10 ms·

I grew up in Germany, but the first time I really learnt about the concept of race was when I went to the doctor in the US, where you need to fill in your "ethn

• bloqs 5y ago
  From a genetic perspective, its shockingly backwards. Classic US oversimplification and pidgeon holing too. We are all a bastard amalgamation.
  • hh3k0 5y ago
    > But precision medicine only works if scientists have studied people who are similar to you. If your genes are rare or unusual compared to those researchers have examined in the past, you could end up getting the wrong treatment. Since the vast majority of genetics studies are done on people of European ancestry, members of other racial groups may lose out on the benefits of precision medicine entirely. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/medicine-is-getting-more-precise-for-white-people/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/medicine-is-getting-mor...
• ricardobayes 5y ago
  Libraries in the UK ask for ethnicity when you register even nowadays, so do uni applications. Weird.
  • hh3k0 5y ago
    University applications probably do for reasons related to equality policies. I'm sure they have some affirmative action equivalent over there.
    • Swenrekcah 5y ago
      Which is racist. It’s good intentioned, but it’s also almost the definition of racism. I don’t particularly mind affirmative action policies but I wish people were more honest with themselves how it’s really an imposition of one kind of injustice in an attempt to remedy another. The world is messy and complicated, it may be warranted, but it seems to me these kind of measures really have to be viewed as temporary measures and aimed to phase out as soon as a certain level of “target equality” has been achieved.
      • hh3k0 5y ago
        > Which is racist. It’s good intentioned, but it’s also almost the definition of racism. I tend to agree with that. I think the idea is that positive discrimination can offset previously encountered negative discrimination to some degree and level the field by doing so. I don't have strong opinion about it, but it seems like the best method we have to make a real impact. Everything else seems too slow.
        • tartoran 5y ago
          But it also could brew resentiments that end up making people hate eachother. Affirmative action should help people of a similar socioeconomic background somehow without involving race. People do need that helping hand but if they happen to tick off the wrong boxes they’re out of luck.
          • ZeroGravitas 5y ago
            Every time affirmative-action comes up for discussion in HN, someone in the comments entirely re-invents european style social-democracy from first principles just to avoid giving any advantage to African American's based on race. I'm never sure whether to be saddened or hopeful about this phenomenon. Is it a new generation growing up and realizing that race is an outdated social construct and they could just help everyone and anyone with sensible policies, or is it just people repeating "You know who the real racists are?" style talking points, it's hard to tell.
  • sircastor 5y ago
    This sort of statistical information helps organizations understand how they’re serving the community.
  • Ntrails 5y ago
    It is for reporting and analysis. "Why are 2/3 of our maths grads white men?" "Hmmm, don't know. What were our applicant demographics?. Ooh, they are only 60% white men. Lets dig..." etc etc. If you don't have the data you cannot identify where in the pipeline an anomaly starts
    • ricardobeat 5y ago
      That’s the point of the entire article. It’s a fuzzy problem that can’t be solved by strict categorization like that, which is in itself a form of discrimination. You design your admissions process to be as fair as possible, not “tune it” to get the metrics right.
    • Zababa 5y ago
      > "Why are 2/3 of our maths grads white men?" Why would you ask that in the first place?
      • dekhn 5y ago
        That ratio indicates that there is some biased process leading to the ratio, and that process should be de-biased. Presuming women and men have equal math abilities (I assume this is true) and equal desire to obtain degrees (not entirely sure; this is a very controversial topic) you would expect that an unbiased selection process would generate 50% male/female ratio. Again, many assumptions and conclusions in what i just said are not absolutely certain. Many departments are currently realizign they play a role in systemic discrimination, and those ratios help them understand how far they are from the mean.
        • Jensson 5y ago
          > Many departments are currently realizign they play a role in systemic discrimination, and those ratios help them understand how far they are from the mean. I hope you realize this process started over 50 years ago. Most fields turned and are now dominated by women. The few fields that are still not dominated by women are probably that way for another reason than discrimination, women are far too good at taking over fields for some discrimination to stop them from doing so.
