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Comment by auggierose | Hacker News Reader

I grew up in Germany, but the first time I really learnt about the concept of race was when I went to the doctor in the US, where you need to fill in your "ethnicity". Same in the UK. I don't think anything can be more racist than being asked about your race or your ethnicity, because really, what exactly is that? Am I here for a medical appointment, or a psychological and philosophical introspection of myself? I usually just fill in Cosmopolitan there.

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For me it was law school in the us. Every other form asked me about my race. Then they made us do a diversity survey with a question: "how much time do you spend each day with minorities?" And "do you want to spend more or less?". I refused to complete the survey. This was Massachusetts. Americans really do not realize how shocking this constant official reference to race is for people from other countries.

The census last year put out a map listing racial makeup in every neighbourhood, with dots representing clusters of people. I was speechless. A government map listing where all the colored people lived. This is normal in America.

It’s not just normal, it’s progressive!

In all seriousness though, lots of americans share your sentiment. Lots of us would just like to live our lives, but we’re constantly bombarded with stuff like this.

The obsession with race is everywhere in the US right now. I work for a Fortune 500, non-FAANG company. I’m required to set four annual goals at the beginning of each year. Two of those goals must relate to my performance or the business’s objectives (you know, what I get paid for). The other two must be Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) goals. One of the ways to satisfy these goals is recruit a “diverse” candidate, which is just a corporate euphemism for non-white. It’s creepy.

To me "a diverse candidate" sounds like a complete oxymoron.

"You must be different, like everyone else!"

Different ethnicities get affected in different proportions by some conditions, such as sickle cell disease https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/sicklecell/data.html. It's a genuine medical question, but of course you're not obliged to answer.

I doubt that it can be taken seriously as a medical question, as some of the American "races" don't cluster genetically. Hispanic is probably the worst offender, but Asian is pretty bad too.

But some do. Its easier to ask for race than it is to ask for genetic makeup.

Do any of them really cluster genetically? Compare a person whose ancestors come from Senegal to a person whose ancestors come from Mozambique – Americans will call both persons "Black", yet I would not expect those two people to have many recent ancestors in common, or much "genetic clustering" at all.

You are thinking too literally. It's just a question that opens the door to more discussion. It's another piece of information, not the end of the discussion.

But does it always "open the door to more discussion", or do some medical professionals just make judgements based on which box was ticked on the patient form? Presented with an African immigrant patient, is a US doctor going to realise that the patient may have rather different genetics from most African-Americans, and hence information about health risks for African-Americans may not be relevant to them? I'm sure an above-average doctor would realise that and take it into account, but would a below-average doctor (of whom there are very many) do it?

No not always. But overall more information is better than no information, especially when spread across an entire medical system.

If more information is better, isn't that a good argument for replacing "race" questions which expect coarse-grained answers with "ethnicity"/"ancestry" questions which expect more fine-grained answers? (i.e. "Chinese" or "Filipino" not "Asian", "African-American" or "Kenyan" not "Black", "English" or "Polish" not "White", etc.)

this is fundemental to American politics

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo153451...

I read that book when I arrived to the US: really interesting. IMO, the activists that pushed the idea of the "Hispanic" race/ethnicity into the American mindset made a huge mistake. Racializing yourself is a bad thing, even if the government gives you a few pennies in exchange.

Well, I think you’ve missed important context here. Darker skinned Latinos didn’t have a choice to not be racialized; “Hispanic” was introduced as an alternative to the prevailing practice of just using the Spanish-speaking country with the most local expats as an informal race designator. White Latinos could in principle have defected and chosen to identify as just white, but I’m glad we didn’t.

I think that the racialization of Hispanics as a group has been pretty bad for "non-white" Latinos too.

1. You are right that someone that doesn't visually appear "white" will be racialized in the US. However, the magnitude of this racialization can differ a lot. Incessantly repeating that "Hispanics" are a very consistent group of people makes the "otherization" of all Hispanics worse, including for "non-white" ones.

