The way our schools and government collect data on race and ethnicity is severely flawed ““ just ask any Persian or Arab who has been categorized as white, any mixed-race person who has been told to choose one race to identify with, or the progressive visionaries who finally had the UC admissions data on Asians and Pacific Islanders divided into 23 distinct categories.
Sadly, in the 2010-11 academic year, all colleges will have to start reporting racial and ethnic data according to the federal government’s own format, which, among other flaws, will consolidate many students into an oversimplified “two or more races.”
Responsible, accurate data on racial and ethnic trends is extremely useful in targeting disenfranchisement and hardship related to racial and ethnic backgrounds.
Irresponsible data on racial and ethnic trends often perpetuate these problems.
The new survey would also first ask a student to indicate if he or she is of Hispanic or Latino/a background, and if not then to select one other category, thereby somehow making a Hispanic or Latino/a identity overrule any others.
It’s bad enough that these statistics lump together very different groups under vague titles like “Latino/a or Chicano/a” and “Asian,” but now the federal government is going to send the UC backward by erasing the progress that has already been made to allow people to choose more than one race or ethnicity and to make data on Asians and Pacific Islanders more accurate and specific.
Not adhering to the archaic federal standard would potentially make colleges ineligible for federal student loans, but this type of policy still must be fought.
American culture is undeniably shaped, in part, by strong influential mixed-race individuals such as Sen. Barack Obama, Tiger Woods, Keanu Reeves, Halle Berry and countless others.
The time for American government and educational institutes to recognize the importance of mixed heritages is long overdue.
If all mixed-race black students were classified as black, the underrepresentation of blacks might become understated, just as classifying them as another single race could overstate that group’s representation.
Additionally, the government must recognize that collecting data on so-called racial and ethnic “sub-groups” is crucial for generating useful data.
For example, students of one Asian heritage may come from a very different socioeconomic background than another, and therefore may have different financial aid needs.
The path to higher education for a first-generation Hmong student is likely very different from that of a second-generation Chinese student.
The United States government should be working to recognize these differences so specific groups that may face unfair disenfranchisement or unequal access to education may be helped, otherwise the data will simply be trivial knowledge.
Instead, the federal government is taking horrific measures to send colleges like the UC back to a more primitive approach to documenting and analyzing race and ethnic influences on access to education.