  • ZeroGravitas 5y ago
    I believe this, and similar things in job applications, is mostly so they can generate stats that would reveal if there was discrimination going on. It feels weird because you're providing the information to the people who are being held accountable, and the idea is to get to a place where the information they are asking you for doesn't matter, but life is complicated.
    • bopbeepboop 5y ago
  • helsinkiandrew 5y ago
    They will always have an option “would rather not say” and are used for reporting. Universities in particular are keen to ensure they have a mix of students that isn’t skewed.
• pbhjpbhj 5y ago
  Different ethnicities get affected in different proportions by some conditions, such as sickle cell disease https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/sicklecell/data.html https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/sicklecell/data.html. It's a genuine medical question, but of course you're not obliged to answer.
  • cplanas 5y ago
    I doubt that it can be taken seriously as a medical question, as some of the American "races" don't cluster genetically. Hispanic is probably the worst offender, but Asian is pretty bad too.
    • MathCodeLove 5y ago
      But some do. Its easier to ask for race than it is to ask for genetic makeup.
      • skissane 5y ago
        Do any of them really cluster genetically? Compare a person whose ancestors come from Senegal to a person whose ancestors come from Mozambique – Americans will call both persons "Black", yet I would not expect those two people to have many recent ancestors in common, or much "genetic clustering" at all.
        • sseagull 5y ago
          You are thinking too literally. It's just a question that opens the door to more discussion. It's another piece of information, not the end of the discussion.
          • skissane 5y ago
            But does it always "open the door to more discussion", or do some medical professionals just make judgements based on which box was ticked on the patient form? Presented with an African immigrant patient, is a US doctor going to realise that the patient may have rather different genetics from most African-Americans, and hence information about health risks for African-Americans may not be relevant to them? I'm sure an above-average doctor would realise that and take it into account, but would a below-average doctor (of whom there are very many) do it?
• wpietri 5y ago
  Sorry, but for QA reasons it's still valuable to track. In the US, medical care is shockingly worse for people who medical staff perceive as one race vs another. Removing the line on the form will not prevent that.
  • auggierose 5y ago
    Adding that line apparently hasn't helped either.
    • wpietri 5y ago
      I don't think that's true at all. There are a ton of studies that have proved the problem exists, which has led to real efforts to fix the problem. How would we do that without data?
      • auggierose 5y ago
        If you want data, take my DNA sample. That might actually be useful.
        • wpietri 5y ago
          As the article explains, your DNA sample will not show how you are perceived racially by the people treating you. And it's that racial perception that has a big influence on quality of care in the US. We cannot eliminate the box on the form until we first eliminate the biased care.
          • auggierose 5y ago
            I can assure you, my answer to that question will equally not show how I am perceived racially by the people treating me. Maybe the people treating me should fill it out? Maybe they should also fill out if they perceive me as rather dumb or rather smart, because that might also impact my treatment.
• wongarsu 5y ago
  In Germany we learned in school about Hitler's race theory and how ridiculous the whole idea was. But compared to attempts like the one described in the article Nazi Germanys version sounds incredibly well thought out, including rigorous criteria to determine the race of a person (as ridiculous as those were). Which is by all means not meant as an endorsement of 1930s ideology, more as a "wtf is that, that's backwards in more ways than I'm comfortable with".
  • thrown_22 5y ago
    [flagged]
  • ZeroGravitas 5y ago
    The Nazis literally copied these rules from America. They actually made them slightly more "reasonable" in the sense that they didn't go as far as the "one drop rule". https://www.history.com/news/how-the-nazis-were-inspired-by-jim-crow https://www.history.com/news/how-the-nazis-were-inspired-by-...
