Patricia wrote:
Interesting. I had figured the person filling out the form gave the mother and the father choices verbally. Thanks.
It came as a surprise to me that Hispanic is considered a race by some people. That's in the last 15 years or so, I think. Since science has proved that my DNA may be more like a black woman's than anyone else's, perhaps race is being phased out entirely in favor of ethnicity. But nobody told me they'd keep the word "race."
I think we should classify people by what their favorite music is, personally
Edit: Tolland, what did you find???
It's probably impossible to know just what occurred when Barack Sr. filled out the form that became the info for the Birth Certificate. In 1970 I was just handed forms to fill out; I don't recall whether anybody told me how to do so. I suspect things were too busy for anybody to do that. That might have been the case with Barack Sr.: nobody told him how he was "supposed" to think about race. Even if he were given the "standard" racial categories of White, Black, American Indian, etc., he would also have been given "other" as a choice, and for that "African" would have been the right word to write for him if he followed Kenyan practice.
Race has been "going away" for decades. There has been a movement in some Black organizations for several decades to cease collecting "race" data on the Census and other Federal and Federally-sponsored surveys. Part of the argument in that in this increasingly multiracial society (you and me both), "race" is beginning to make no sense, but that is not the argument the Black organizations make.
Their argument is that statistics that are tabulated by race often tell a misleading story. For example, the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports report higher rates of armed robbery, for example, among Blacks than among Whites, as well as higher rates of Black on Black crime than of Black on White crime. I have had trouble accepting this argument, because I think there is a truth there that needs to be examined and dealt with. However, I agree that the association between "race" and crime rates goes down a lot when social class is introduced as a statistical control. It's not that the correlation of race and crime rates is spurious, but it is the case that there is a combined effect of race and social class. What part of that correlation with race is due to discrimination that is caused by the very reporting of racial differentials remains to be determined; I do think that prejudices are formed from such data without the needed qualification: it's more complicated than that.
A counter-argument is that we need statistical reporting by race to document differentials in poverty rates, for example. It would hardly be defensible to tabulate crime rates without race but to tabulate poverty rates with race. The statistical side of me says that would be deliberate distortion of the data. And it would give a lot of sociologists an enormous amount of trouble in doing their research.
Another counter-argument is that we need race data in order to make sure that such things as health studies are performed on true cross-sections of the whole population. A great deal of modern medicine is still based on studies of white males. That has led to some serious medical errors and bad diagnoses and prescriptions. Women were especially affected, because I think women probably
are from Venus and thus are fundamentally different from males. This difference was not detectable in medical studies until NIH passed rules requiring that women be included in all studies. The same was true for racial differences. There was no good handle on how and why some medicines work differently for Blacks than for Whites, or why the incidence of hypertension is higher among Blacks than among Whites (if I remember my facts correctly).
A third counter-argument is that statistics on race document the political power of minorities. This was why Arab-Americans officially sought to be separately counted as a race in the 2000 Census. I and some others fought back very hard on this and convinced some advocates of this position that it would be unwise to do that. In the mid-90s it was already clear that discrimination against Arabs and Arab-Americans was growing; the first WTC attack was in 1993. Then old-line Black organizations fought hard against the introduction of simple ways for people to report that they are of multiple races; they feared correctly that some people who before had reported themselves as Black would now report themselves as, say, Black/Asian. The advisory committee to the Secretary of Commerce also did not accept that; we saw a coming nation that is coffee with cream and wanted to be able to capture that in an early stage.
Hispanic is considered an ethnicity, and Hispanics can be of any race, including Asian races. Ethnicity makes more sense today, to me, if it is asked as a heritage question. "White" is not my ethnicity. It is French/Dutch/Creole/French/Scots-Irish/ and who knows what else. Does that "ethnicity" mean anything on the order of what "Hispanic" means? No. In fact, my brain is demonstrably hard-wired against learning French. I think that has to do with the unpleasant circumstances in which one set of my ancestors fled France to England.
This discussion caused me to think again of
Dreams from My Father, which I read soon after what I thought was a stunning political debut at the 2004 convention. I guess that I had not paid that much attention to what I was reading, because now that I've started reading it a second time, I'm getting a better sense of the man that I had supported since 2004: he is a wonderful human being. I just went there to see how Obama described his father ("African") and am sticking around to read what shaped this extraordinary life.
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Pleeease tell me you are being sarcastic here. The certificate from freepages notes the person was born 
