or Alaska Native; and Some Other Race. “Hispanic, Latino or Spanish origin” is treated not as a race but as an ethnicity — a question asked separately. So someone may be White (Hispanic) or Black (Hispanic) but not simply Hispanic. As a result, many Hispanics check “White” or, increasingly, “Some Other Race.” This ill-defined category is what mixed-race Americans, like me — half Burmese, half Luxembourgian-Irish — often check. It might just as well be called “Generally Brown.” Today, the third-largest racial group in America is “Some Other Race” — and it is made up overwhelmingly of Hispanics…

“The Americans Our Government Won’t Count“, Alex Wagner, New York Times, March 30th, 2018.

It ends up that there may have been some padding in the statistics, too.

“…It is also no coincidence that the reforms the administration is resisting would have decreased the number of American “Whites.” Census research showed that when presented with the proposed changes, Hispanics identified as “Hispanic” alone at significantly higher rates than they did as “White (Hispanic)” or “Some Other Race (Hispanic).” The same was true for residents of Middle Eastern origin, who, when given a category of their own, mostly chose it over “White.”

This would have exposed the fact that the category of “Whites” has been artificially inflated, eroding its primacy at a time when whiteness — of the decidedly European strain — has gained new currency…”

The Americans Our Government Won’t Count“, Alex Wagner, New York Times, March 30th, 2018. (ibid).

The article goes on to say that to claim to be either Hispanic or Middle Eastern in the United States is a political act. I don’t know about that. I don’t know how many ‘Other’ are this and that or the other or something completely different. It’s completely different based on what someone is willing to identify as to a government, to offices, and to apply for grants at a financial aid office.

From 2021:

“…What was once the country’s third-largest racial category in 2000 and 2010 outpaced “Black” last year to become the second-largest after “White” — and a major data problem that could hinder progress towards racial equity over the next 10 years…”

“1 In 7 People Are ‘Some Other Race’ On The U.S. Census. That’s A Big Data Problem“,
Hansi Lo Wang, NPR, September 30th, 2021.

That article goes on to give the history of ‘Other’ in the U.S. Census. First used in 1910, it was the job of census workers who assigned people to a race by observation, and were instructed to label those that they couldn’t recognize as ‘other’, and write down the race. One of the bureau’s 1910 census reports even included Hindus as a race: These would be East Indians, from India, in an era when Native Americans were still called ‘Indians’, the Columbus idiocy that would not die quietly.

In 1960, the bureau allowed U.S Residents to self-report their racial identities, and in 2000 the checkbox came along.1

…”For a long time, there was the sense that there wasn’t anything wrong with the question, but rather that Hispanics didn’t understand the question. And I remember thinking, ‘Wow,’ ” says Clara Rodriguez, a sociologist at Fordham University and author of Changing Race: Latinos, the Census, and the History of Ethnicity in the United States. “‘Some other race’ was something to be taken seriously, not to be dismissed as a misunderstanding on the part of the Hispanic population.”…

“1 In 7 People Are ‘Some Other Race’ On The U.S. Census. That’s A Big Data Problem“,
Hansi Lo Wang, NPR, September 30th, 2021. (ibid)

I have no doubt that some people who identify themselves as ‘other’ are of Hispanic origin, but it’s hard to say that all of them are. In fact, there may be some, like me, who just think it’s an insulting question, but there would be many other individuals with their own reasoning. What’s the incentive for filling out a form and telling them what you identify as? This seems to be an application of the ‘One Drop Rule’, as previously mentioned.

Generally speaking, people like to belong. People announce their love to the government through marriage licenses, so announcing their tribe to the government makes about as much sense. Yet, the numbers of ‘Some Other Race’ have been consistently growing, and I have yet to be invited to an ‘Others’ meeting.

The one thing that connects ‘Others’ is the one thing that divides them: The U.S. Census and it’s use of race. It underlines how silly the system is, where people either can’t or won’t claim a race in the census. Humanity is a melting pot.

It is mildly disturbing that in it’s bid to be more granular, the U.S. Census Bureau is finding nationalities in ‘some other race’ respondents. A Brazilian could be any combination of heritages, but since I know Guyana a bit better and they are mentioned, the majority of the population of Guyana is of a mix of African descendants (from slavery) and Indian (Indentured Laborers), and so those reporting themselves as Guyanese could be either one, both, a mixture, indigenous, or even of majority European descent. During World War II, many people blended into South America in various nations.

The system is as cleanly cut as what race is – a social construct that was originally created to allow some to be ‘greater’ than others.

It begs the question of whether race is itself still a pertinent way to track people. It only benefits those that already have purchase or the capacity to purchase, not those who do not. It’s clearly an administrative nightmare, built on the politics of the moment. To what end?

It ends up that ‘Other’ is a pretty big data problem for a system built on counting how many of each race as well, something that potentially can skew a lot of other things.

Those Others.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 3 Comments

‘Some Other Race’, or as I say, ‘Other’, is a growing demographic.