  • notahacker 5y ago
    I think "this is the weird phenotype/culture hybrid people treat this person and their family as" is a less backward approach than "here's some pseudoscience to try to disprove that Jews and Aryan ubermenschen are of intermixed ancestry and actually pretty difficult to distinguish physiologically [at least without looking for specific genetic markers we fortunately haven't the technology to identify]", even before we get onto the why is this being looked into question. Conceding a socially significant category isn't actually very analytically rigorous and might as well be treated as just a label shows more thoughtfulness than inventing a lot of nonsense to try to give it the appearance of rigour.
    • wongarsu 5y ago
      If you describe it like that it sounds like a classical descriptivism vs prescriptivism argument. Nazi Germany leaned hard into prescriptivism, trying to have hard rules for everything, while the US goes with a descriptivism "whatever the people call it is right". But that sounds fundamentally incompatible with having a fixed list of categories, with that approach surely it would have to be a free text field (or at least a couple categories, along with either a text field or an "other" category, like with gender nowadays)
• rubyist5eva 5y ago
  For all intents and purposes, I am white but I am also of French descent. My wife is also, for all intents and purposes "white" - . When my wife was pregnant they asked for our ethnicities but wanted more details than just "white". When they found out that I had French descent, they added initial genetic screening for the baby for a disease which only statistically significantly occurs in people with French descent.
  • stickfigure 5y ago
    This seems a poor way of economizing on tests. How would someone of (say) German descent be sure that some of their ancestors didn't come from across the border? Very few people can trace their lineage back more than a couple generations.
    • rubyist5eva 5y ago
      I agree, it's not an exact science and I am not a doctor or run a practice so I do not know why they would do it this way. Probably a "best we can do" type situtation.
    • troupe 5y ago
      Keep in mind there is also the chance of false positives on those types of tests. So anything you can do to do them only on people where there is a higher chance of them being meaningful saves not just the cost of the tests but mental anguish for people who would get the false positive results.
  • ricardobeat 5y ago
    I thought genetic screening was most useful before pregnancy, to know if a child would be at risk of inheriting any conditions from their parent’s genes, or to diagnose a disease and guide treatment. What’s the purpose of blanket screening a child that hasn’t shown any symptoms?
    • rubyist5eva 5y ago
      In our case, this disease can be detected very early in the womb and children born with it do not survive very long - usually only a few months, 2 years at most if I'm remembering correctly. They do these tests early so the pregnancy can be terminated if the parents choose.
• secondaryacct 5y ago
  I put Mix: Normando-French in the "Other" category when Im asked at the census in Hong Kong giggling at their expected confused looks. What the fuck is a race, I look a bit different from a guy in Marseille and a lot different from a guy in Beijing but it's all a gradient, why make it discreet and give names (they split between western and viet for instance in HK... but isnt Vietnam west of China too??), do they also have a guide book so we cull impurities ? It s insane to use races as a concept for humans when clearly we fuck just as dutifully as stray cats in a gutter. Racism is to talk of races.
  • zelphirkalt 5y ago
    Not defending that particular application, but it is probably important for humans to make categories of things to be able to draw lines between them and find useful rules of how to deal with things. People like to make up labels for all kinds of (ir)relevant stuff and try to "other" people who are different in some way or to some degree. "my side, your side" stuff. The important thing is, that we are also able to look beyond our categories and do not draw wrong conclusions from them. Keeping an open mind.
    • TimTheTinker 5y ago
      Race and ethnicity are meaningless, arbitrary, and ultimately capricious categories we need to get rid of. TA is a long-form treatise on why.
    • secondaryacct 5y ago
      We have no category given by nature that's for sure. What s important is not to look beyond our category, it s waking up to the fact there is none. It s very american, for some reason, anyway. They were so hung on not mixing up with the slaves they had to draw a line. But stop thinking you're white or black: you re very different from a Russian and a Portugues, or a Malian and a Senegalese. Focusing on skin color is stupid. My daughter for instance is more franco-chinese than she's whito-yellow (and even that has so many variation that no two french and no two chinese think perfectly alike), it has no meaning, no more than hair color or eye color, at least.