2. Including people of European descent in a group that is going to benefit from affirmative action opens an obvious loophole. Unconscious bias will provoke that the opportunities created by AA end up with people who look/are white, not to Latinos "of color". Hollywood is particularly terrible on that: with most of Hispanic actors looking European (Ana de Armas is a recent example) or coming directly from Europe. I guess they can't find non-white Latinos in LA. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

3. Finally, the idea of Hispanics forming a genetic cluster will be pernicious for all Hispanics, particularly when applied to medicine. It puts our lives in unnecessary danger.

Hispanic isn't a race according to the Census Bureau.

> The United States Census Bureau uses Hispanic or Latino to refer to a person of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin regardless of race

The way it's used in popular imagination is as a "race" though. My mom doesn't see Pope Francis as hispanic because he isn't mestizo.

I am a "Hispanic" that lives in the US. I am also European. In my experience what qualifies as an Hispanic varies incredibly from institution to institution, from person to person. A few months ago I was admitted briefly to the hospital, my race (not ethnicity) was marked as "Hispanic". Other times, in other places, I have been assumed to be "white".

Also, you wouldn't believe how much better I am treated when I am perceived as "white".

US also uses a definition of “black” that includes people that are genetically 90% “white.”

I put Mix: Normando-French in the "Other" category when Im asked at the census in Hong Kong giggling at their expected confused looks. What the fuck is a race, I look a bit different from a guy in Marseille and a lot different from a guy in Beijing but it's all a gradient, why make it discreet and give names (they split between western and viet for instance in HK... but isnt Vietnam west of China too??), do they also have a guide book so we cull impurities ?

It s insane to use races as a concept for humans when clearly we fuck just as dutifully as stray cats in a gutter. Racism is to talk of races.

Not defending that particular application, but it is probably important for humans to make categories of things to be able to draw lines between them and find useful rules of how to deal with things. People like to make up labels for all kinds of (ir)relevant stuff and try to "other" people who are different in some way or to some degree. "my side, your side" stuff.

The important thing is, that we are also able to look beyond our categories and do not draw wrong conclusions from them. Keeping an open mind.

Race and ethnicity are meaningless, arbitrary, and ultimately capricious categories we need to get rid of.

TA is a long-form treatise on why.

We have no category given by nature that's for sure. What s important is not to look beyond our category, it s waking up to the fact there is none.

It s very american, for some reason, anyway. They were so hung on not mixing up with the slaves they had to draw a line. But stop thinking you're white or black: you re very different from a Russian and a Portugues, or a Malian and a Senegalese. Focusing on skin color is stupid.

My daughter for instance is more franco-chinese than she's whito-yellow (and even that has so many variation that no two french and no two chinese think perfectly alike), it has no meaning, no more than hair color or eye color, at least.

For all intents and purposes, I am white but I am also of French descent. My wife is also, for all intents and purposes "white" - . When my wife was pregnant they asked for our ethnicities but wanted more details than just "white". When they found out that I had French descent, they added initial genetic screening for the baby for a disease which only statistically significantly occurs in people with French descent.

This seems a poor way of economizing on tests. How would someone of (say) German descent be sure that some of their ancestors didn't come from across the border? Very few people can trace their lineage back more than a couple generations.

I agree, it's not an exact science and I am not a doctor or run a practice so I do not know why they would do it this way. Probably a "best we can do" type situtation.

Keep in mind there is also the chance of false positives on those types of tests. So anything you can do to do them only on people where there is a higher chance of them being meaningful saves not just the cost of the tests but mental anguish for people who would get the false positive results.

I thought genetic screening was most useful before pregnancy, to know if a child would be at risk of inheriting any conditions from their parent’s genes, or to diagnose a disease and guide treatment. What’s the purpose of blanket screening a child that hasn’t shown any symptoms?

In our case, this disease can be detected very early in the womb and children born with it do not survive very long - usually only a few months, 2 years at most if I'm remembering correctly. They do these tests early so the pregnancy can be terminated if the parents choose.

That's backwards. They shouldn't use your self-described ancestry to choose which tests to give you. The test already has the ability to determine that better than any human.

The specific test is expensive and they do not cover it with our single payer healthcare, so they don't recommend/do it unless they have to.

Understood, but using self-reported race is very inaccurate, so they are wasting money a lot of the time. Instead, a rapid ancestry test would be inexpensive (<$100) and would provide a much better guide to determine if the expensive test should be taken.

WHat test is it (if you feel free sharing)?

