Pre-Reading Post Week 3

-When people lump others into an ethnicity based on what they think their race is they’re clumping together people who may actually be incredibly different ethnicities. Ethnicity is defined as being about people with a shared or common descent, history, and symbols of personhood. Where as, race is based off of physical appearance. So, just because some people share the same skin color doesn’t mean they share the same ethnicity. When you lump together people of the same color, not taking into consideration their ethnicity you’re stripping them of their history, their personhood. You’re reducing them to a color. How is it possible to know who a person really is if you don’t talk to them to find out their history and beliefs. Race implies that everyone of the same color is of the same ethnicity but that can’t be true, we hail from different ancestry and that doesn’t mean that skin color ties us together.

-My idea of what major ethnicities are- Italian, French, Russian, Mexican, Latin, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, English, British, Irish, Scottish, German, Arab, Armenian, I mean the list goes on. Everyone can’t be defined by a single ethnicity. If we want a general idea of what the ethnicity of people are we should just give them a list of countries to choose from. Everyone has ancestors from different regions of the world, and it’s likely that those places they know of are how they define their ethnicity. And even then, they might want to take it a step further and say their ethnicity is Lucian Italian, or Sicilian Italian, instead of Italian.

I don’t know what my list for “races” would be because I no longer understand what “race” is.  We group races together based on physical differences mainly focusing on skin color and sometimes using eye shape, eye color, or hair color and texture to define their race.  I mean the first two options they give are just colors, white or black, and then they just delve into regions of the world. What makes a person white? Because if it’s their skin color couldn’t someone who is Chinese say they’re white? On a color wheel their skin color might be closer white than black, right? Their list for what race is closely resembles my list for what ethnicity might be, so I guess I would either eliminate “white” from the list or not have a race question on the census. Because people are so mix cultured now I find it very hard to define a person’s race.

-If I were answering these questions I would mark as following:

            8. No, not of Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin.

That was a fairly easy question for me. Knowing what I do of my ancestral background, there’s nothing to show I have any Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish background.

            9. I guess if I’m being honest and going off of the options they give it would be white.

I had a difficult time answering this question because I find that there isn’t another option for me to check, I guess I could not answer the question at all or check “some other race,” but then I’m still wondering what my race is.

-I think that what the Census definitely has an effect on what racial and ethnic categories we use everyday. They give us options and we choose from those, we don’t see any other options and are therefore, are limited to what we know about different races or ethnicities people believe they are.  

-If I were to ‘re-do’ the Census categories I would pose the questions as fill in the blanks, i.e.:

What ethnicity do you believe you are?

And I would just eliminate the race question all together.

-I think the biggest example of a time when the census may have changed, though I’m not sure it did, is after 9/11. I think that after that major catastrophe people started to group people who were Islamic or Arabic into a racial category. Where they once were able to check the “white” race I think a lot of people became very racist and didn’t approve of that. People are naïve in the fact that they think that just because one person of a certain race or ethnicity did something that that therefore means other people or sometimes all people who might fall into that category of race or ethnicity also follow that stigma. 

Word Count- 735