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Comment by axlee | Hacker News Reader

I'd like to understand how asian and pacific islanders are mixed up in one "group'". Is the person grouping ethnicities together judging by squinty eyes, or what? All these "ethnicities" stats are worthless, give us place of birth or nothing, it's 2023.

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Pretty sure these are just the US Census categories, which is the most consistently used grouping of people in the United States.

There are meaningful ethnic disparities between say, Black and White Americans; and those are the categories because national origin is a lot harder to measure, particularly for the descendants of people enslaved before any of the countries of modern Africa existed.

Fun fact: Nearly all formerly-Ottoman ethnicities are classified as "white" in the US. The average American considers "Muslim" a race, but the average Muslim is considered "white" under the United States' official designations.

Yeah this is actually ridiculous. I am an immigrant to the US, olive skinned but from Eastern Europe where I also stood out as an obvious ethnic minority, yet on US demographic measurement, I am as white / universe as Bob Smith whose ancestors came on the mayflower.

My dad is Persian, I grew up in Turkey, and my only citizenship is USA. I very much feel this struggle. At the same time, there’s no way they could make a box that feels like it “fits” me

Les Earnest on the subject:

https://web.stanford.edu/~learnest/les/mongrel.htm

There was a time when people from Finnland were discriminated against in US as they were not considered “white” because of their language being of Uralic origins and not Indo-European.

That’s how ridiculous it was/is.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_whiteness_in_...

edit: typo

Ethnicities/races have very nebulous definitions, and the tribal groupings vary greatly with the political winds.

At best, they try to whittle down someone’s perceived socioeconomic status, strength of family, and “cultural” values into a group with others where you share (very roughly) the same quantities of the aforementioned qualities.

Even place of birth is probably not very informative in 2023. You could be the child of poor immigrants who came to the US via chain immigration, or the child of factory owners who could afford to pay $60k per year for you to go to grad school in the US and obtain an H1-B, or even have enough to invest and get an EB-5.

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