In 1987, a 16 year old version of me walked into a financial aid office in Texas. I was an emancipated minor, of severely mixed heritage and no idea of my actual genealogy beyond my immediate parents.

I was asked if I had any ‘black’ or ‘hispanic’ in my heritage.

As far as I knew, the answer was ‘no’.

I filled out a bunch of paperwork during registration, and the first time it asked me about race it presented me with options that didn’t fit me, and at the bottom, “Other”. Disaster averted. Below, a line asked what I was if I had chosen other. I stared for a while. I contemplated.

“None of the above.”

This would be how I filled out every piece of paperwork asking me about this. When I joined the Navy, the recruiter asked me the same question about being black or hispanic, because they got points for that. I shook my head ‘no’, but my recruiter said, “You look hispanic”, and I suspect that despite my denial he may have put down hispanic for my recruitment. After all, it was more points for him, and it didn’t really affect my enlistment.

I’ve always considered myself a tribe of one, but I’ve been mistaken for other tribes more than once. In the U.S., depending on how I grew my facial hair, I was some version of Latino, with the exception of Hawaii where I was considered Filipino. I got all the prejudice that came with that. In other parts of the world, it varied, but I was generally an outsider with the exception of Hawaii where I was pretty much accepted for who I am by Samoans. Good folks, those Samoans.

A conversation on Mastodon had me pipe in about those that show up as ‘other’ related to financial aid. I was shouted down – some folks seemed to think I was airing some ‘white grievances’, which was most amusing because at least 2 of the people were, based on profile pictures, melanin deprived. One even said it appeared as if I was looking for a cookie. Real inclusive people, these. Glad I didn’t meet them in a dark alley, they might think I wasn’t persecuted enough and throw a beat down on me.

I hadn’t attacked anyone else’s needs for assistance, or denied anyone else’s persecutions. I was simply pointing out that people who didn’t neatly blend into the discourse on race existed, and had their owntroubles – troubles I myself am not worried about since I have managed and am on the slide down from. Younger generations deserve the acknowledgment as they begin the stairs to that slide. Present systems ignore them because… well, because the system wasn’t designed for ‘others’.

It ends up ‘Other’ is a growing statistic. I’ve been doing some research, and will follow this post up with some pretty interesting stuff related to the U.S. Census Bureau. It ends up on pulling on this thread, a lot of problems start showing up, from social media to healthcare to… well… other things.

More tomorrow.

On Affirmative Action.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 2 Comments

This is necessarily a touchy subject and one that I generally haven’t written much about despite how interesting it is to me. It’s a polarizing issue, and when issues get polarized the people in the middle generally get pushed against a wall and shot.

I don’t like being shot, really, but I’ve stewed on it.

Here’s the thing. I’m a tribe of one. My genetics come from a lot of people from all over the world that were productively sexual. A read on my genetics will link me to Genghis Khan, as an example, and I’m not Mongolian by any stretch. When it comes to prejudice, I have known many and none were actually about who I am but who I looked like.

I have never been judged on my genetics.

I have always been judged based on appearance. When I went to college so many years ago, the financial aid office had stuff for people of African descent, Native American, and even for people of Hispanic descent (it was just beginning)… but there I was, a guy with a West Indian version of an East Indian surname whose genetics included a slave trader, indentured laborer, a famous artist… the list goes on. My genealogy is a history of the world in some regards. The financial office had nothing special for me because I wasn’t black enough or hispanic enough. Later on I would find I might have claimed hispanic because of the Portugese of my great great grandmother, but even that would have been a stretch.

Affirmative action never helped me. When asked what ‘race’ I was, I always said, “other”, and when asked to explain, I simply put, “None of the above”. Affirmative action to me was just a thing where some people got a step up on the ladder and I had to climb it myself from the ground. It never bothered me because it was rare for me to find someone who didn’t merit that step up and I never understood tearing someone down to get ahead. Yet in a way, and this may sound horrible to some who are grounded in decades of affirmative action… affirmative action does much the same.

And.

It was also arguably necessary because of a bunch of racist policies at the time, so the argument that it was necessary is not something I will ever argue against. I have seen racism, I have even experienced it as someone mistaken for one group or another.

And.

Re-evaluating it’s necessity now is something we should consider. The grounding of affirmative action has been that people deserve opportunity based on merit, and there were those not getting that opportunity despite having the merit because of racism – racism, manufactured from the stupid human concept of ‘race’ which has no scientific basis whatsoever. If you send someone a copy of your DNA and nothing else, they cannot guess what you look like… yet? Maybe in the future, but not in the conceivable future.

I read the interview with Edward Blum, and it was not what I expected. It echoed my own sentiments, which I have kept to myself because I lacked enough knowledge. Affirmative action is a big red button I simply did not want to push because I’ve never benefited from it, and I was also aware that race was an issue. I was reminded every time I was mistaken for Mexican, Puerto Rican or Cuban, depending on facial hair, and even that is not a race. Even Latino is not a race. The diversity of those groups is astounding.

