A California professor sues over new DEIA performance reviews
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I can see why someone would feel this is an indoctrination they don’t want to participate in:
“Persons are either anti-racist or racist. Persons that say they are ‘not a racist’ are in denial of the inequities and racial problems that exist.”
Colorblindness “de-emphasizes, or ignores, race and ethnicity, a large part of one’s identity and lived experience.” A suggested synonym is “color-evasiveness”
“merit is embedded in the ideology of Whiteness and upholds race-based structural inequality.”
Among the myriad problems with this ideology is that it projects the experiences of (some?) black people with race onto a society where the majority of people who are not white are also not black. For example, the passages you quote above use “race” and “ethnicity” as synonyms, but they’re different both in theory and practice.
They have been wildly successful in this regard.
As is usually the case, it's the discriminators that set the stage, and the rest of us who have to act out the play.
"What do you mean 'green'? Two sharp peaks at 520 and 540 nm? One 30 nm wide pseudo-Gaussian with mean at 530 nm? Is 564 nm still green, or is that yellow? What about 567 nm? It is a term without meaning."
See also: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Principal_compon...
The problem with the American concept of “race” is the idea of dividing humanity into a small number of categories (five or six), with very arbitrary boundaries - the US government officially considers Afghans to be “White” but Pakistanis to be “Asian” - so two Pashtuns who look rather similar, but whose ancestors come from opposite sides of the border, are different “races”, according to mad Uncle Sam
Now, if you want to defend the idea of humanity as biologically divided into different “descent groups” - I think that may be more defensible, but we will end be up with hundreds of groups not just five or six - groups such as Sicilians, Welsh, Cantonese, Yoruba, Zulu, Ashkenazim, Navajo, Pitjantjatjara, Pashtuns, Malays, Tamils, Punjabis, Bedouins, Berbers, etc - not “White” or “Black” or “Asian”
Perhaps even a more extreme example is dog and wolf. It's kind of funny to think that this a nothern inuit dog [1] is the same species as a chihuahua [2], while a wolf [3] is a completely different species. Maybe most interesting is that the transition from wolf to dog happened over less than 40,000 years. Somewhere in the doggy afterlife there's one very disappointed great great... grand wolf father looking down at a chihuahua just thinking to himself.. 'Yeah, you had to go to the campfire didn't you. They just wanna give me some free food you said.'
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Inuit_Dog
There is a big difference though - there is mostly international agreement on what are the boundaries between species. I’m sure there are some disputes, but also vast areas of agreement
By contrast, “races” and the boundaries between them is a country-specific concept. The US is unusual in having officially defined racial categories. Most other countries don’t do that. And the few other countries that do, have very different categories from the US
So I think the issue is not one of arbitrariness, but would it even be useful to have some sort of a global categorization system for humans? And I think probably not. We're a species just a bit too addicted to dystopia, and I'm increasingly averse to pretty much anything that begins with the words global or world.
Many countries collect data on ethnicity-hence, they will have a system for categorising people based on ethnicity, often based on which ethnicities are most common in that country. But the US is unusual in having racial classifications instead of purely ethnic ones.
Differences: race purports to be a biological classification, ethnicity is predominantly a cultural one; racial classifications very often attempt to sort everyone into a small number of categories, while ethnic classifications tend to be much more expansive (with dozens or even hundreds of categories)–e.g. the Australian government's system recognises over 250 distinct "cultural and ethnic groups" [0]
Consider the case of identical twins separated at birth, and raised by families belonging to different ethnic groups-the twins could grow up to have different ethnicities, but few would agree they could have different races. Suppose one twin is adopted by an Italian family and grows up speaking Italian at home, while the other twin is adopted by a Lebanese family and grows up speaking Arabic at home instead
In theory (and occasionally in practice), you can change your ethnicity - sometimes a person joins an ethnic group (often via marriage, religious conversion, and/or immigration), and becomes so thoroughly assimilated to it that everyone accepts them as a full member. A relatively rare scenario-and different ethnic groups differ in their openness to it-but given ethnicity is a cultural category there is nothing in principle wrong with the idea of changing your ethnicity. Whereas, in theory, your race is immutable and cannot be changed (in spite of rare cases when practice has deviated from the theory)
[0] https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/classifications/australian...
The idea that there is a clear distinction between race and ethnicity is very American. In much (most?) of the rest of the world, there isn’t. The Australian government officially refuses to take a position on what the distinction is - it prefers to just talk about ethnicity; when it acknowledges the concept of race at all, it treats it as roughly equivalent to ethnicity. I think most countries worldwide are closer to Australia on this issue than to the US
Brazil also imported slaves from Africa, but its concepts of “race” have always been quite different - much more fluid - than those of the US. Brazil never had anywhere near as much segregation as the US. Indeed, I think US ideas about “race” weren’t caused by segregation, they pre-existed and caused segregation-Brazil never adopted those policies, despite the shared experience of African slavery, due to having different ideas about “race” from the start
And there’s a lot about American ideas of “race” which can’t be explained by either slavery or segregation. I mentioned before the arbitrary boundary between “White” and “Asian”, drawn along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border - that seems to have no logical connection to either