I'm white but I put "Prefer not to answer" whenever I'm asked an equal-opportunity question about my race because what difference should it make?

However, at the doctor's office it matters. Black people are at a higher risk for sickle-cell anemia, there's a significant percentage of ethnic Chinese who cannot metabolize alcohol very well, etc. Having your ethnic background on file helps health professionals evaluate your risks for conditions significantly influenced by ethnicity.

There are genuinely different risk factors and biological predispositions that are impacted by one’s racial background. The idea that we should pretend race is only a social construct is completely unscientific and absurd.

To argue asking about one’s race is racism will absolutely, positively have negative outcomes in providing quality healthcare. A good physician should never be ignorant of such things. And there’s no such thing as a good physician who is willfully ignorant of such things.

Theoretically, yes. However, in practice either one of White, Black, Asian and, notoriously, Latino races carry zero of medically useful information since all of those are polyphylectic. There's more than one distinct things in each.

I agree. But that’s a problem with how one’s race is being asked, not whether it is out-of-bounds to ask.

> The idea that we should pretend race is only a social construct is completely unscientific and absurd.

Nonsense, "race" is the unscientific and absurd concept when applied to humans. They are human populations which are more predisposed toward certain diseases (e.g. sickle cell anaemia) but these populations aren't different "races"!

You’re being pedantic.

That's the point of science.

Yes, so lets start by distinguishing between the 5 major and 28 minor races of Africa. Saying that 'African American' corresponds to anything medically meaningful is the equivalent of saying 'All Asians look the same'.

I think the idea is more, that there is no distinct level at which you can draw a line and can reasonably claim, that everyone beyond that line is or does x. That means, that you probably should not draw any conclusions from that line, even if there are differences in many cases on each side of the line. From each side if the line a person can surprise you by not being or doing what you would expect based on the line you drew, so you need to keep an open mind about the arbitrary line you drew.

I can agree with that. It might be uselessly imprecise. But the parent suggested asking one’s race was fundamentally racist. That’s absurd.

In the idea of race, isn't one of the races "ahead" of the other races? The point of race is to be racist.

One reason behind the question is to quantify the impact of racism in society. Can you propose a methodology for quantifying racism that avoids this?

You are very wrong. Your best option, should you be open to knowing how far off you are, is to listen to the podcast series “Seeing White.”

In america it’s important that our ruling class constantly divides all us plebs up by race so that we can all be mad at each other instead of them. It’s incredibly effective.

"our ruling class" is a naive claim; a useful lense is found here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_politics

Sorry, but for QA reasons it's still valuable to track. In the US, medical care is shockingly worse for people who medical staff perceive as one race vs another. Removing the line on the form will not prevent that.

Adding that line apparently hasn't helped either.

I don't think that's true at all. There are a ton of studies that have proved the problem exists, which has led to real efforts to fix the problem. How would we do that without data?

If you want data, take my DNA sample. That might actually be useful.

As the article explains, your DNA sample will not show how you are perceived racially by the people treating you. And it's that racial perception that has a big influence on quality of care in the US.

We cannot eliminate the box on the form until we first eliminate the biased care.

I can assure you, my answer to that question will equally not show how I am perceived racially by the people treating me. Maybe the people treating me should fill it out? Maybe they should also fill out if they perceive me as rather dumb or rather smart, because that might also impact my treatment.

Ok? But this isn't about just you. Enough people will answer this question in a way that it's still statistically useful to helping us work toward fairer outcomes. If you would seriously like to propose a systemic change you think even more effective in making things fairer, have at it. But please grapple at least vaguely with the actual difficulty in implementing your proposed change.

I don't need to grapple vaguely with anything. I don't want that line on my questionaire. You cannot tell me it is helping with anything. So just get rid of the line, and I am sure the world is not going to be a worse place.

Again, this is not about you. I get that you have an opinion. But if you want it to be more than one anonymous goof's quirky and apparently uninformed disposable niche social media comment, you're going to have to put in the work.

My comment is already on the top of this topic, and seems to have resonated with enough people. That's really all I expect from my comment. Maybe a little change will come from that. On the other hand, maybe YOU should put in some work, because you are really coming across as the entitled white male you probably are. The question is, is the data you gain from adding this question to every form in the US really so valuable that it outweighs the damage done by enforcing the conception that you are all different and divided by race? I doubt it, but I don't know. Do you think you know?

