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Comment by INTPenis | Hacker News Reader

That's interesting but what I reacted to was this paragraph;

>According to census data, this block—and hence this house—had 14 residents in 2020: one Hispanic person, seven white people, three biracial people (white and black), two multi-racial people (white, black, and American Indian), and one person of “some other race.” There were supposedly eight adults and six children living in the house.

Why is this important? I love how they trail off at the end there. So if you don't qualify for bi-racial you're "some other race". What if your grandparents were biracial? Does that make you some other race? Where does this end?

Don't mistake this for me trying to make a point about "woke". I'm a Swede who truly finds it fascinating how the United States emphasize people's "race" instead of their heritage (nationality).

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The importance of collecting race data is because of a history of systematic discrimination based on race. It's not for example Black or Hispanic groups that decided that those categories are important, it was the people creating Jim Crow Laws, Redlining, Bank discrimination, unequal resource distribution to schools, racial discrimination of public pools, racially based differences in policing strategies etc. The reason to ask these question is to make it possible to identify such discrimination.

Sweden is a great example of why this is important. There it is much harder to identify such kind of discrimination due to poor data. See for example the treatment of Romas or Afro Swedes.

The US census allows you to specify your race from a list of options or choose other. A person with biracial parents can just choose whatever they feel best identifies them. There is no "qualifies".

Nationality does not work in the US. In Sweden (which, ironically given your question doesn't seem to publish country level ethnicity statistics), most Swedes are 12th generation or older. That pretty much predates the US.

Meanwhile, other issues on ethnicity are that approximately 12% of Americans can only list "ancestors kidnapped from somewhere in Africa"

No, your assumption that “some other race” means you “don’t qualify for bi-racial” is wrong. “Some other race” means you don’t identify with any of the racial categories on the Census, and in practice that means you’re Hispanic/Latino or Middle Eastern - those groups are officially grouped into white, but respondents often don’t identify that way. If your grandparents were biracial you’d be biracial.

This matters in the article because its an unusual data point, easily investigated.

> I'm a Swede who truly finds it fascinating how the United States emphasize people's "race" instead of their heritage

The US is founded on essentially shipping criminals and undesirables overseas so they can go murder some people that aren't in the public eye. If there was a focus on heritage, there would be basically no Americans. And that would be unacceptable, because the culture is deeply racist in a way that is so fundamental it is not possible to separate it today.

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