Just like ‘white people’. What is called ‘white’ wasn’t always considered ‘white’. The Europeans brought with them their own stigmas to the United States, and the Irish and Italians as examples were not considered ‘white’. Jews are Middle Eastern in origin themselves, they’re not ‘white’, and nowadays when we talk about ‘white’ we’re talking about some mix of European ancestries – unless you go to far East from Europe and start getting to the confusing areas where Asian and European merged thanks largely to the Mongol Empire.

What we do know is that if you stick two different people together, they have sex and their children are neither and both at the same time while becoming… unique.

That said, I’d suggest a read of this interview with Blum, and do so with an open mind. Look at the points he makes, the rebuttals, and consider it. If anything, it’s fodder for discussion.

Bigotry based on ‘race’ will eventually get screwed out of society, of that I’m sure, but in the interim, the next decades are what we need to look toward. Affirmative action as it stands may need to be looked into, not because we want to make things unfair, but because we do honestly want to make things fair for everyone.

Including mixed up genetic soups like me who make no claim to the major minorities. The answer is not more systemic bigotry, it’s less, and we need to take a hard look at that.

Labels, Labels, Labels

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Vanabbe Museum - MuseumnachtCertain things irk me. One of these things which has become more rampant and divisive is the use of certain phrases that, if anyone actually read and understood Pedagogy of the Oppressed, they wouldn’t use.

There is power in words and this power can guide a conversation or end it – and these days, it’s apparent conversations are ending, be it with Brexit or the exuberant hatred of people who elected Donald Trump to the Presidency of the United States.

In essence, people are going to get angry with me. Vexed. Aggravated.

Let’s take on a few key phrases.

Equality.

Everyone talks about equality, but we all want to be better than others. How can I, on one hand, want people to be treated the same as myself without being willing to be treated as poorly as they are? How can I say that men and women are both equals? That is, at it’s core, odd – not because of the idea people are trying to convey, but because the appropriate word is ‘equitability‘, a word so foreign that my spell-checker need it added:

characterized by equity or fairness; just and right; fair; reasonable:
equitable treatment of all citizens.

We want people to be treated fairly. Treating people equally would mean treating them the same, which is silly. Just taking gender as an example, treating men and women the same when one does not become pregnant and another does leads to all sorts of silliness. But we could treat women with equitability. And then we can realize that what women and their allies are actually negotiating for is to be treated fairly. What’s really being negotiated is what fairly is.

We are all different, despite labels, and we cannot be treated equally because we’re not all good at math, we’re not all artists, and we’re not all brain surgeons or automotive mechanics. But we can be treated equitably.

Race

This drives me nuts as a multicultural. There are, scientifically, no races. There is absolutely no genetic evidence of ‘race’. This is a social construct, and when we discuss ‘race relations’, we’re having an argument that someone else dictated, by the rules someone else dictated, for their own reasons. And that ‘discussion’ is going exactly as designed, powered by people who are too interested in fighting and not interested in the objective: Equitability. Cue Morgan Freeman:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mh8mUia75k8]

‘Patriarchal Culture’

Patriarchy is easy enough, and may be seen as an apt descriptor only when discussing gender and sexual rights, and in doing so it is mislabeled more often than not because minority males suffer as well. There can be argument about whether, as an example, a white woman is treated better than a black man, etc. So is it really patriarchal culture, or is it an antiquated culture? Women had and continue to have power in what are called patriarchal systems and cultures. Is it equitable to nail this down all on every man that draws breath? Of course it isn’t. It would be like accusing all Muslims of being terrorists (and by proxy all brown people who aren’t Westernized), all black people of being thugs, all Mexicans of being lazy… the list goes on. This ‘fight fire with fire’ mentality is creating more problems than it is solving.

Feminism

Ladies, being treated equitably (see above) is only… right. And I won’t disrespect those feminists who truly want equitability, but the man-hating folks in that camp are a bit much for me, and some of the labels tossed around are offensive to me as a man. I shouldn’t have to defend myself when a woman gets raped by another man. We get back to accusing all Muslims of being terrorists.

We could get rid of this if we were all interested in equitability.

And I’ll let you in on one of the most open secrets about me. I’m not a feminist. I don’t think highly of men who call themselves feminists either, because I see that as losing their own identity to serve the purpose of another – which is… the core problem of what men have done and continue to do to women around the world, isn’t it?

So, again, it’s about equitability.

If we were truly interested in fairness, we probably would think a little more before using words and phrases because they’re trendy. Some of these words may even have been necessary at some point to create the awareness, but it’s time to shift to proper word usage. Doing that may actually create more equitability.

I’d like that. I’d like everyone to have equitability. I consider it a human right. But you can’t have your equitability by destroying someone else’s. The words we use create emotional footprints, they create responses, and if you want change – if you truly want change… be equitable.