Oh? What specifically are you claiming I'm being entitled about because of my whiteness or maleness?

Read your previous comment, and it will come to you. Or not.

Hah! That is exactly the kind of evasion I was expecting from some somebody whose self-declared standard of discussion is "as long as I get likes, it's good."

Well, you didn't answer the question in my previous comment, so a discussion with you doesn't seem to be worthwhile. I think I have a pretty good idea by now what to expect from YOU.

You are entitled, because you do not bring any facts to the table that would support your point of view, just your own opinions, nevertheless you demand "more work" from other people. If that is not entitled, I don't know what is. And the fact that you cannot see it, even after I point it out to you, speaks for itself.

> We cannot eliminate the box on the form until we first eliminate the biased care

That is where the article ends: “the need to monitor” etc. But there is no logic to that. The biased care is eliminated by having the care providers not care about race, not by measuring it precisely. You can still record % of people who feel discriminated without doing the discrimination yourself.

Gosh, if it's that easy, why hasn't it happened already?

The truth is that's very hard. And if we can't measure it, it's impossible to tell which bias-reducing interventions work.

I get why white people, of which I am one, want to just ignore the problem and hope it goes away. But if there's anything that history demonstrates, it's that sustained power differentials don't just go away on their own. In the US, that's what both our Revolutionary War and our Civil War were about, as well as our civil rights movement. And things like the First Nadir and the Second Nadir show that even hard-won victories like those don't last without upkeep.

It has helped politicians. And that means if the problem is ever solved, politicians won’t benefit anymore. So lots of tax money is spent but the problem remains purposefully unsolved.

Shouldn't the medical staff be the ones filling out the questionnaire then? They are the ones perceiving the race.

Seems like in matters of perception, the person to interrogate is the one perceiving, not the object being perceived.

You're welcome to propose that change, but I see it as being impractical. Not only would this require complex and expensive changes to health data infrastructure, but I doubt it would result in significantly better data. How many of the racially biased medical practitioners will correctly report the perceptions they're acting upon?

As Box said, "All models are wrong. Some models are useful." The current model is clearly wrong but clearly useful. You'd have to make the case that switching to your theoretically-less-wrong model would have a high ROI in terms of reducing unfair medical outcomes. But I think that's a very hard case to make.

I'm not proposing a new model, I'm merely proposing reducing errors by using the one already in use in a sightly less nonsensical fashion.

The current model is 1:1 for patient:race, data entered by the patient. You are proposing a 1:n model with data entered by each practitioner. That is a different model.

And again, you haven't walked through the practical consequences of making this change and how it will improve fairness enough to be worth the cost of implementation. If you're serious about this, please do that. Otherwise it looks to me like you're just bikeshedding, and I don't have time for that today.

From a genetic perspective, its shockingly backwards. Classic US oversimplification and pidgeon holing too. We are all a bastard amalgamation.

> But precision medicine only works if scientists have studied people who are similar to you. If your genes are rare or unusual compared to those researchers have examined in the past, you could end up getting the wrong treatment. Since the vast majority of genetics studies are done on people of European ancestry, members of other racial groups may lose out on the benefits of precision medicine entirely.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/medicine-is-getting-mor...

Libraries in the UK ask for ethnicity when you register even nowadays, so do uni applications. Weird.

University applications probably do for reasons related to equality policies.

I'm sure they have some affirmative action equivalent over there.

Which is racist. It’s good intentioned, but it’s also almost the definition of racism.

I don’t particularly mind affirmative action policies but I wish people were more honest with themselves how it’s really an imposition of one kind of injustice in an attempt to remedy another.

The world is messy and complicated, it may be warranted, but it seems to me these kind of measures really have to be viewed as temporary measures and aimed to phase out as soon as a certain level of “target equality” has been achieved.

> Which is racist. It’s good intentioned, but it’s also almost the definition of racism.

I tend to agree with that. I think the idea is that positive discrimination can offset previously encountered negative discrimination to some degree and level the field by doing so. I don't have strong opinion about it, but it seems like the best method we have to make a real impact. Everything else seems too slow.