• trentnix 5y ago
  There are genuinely different risk factors and biological predispositions that are impacted by one’s racial background. The idea that we should pretend race is only a social construct is completely unscientific and absurd. To argue asking about one’s race is racism will absolutely, positively have negative outcomes in providing quality healthcare. A good physician should never be ignorant of such things. And there’s no such thing as a good physician who is willfully ignorant of such things.
  • secondaryacct 5y ago
    • trentnix 5y ago
      You don’t seem to understand what race, as it’s used in this context, actually means.
      • secondaryacct 5y ago
        Nothing... it means nothing and your inability to define it precisely beyond vague concepts proves it. Races have a precise meaning in domestic animal breeding, there is a rule book, you cull the offspring that mutates too far away and aim at purity of attributes as defined in the standard. You get certification for your animals by various standard association who measure shape, color and size. It makes no sense for humans. You can say gene X produce problem Y if you want, but there s no discrete segmentation in humans.
  • thriftwy 5y ago
    Theoretically, yes. However, in practice either one of White, Black, Asian and, notoriously, Latino races carry zero of medically useful information since all of those are polyphylectic. There's more than one distinct things in each.
    • trentnix 5y ago
      I agree. But that’s a problem with how one’s race is being asked, not whether it is out-of-bounds to ask.
• colpabar 5y ago
  In america it’s important that our ruling class constantly divides all us plebs up by race so that we can all be mad at each other instead of them. It’s incredibly effective.
  • mistrial9 5y ago
    "our ruling class" is a naive claim; a useful lense is found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_politics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_politics
• sandworm101 5y ago
  For me it was law school in the us. Every other form asked me about my race. Then they made us do a diversity survey with a question: "how much time do you spend each day with minorities?" And "do you want to spend more or less?". I refused to complete the survey. This was Massachusetts. Americans really do not realize how shocking this constant official reference to race is for people from other countries. The census last year put out a map listing racial makeup in every neighbourhood, with dots representing clusters of people. I was speechless. A government map listing where all the colored people lived. This is normal in America.
  • colpabar 5y ago
    It’s not just normal, it’s progressive! In all seriousness though, lots of americans share your sentiment. Lots of us would just like to live our lives, but we’re constantly bombarded with stuff like this.
  • hnuser847 5y ago
    The obsession with race is everywhere in the US right now. I work for a Fortune 500, non-FAANG company. I’m required to set four annual goals at the beginning of each year. Two of those goals must relate to my performance or the business’s objectives (you know, what I get paid for). The other two must be Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) goals. One of the ways to satisfy these goals is recruit a “diverse” candidate, which is just a corporate euphemism for non-white. It’s creepy.
    • WithinReason 5y ago
      To me "a diverse candidate" sounds like a complete oxymoron. "You must be different, like everyone else!"
• gonehome 5y ago
  Yeah, the question always irks me as well and I usually leave it blank. The recent Covid stuff about prioritizing vaccines depending on race (which thankfully got rejected) shows there is reason to be suspicious of it imo. “Race” is such an arbitrary and bad classification scheme. A third rail topic, but an alien observing humanity would find our obsession with certain characteristics but not others weird, particularly when we’re all the same species anyway. My hope is we can one day get past it. There’s some evidence of this with previously coded “races” no longer being explicitly thought of that way in the culture. Cultural variance is interesting, but identity classifications seem harmful and with racial categories primarily a social construction anyway - just strange?
• bitwize 5y ago
  I'm white but I put "Prefer not to answer" whenever I'm asked an equal-opportunity question about my race because what difference should it make? However, at the doctor's office it matters. Black people are at a higher risk for sickle-cell anemia, there's a significant percentage of ethnic Chinese who cannot metabolize alcohol very well, etc. Having your ethnic background on file helps health professionals evaluate your risks for conditions significantly influenced by ethnicity.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• tasogare 5y ago
• aklemm 5y ago
  These questionnaires should read, “What race has society labeled you?”