Last night I was filling out some innocuous online forms, and for the first time stopped to really pay attention to the race/ethnicity section. Admittedly, this portion is “relatively” comprehensive, reflecting to a fair extent the world’s most diverse and cosmopolitan society. But it also leaves much to be desired. Even with ten options listed there were still plenty of glaring discrepancies, but of course it would be impossible to list every possible ethnicity, and I suppose there are many that might be superfluous given the nation’s demographic makeup.
But for a country with such a sordid racial past in a world that is — despite Trump and Brexit — more interconnected than ever, the form is woefully incomplete, and due to that incompleteness exacerbates underlying racial misunderstandings that manifest in harmful racism.
Asian much? There are only three billion Asians after all. Are Slavic Asians white? Are Indian Asians black? That’s one category for three billion people. Not exactly a lot of wiggle room. Of course when most people hear Asian we imagine someone from East Asia, likely Chinese, Japanese, or Korean. But even that distinction is fraught with racial profiling. There is a long history of racial animosity among the Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans, but we’ve lumped them all together as Asian despite those differences. And the distinction doesn’t include the Armenians, unless the Armenians are white. And what about Bangladeshis? Turkey sits halfway in Asia. Are the Turks white?
As tedious as it would be to make the list above significantly more comprehensive, it would also behoove us not to force ourselves into such small slices of identity. We live in a diverse country, and that diversity is a huge strength, but the systemic and structural racism that still plagues us threatens to make that strength a weakness. In order for us to capitalize on the melting pot of ideas that we’ve brought together we must break down the systemic racism that impedes unity.
There are far more pernicious structures than the race/ethnicity portions on forms and other documentation. And yet the way we categorize ourselves on these forms is indicative of the narrow and uninformed ways we think about and talk about race. If we can’t display a better understanding of this issue on a simple form, how are we supposed to dissect and address the larger inequities that plague us and threaten to make diversity a permanently divisive problem rather than the benefit to our society that it should be.