But it also could brew resentiments that end up making people hate eachother. Affirmative action should help people of a similar socioeconomic background somehow without involving race. People do need that helping hand but if they happen to tick off the wrong boxes they’re out of luck.

Every time affirmative-action comes up for discussion in HN, someone in the comments entirely re-invents european style social-democracy from first principles just to avoid giving any advantage to African American's based on race.

I'm never sure whether to be saddened or hopeful about this phenomenon. Is it a new generation growing up and realizing that race is an outdated social construct and they could just help everyone and anyone with sensible policies, or is it just people repeating "You know who the real racists are?" style talking points, it's hard to tell.

> re-invents european style social-democracy from first principles just to avoid giving any advantage to African American's based on race.

What "just to avoid"? Many people on HN are from such European style social democracies, there is no "just to avoid", we just think that is a much better system than the racialized democracy American democrats wants.

> the racialized democracy American democrats wants.

This doesn't describe anything I recognise as reality and I thought I'd already headed this off by mentioning the "You know who the real racists are?" talking points.

I'm glad we all agree that racism and sexism is bad now, I suppose that's progress of some kind.

I'm confused as to how asking to be evaluated on one's merits and not race has anything to do with European social democracies. Affirmative action/"positive" discrimination occurs in Europe as well.

The comment I replied to was talking about helping people from a specific socioeconomic background.

The implication, and very sensible one at that, is that just because you are from a poor family, doesn't mean you don't have "merit". Some portion of an Ivy League credential reflects not your merit or potential or contribution to society, but inherited privilege, connections, luck etc.

Meritocracy in such a situation is like having a fair race when one competitor has a motorbike. Yes they are objectively faster than the runners in certain circumstances, but that's not due to their merit as a runner, from a combination of natural aptitude and years of dedicated training and focus, it's because they're on a motorbike.

If you really need something delivered quickly, then the short term solution is to ask the guy with the motorbike. If the aim is to get the human race moving faster in general, then giving everyone a motorbike is the answer, not pretending against all evidence that the people with motorbikes are inherently superior beings and just naturally good at running.

Then you can choose the best motorbike rider and get something that approximates a real meritocracy.

This sort of statistical information helps organizations understand how they’re serving the community.

It is for reporting and analysis.

"Why are 2/3 of our maths grads white men?"

"Hmmm, don't know. What were our applicant demographics?. Ooh, they are only 60% white men. Lets dig..." etc etc.

If you don't have the data you cannot identify where in the pipeline an anomaly starts

That’s the point of the entire article. It’s a fuzzy problem that can’t be solved by strict categorization like that, which is in itself a form of discrimination. You design your admissions process to be as fair as possible, not “tune it” to get the metrics right.

> "Why are 2/3 of our maths grads white men?"

Why would you ask that in the first place?

That ratio indicates that there is some biased process leading to the ratio, and that process should be de-biased. Presuming women and men have equal math abilities (I assume this is true) and equal desire to obtain degrees (not entirely sure; this is a very controversial topic) you would expect that an unbiased selection process would generate 50% male/female ratio. Again, many assumptions and conclusions in what i just said are not absolutely certain.

Many departments are currently realizign they play a role in systemic discrimination, and those ratios help them understand how far they are from the mean.

> Many departments are currently realizign they play a role in systemic discrimination, and those ratios help them understand how far they are from the mean.

I hope you realize this process started over 50 years ago. Most fields turned and are now dominated by women. The few fields that are still not dominated by women are probably that way for another reason than discrimination, women are far too good at taking over fields for some discrimination to stop them from doing so.

Nothign I said in my comment above is my current position, it's a description of the thinking of people who run departments. Note that I very carefully said the idea of whether genders have preferences, is a controversial topic.

In my own field, biology, many subfields do have equal gender ratios (went from skewed to equal over last 20 years). However, having worked in Silicon Valley at tech firms, I can say that they (and the programs that feed them) still have very skewed ratios.

I'm aware of these processes and how long they've lasted; about 100 years ago, Harvard limited the number of Jewish people who could be accepted. Jews were excluded from working at "white-shoe law firms" (the ones that did high-value business deals) and instead generally ran law firms that handled "the dirty stuff" (divorces etc). Eventually, Jews became much more accepted, explicit Jewish quotas at universities were removed, and white shoe law firms hire (and have partners) who are Jewish.

