Race and Ethnicity is certainly at least as contentious a topic as sex/gender/orientation was last week, and not nearly as real as Age which was polled two weeks ago. Race/Ethnicity is not a matter of skin color, genetics, country of origin, upbringing, social-economic status, personal family history, national history, social-cultural construct... it is bits of all of those. I have tried to follow the U.S. Census definitions, with some modifications.
Once again, please take the poll itself seriously, and save the humor, snark, and uhmmmm... comments, etc. for the comments section.
Hopefully, if this poll is posted up in the Recommended Diary section for at least 27 hours (24 hours in all continental time zones), we will get a large, valid, representative sample of us.
It looks like this came off the Recommend Diary list sometime in early evening east coast time, and missing any evening west coast time... missed most of evening hours altogether, up for about 12 hours... oh well.
Should we ask about "Race" at all?
One argument against asking, is that race does not really exist. Or that it does not exist in the way that we usually think of it. Another argument is that it should not matter. Another is that if you cannot ask it in a more open-ended way that does not limit the pre-categorizations, then it should not be asked. There are many other arguments for why not to ask....
Among the arguments in favor of it, is that since the reality of the history of the European settlement of North America is in part the history of genocidal killing of Native North Americans and the enslaving and forced importation of Africans, that to not measure such things is to ignore or deny it. Another is that if one wants to measure how we are doing today by such categories, then we need somehow to use such categories. If one wants to attack racial health disparities or to have affirmative action programs, then one must also allow for such categorizations and measurements, it is argued. Some have argued that one reason France has such difficulties in assimilating people from North Africa and elsewhere and in knowing what to do about the discrimination that does exist, is that they do not ask race/ethnicity in any of their data collection (it is actually illegal to ask). There are many other arguments for why to ask....
The 5 "Traditional" Census Race Categories:
Update 1 Race: http://en.wikipedia.org/...
Update 2 (.PDF file) White: http://www.census.gov/...
Update 3 (.PDF) Hispanic/Latino: http://www.census.gov/...
White: All folks whose self identified predominant family background is from Europe. This includes eastward through Russia and yes the Caucuses (for you Caucasians). It also includes the entire Mediterranean basin, including the Middle East & North Africa... Arab, Jew, Berber, Kurd, Turk, Iranian... you are all White in the eyes of American Census Bureau (I know many Jews and Arabs want to check other; for today... please check white).
Black: All folks whose families originate from "subSahran Africa" and the African diaspora. The majority of folks whose ancestors were enslaved came from West Africa. The history, culture, ethinic identify for folks whose families more recently were in the American South is different from those in the Carribbean, or Guyana or Canada. Folks who families are more recently from West Africa, East Africa or the Horn (Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia) are of course all quite different but are lumped together as "Black." Indeed, people from Yemen, Madagascar, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Fiji, some parts of India, and Australia all might be "read" in the American context as Black, but are not African.
Asian: Similarly, the category of Asian is also an (almost?) meaningless mishmash. People from China, Japan, Korea, Vietanm and Thailand have some similarities and many differences. Even more so, when lumped together with people whose family came from India or Pakistan. (But again, please use the Asian category as given, for now).
American Indian & Alaskan Native: Sorry, if your ancestors came over on the Mayflower and your family has been here "forever" you are not a "Native American."
Hawaiian & Pacific Islander: Native Hawaiian were originally separated out from the other pre-European native people as a political decision when Hawaii and Alaska came in as State together. Since then there are also more people of Polynesian and Micronesian ancestory in the U.S. as well.
Ethnicity: In this context is limited to Hispanic or Latino, meaning from Spanish or Portugese speaking countries & cultures.
Bi- & MultiRacial: In recent years, through 2000, there were 5 standard Census categories for "race" and Hispanic/Latino (or Non) "ethnicity". Starting in 2000 the additional choice of multiracial was added. To the limited extent that race means anything, most of us are multiracial, though only some us consider ourselves such. Even within the confines of the artificial 5 race scheme above, many, perhaps most Americans are BiRacial or MultiRacial. This categorization is at least as real as any other, it is important... and it makes doing this a whole lot more difficult. One popular example of course is the "Cablinasian-American" (his term) Tiger Woods whose father was African-American and American Indian, and mother was from Thailand. Barack Obama is of course another such example. Many Hispanic/Latino people have a mix of Native American and/or European and/or African. Many folks who simplistically seem to be "White" or "Black" in fact have both European and African ancestors as the Sally Hemming story reminds us. Many White and Black folk have Native American Indian in their family history (for example, specific history in folks from Oklahoma and Florida). One childhood friend of mine had a Black mother and White Jewish father. He married a woman of northern european heritage who has fair skin, blond hair blue eyes. Their children are lighter in skin tone than my Ashkenazi (from Poland) Jewish grandfather (who looked a lot like Thurgood Marshall, though he was racist enough to not like the comparison). Here in New York City, we often make a distinction between African-Americans (presumptively descendents of persons enslaved in pre-civil war south) and people who are Afro-Carribbean (people whose families more recently immigrated from Carribbean such as anglo Jamiaca or franco Haiti). Multiracial combinations would require at least 62 categories (31 Bi/Multirace combination x 2 for Hispanic/Latino or Not), and up to 126. However, Kos polls are limited to 15 categories; I beg forgiveness ahead of time. I had to combine some categories.
