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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> census exists to inform policy

Race is a social construct. The census strengthens that construct. OP’s argument is that race should be a weaker construct, which is a legitimate if debatable argument.

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Second OP's point is that yes, race is a social construct, with clear and consistent impacts in real people's lives every day. The census exists to measure things that may be used to inform policy.

Therefore, something such as race, even if it is an arbitrary social construct used to divide based on nothing more than skin color, is important to measure against other factors such as income and address. It helps you decide when/where/what is being discriminatory.

Race should be a weaker social construct, yes. But living in Infinite Fun Space doesn't help anyone today in the real.

As pointed out elsewhere in the comments on this thread, the census may have accidentally ended up enforcing white hegemony in America. See the anecdotes of people suppressing the reporting of partial indigenous or African heritage in order to pass as white. The data made America look far more white than it ever was. And despite the recent trend I doubt the effect has vanished. Are we so sure we want to be using that data for policy?

I keep expecting (not hopefully) the establishment of "Trans Racial" people, where people want to be recognized as the race they identify as, rather than what they were labeled at birth. The logic is precisely the same as transgenderism. There have been a few cases, with the Rachel Dolezal case of 2015 getting a lot of attention.[1] I wonder if the status that transgenderism has achieved would make such a movement easier. Or, would it discredit such movements and "dysphoria" diagnoses? I mean, if we're going to alter/deny immutable traits, and if race is truly a "social construct", why wouldn't trans-racialism become a thing?

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2015/06/12/us/washington-spokane-naacp-r...

I don't think trends and fashion are that aware of their own transience. For example, the rise of Christianity in a region hardly coincides with the rise of other forms of theism. But why not? If people are willing to believe in one imaginary superbeing, why not others whose logic is precisely the same as Christianity? Yet precisely the opposite happens - the one arbitrary belief is forced to delegitimize similar trends, in order to establish itself as not-just-another-arbitrary-theism.

Transgender people have only very recently been given the faintest legitimacy, and they naturally want to defend that against transracialists and otherkin and other movements that basically look like a parody of trans people. Even if their logic isn't fundamentally stronger than those other movements, transgender people have something that actually matters: a little bit of power.

Why should anyone sacrifice that to the altar of logic?

Ignoring race doesn’t make it stop being a problem. We tried that from basically the 1980s till the mid-2000s and things really only got worse. Race may have stopped being on the minds of white people, but it is always on the minds of non-white people every time they interact with a white person. Not engaging on racial issues is why we had riots in 2020.

If you think things got worse for people since the 1980s, maybe you should start by digging a little deeper into how bad it used to be. And why would you think race has stopped being on the minds of any people? Do you have any evidence of this, because it sure strikes as utterly wrong given the non-stop ongoing national conversation about race.

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