> That ratio indicates that there is some biased process leading to the ratio, and that process should be de-biased.

Or that people have different preferences?

> Presuming women and men have equal math abilities (I assume this is true) and equal desire to obtain degrees (not entirely sure; this is a very controversial topic) you would expect that an unbiased selection process would generate 50% male/female ratio.

If by that you mean that "for each degree, the percentage of the people that want to get it follows the repartition in the population", it is absolutely not true. I don't know why or what mechanism are at play here, but assuming that this is all bias seems very weird.

> Again, many assumptions and conclusions in what i just said are not absolutely certain.

I think this is a really weak reason to collect racial statistics in the first place.

> Many departments are currently realizign they play a role in systemic discrimination, and those ratios help them understand how far they are from the mean.

That's true, but you can also base yourself on things like revenu which seems to be more universal than race.

To figure out if there is discrimination or not...

I don't think it's good science to say that every difference comes from discimination. For example, the poorer you are, the higher are your chances of dropping out. This is not discrimination against poor people. But, at least to me, this is a problem that we should try to fix.

Figuring out whether or not there is discrimination is not saying that any differences comes from discrimination. Identifying differences is the first step in doing that, not the last step.

That's a fair point.

I believe this, and similar things in job applications, is mostly so they can generate stats that would reveal if there was discrimination going on.

It feels weird because you're providing the information to the people who are being held accountable, and the idea is to get to a place where the information they are asking you for doesn't matter, but life is complicated.

They will always have an option “would rather not say” and are used for reporting. Universities in particular are keen to ensure they have a mix of students that isn’t skewed.

In Germany we learned in school about Hitler's race theory and how ridiculous the whole idea was. But compared to attempts like the one described in the article Nazi Germanys version sounds incredibly well thought out, including rigorous criteria to determine the race of a person (as ridiculous as those were).

Which is by all means not meant as an endorsement of 1930s ideology, more as a "wtf is that, that's backwards in more ways than I'm comfortable with".

The Nazis literally copied these rules from America. They actually made them slightly more "reasonable" in the sense that they didn't go as far as the "one drop rule".

https://www.history.com/news/how-the-nazis-were-inspired-by-...

I think "this is the weird phenotype/culture hybrid people treat this person and their family as" is a less backward approach than "here's some pseudoscience to try to disprove that Jews and Aryan ubermenschen are of intermixed ancestry and actually pretty difficult to distinguish physiologically [at least without looking for specific genetic markers we fortunately haven't the technology to identify]", even before we get onto the why is this being looked into question.

Conceding a socially significant category isn't actually very analytically rigorous and might as well be treated as just a label shows more thoughtfulness than inventing a lot of nonsense to try to give it the appearance of rigour.

If you describe it like that it sounds like a classical descriptivism vs prescriptivism argument. Nazi Germany leaned hard into prescriptivism, trying to have hard rules for everything, while the US goes with a descriptivism "whatever the people call it is right".

But that sounds fundamentally incompatible with having a fixed list of categories, with that approach surely it would have to be a free text field (or at least a couple categories, along with either a text field or an "other" category, like with gender nowadays)

> But that sounds fundamentally incompatible with having a fixed list of categories, with that approach surely it would have to be a free text field (or at least a couple categories, along with either a text field or an "other" category, like with gender nowadays

I agree, but generally it is, in my experience, as well as almost invariably being completely optional.

These questionnaires should read, “What race has society labeled you?”

Yeah, the question always irks me as well and I usually leave it blank.

The recent Covid stuff about prioritizing vaccines depending on race (which thankfully got rejected) shows there is reason to be suspicious of it imo.

“Race” is such an arbitrary and bad classification scheme. A third rail topic, but an alien observing humanity would find our obsession with certain characteristics but not others weird, particularly when we’re all the same species anyway.

My hope is we can one day get past it. There’s some evidence of this with previously coded “races” no longer being explicitly thought of that way in the culture. Cultural variance is interesting, but identity classifications seem harmful and with racial categories primarily a social construction anyway - just strange?

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