Update 4: Ancestory (Country of Origin) is a separate question, a different "axis" than "Race" when it comes to the U.S. Census (= OMB and hence Federal statistics generally)
As to the poll questions themselves:
"What Race/Ethnicity below most closely fits what you consider yourself"
The first five are for the "five census races" and if you consider yourself NON-Hispanic/Latino, that is NOT.
The second five are for the "five census races" and if you consider yourself Hispanic or Latino.
The last five are my attempt to offer options for folks who primarily self identiy as biracial or multiracial, given both the limits of having only 5 questions left, and also given that one objective of this poll is to get at the underlying question racial and ethnic diversity at dKos (aka: how White are we; how many "people of color" are there here); admittedly trying to have my cake and eat it too to some extent. With only five poll questions left I have chosen to combine the American Indian, Alaskan Native, Hawaiian & other Pacific Islander into one group, in order to also make room for Hispanic/Latino.
Why do Demographic Polls at all?
I acknowledge all of the above, but still think it is potentially useful, interesting, even important to have a sense of the "racial/ethnic" diversity and mix (or lack thereof!) in our dKos community.
Some folks asked why should we do these demographic polls at all, and raised the issue of privacy concerns. As to the why question, the simple answer is "know thyself." Who are we when we spout off and comment? Also, it can be fun. And yes, maybe it will be reported by other media or be used to market advertising to the site. As to the privacy concerns, Kos has certainly made clear his strong views against "outing" the real identities of anybody. I do not know what access the site administrators have to the data or linkages of usernames to poll responses. Myself, I am just a regular user, and have nothing to do with administration or behind the scenes here. I don't know who has voted or what age goes with whom. All I have is the same bar graph that is publicly visible. Also, there are no cross-tabs between any variables (e.g., last week's age with this week's gender). It is not like a questionnaire with multiple separate questions per single interviewee. I guess the question is a matter of what the site administrators COULD access and link or identify if they were so inclined, whether they WOULD do so; and what protections are there on system to prevent an outsider from doing so? Clearly if there were a serious breack of confidentiality/privacy, the Kos community would react badly and that could be the end of the site. The simple answer is, if you are that concerned, with this or any other issue, then do not participate; don't vote. This is a voluntary poll, within one of many diaries, among the nearly infinite number of webpages you can browse.
Last week's Sex/Gender/Orientation poll: We had 7,118 votes, which was way down from the 11,492 we had for age; this is itself one result as it were. The biggest result in my humble opinion was that there were twice as many men compared to women, with 66% were male & 32% female (the poll software rounds off badly). Overall, 52% of poll respondents were straight men, 12% gay men and 2% bisexual. 28% were straight women, 3% lesbian & 1% bisesual. Suggestively, if we adjust so that the male:female ratio had been 1:1, then the %-Gay men might have been around 9% and the %-Lesbian women might have been around 4.5%, which is in line with some national estimates. I would suggest that, maybe, our imbalance is in male:female and not straight/gay. Or not....
Since the poll is self selecting and does represent a random sample there is always the possibility for selection bias including but not limited to responder bias, making the survey results different than truth: Were men (and maybe gay men) more likely to vote? Are there reasons to believe that women in general (and perhaps lesbian women?) were less likely to vote? In defense of the possible validity of thepoll... for what it is worth: Only briefly during the first 2-3 hours (early morning east coast time) were the percentages closer to equal numbers of males and females; they then changed to the 2:1 ratio... and then stayed remarkably the same for the rest of the 20 hours or so that the diary stayed on the Recommended List (hurrumph... hoping for full 27 hours) even as the count climbed. Nor, specifically in response to one reasonable suggestion -- that men saw the word sex and came to look -- did it change after I changed the header from Gender to Sex/Gender in the middle of the day (it was already 2:1 with the just the word Gender).
Given some of the comments, it might well have been better to just do the Male/Female/Other poll as had been done before. Perhaps I will do this again... at a much later date.
I have a more "fun" surprise for next week's "Sociodemographic Tuesdays" poll.
The next "Single-Payer" health care diary will be up Thursday morning.