Racial stats and forms asking about it are an underestimated force that perpetuates systemic racism, increases segregation, discrimination and undermines social cohesiveness. Change my mind.
Here in France there is no such thing as "race" or "color" or "ethnicity" from the State's point of view. The census doesn't ask anything related to race / color / ethnicity. As far as the state is concerned, you're either a French citizen or a foreigner.
However, during 2020, there were a few cases of alleged [0] police brutality towards "minorities". This has opened a wider debate over the place of minorities in the French society which, of courses, started to talk about racism. There was a clear attempt by some parties to bring up arguments which seemed directly taken from US events, in particular related to the George Floyd case. Of course, those arguments were met with the "France doesn't see race, so there can't be racism" argument.
Now I haven't followed those debates particularly closely, but from my (admittedly superficial) point of view, it's pretty hard to say that something is happening to a particular class of people because of who they are without acknowledging that that is, indeed, a class. In practical terms, how can you acknowledge that "black people are discriminated against if there are no black people"?
My point is that it's way more difficult to talk about things you can't measure. This slides into "I feel that", which doesn't really allow to know whether progress is being made.
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[0] I say "alleged" because I haven't followed closely those cases so I don't know what the investigations concluded.
> In practical terms, how can you acknowledge that "black people are discriminated against if there are no black people"?
Think about how you would practically go about preventing discrimination against a group of people. I don't think any solutions require the acknowledgment that the group exists, officially. Discrimination can happen on a number of lines that are not in whatever survey the state creates so any effective solution has to address the tendency toward discrimination of all sorts. In the US, we don't collect information (officially) on sexual orientation or religion yet we still take steps to protect people from discrimination on those avenues despite having no metrics.
I think collecting that data has a danger of creating a list of officially recognized groups which can be discriminated against (at the expense of those not tracked). This happens in the US with sexual orientation because it has not been in the list of things that it's illegal to discriminate against innthe past. Instead of just making discrimination illegal, it's only illegal to discriminate by race, religion or gender. If, instead, it were just illegal to discriminate, that wouldn't be an issue.
> yet we still take steps to protect people from discrimination on those avenues despite having no metrics.
The issue is that the U.S.A. knows at-will employment to begin with where a man might be fired or hired for rather arbitrary reasons.
In many countries, the onus is on employers to justify their reasons to make financial sense.
Pertaining to Japan, I once had a discussion with someone from the U.S.A. who learned that sexual orientation is not a “protected class” in Japan, and he had assumed that that meant that one's employ could be terminated over one's sexual orientation. Japan, as it stands, is notorious for it's nigh impossibility to fire an employee for about any reason other than willful, dishonorable, illegal conduct. Even an employee that is not being sufficiently productive in Japan will be hard to dismiss if the court find that he still tries and puts in enough effort, but simply finds it hard to manage. — personal reasons, such as sexual orientation or anything one does at home is completely off the table, of course, and thus in no want of any special protection.
I completely agree that it causes problems when armchair warriors point out that your diversity doesn't match what their expected diversity is. However it does make it more difficult to find and fix real problems, eg in France no one knows what exactly is going on.
I too agree that the US racial buckets are terrible. People from MENA countries like Saudi are white, and all Japanese/Bangladesh/Mongolian/Indonesians are "Asian", but somehow Pacific Islands got their own bucket. Makes no sense.
Plus now nearly everyone is heading towards mixed. My daughters friends are a bunch of Chinese/Jamaican, Russian/Indian, White/Asian, White American/African. Everyone is going to be just multiple buckets in a few generations.
I replied to another poster about the collection of ethnic minority data in the UK. I repeat what I said previously: these stats are collected in order to provide insights into important issues such as health, employment, housing and yes, inequality.
For example, the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed that deaths from COVID-19 are higher among black and South Asian groups. Without this data we would not have been able to identify that these communities are at higher risk.
ethnicity is a very important legacy for every ethnic group, acknowledging the existence of the different ethic groups living in a country means being more aware of the specific needs of everyone instead of crushing minorities under the umbrella of homogeneity.
it's the laws that perpetuates systemic racism.
For example in Japan Ainu, Ryukyuans and Yamato are different, have different languages, traditions and sometimes even different alphabets.
