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I am 100% in agreement that the way the US census classifies race is lacking. We should most definitely have a MENA category, like the UK does. But your solution to needing to improve it is completely doing away with it, which would likely exacerbate existing issues and make racial discrimination much easier based on factors such as name, undergraduate institution, types of community service, etc.My apologies on the mix-up and I have fixed it 🙂
Regarding the inter-twined race and SE status, not all underrepresented races can benefit if the race box is checked, and that is the problem of relying on race- it is self-reported and there is not a box for some of the races. Please see below for an extract of the Supreme court hearings:
“Justice Brett Kavanaugh, asked the UNC counsel, Ryan Park how applicants with Middle-East origins are supposed to identify themselves on the University of North Carolina’s applications since there isn’t a specific box for the Middle Eastern ethnicity. Park responded by saying the school’s applications allow applicants to specify their country of origin in the text even though there is no race box.
“But if they honestly check one of the boxes, which one are they supposed to check?” Kavanaugh asked.
Park responded: “I—I do not—do not know the answer to that question. What I can say is that if a person from a Middle Eastern country self-discloses their country of origin, it would be considered in the same way that we consider any box that matches, you know, one of the boxes that’s available in the common application, which is it would be an individualized holistic analysis.”
Infact, the US census bureau and DOE classifies Middle East as “ Caucasian” / “White” race. However if Ryan Park had given that answer to Kavanaugh’s question, it would only further undercut the argument made by affirmative action advocates—even though most Middle Easterners do not fit inside the Anglo-Saxon category typically used to describe white people. Obviously universities and med schools don’t want to admit this since if they do so, they would also have to admit that the vague racial categories used by colleges across the country force applicants into narrow boxes that don’t accurately reflect their backgrounds or experiences.
Let us then eliminate this “pseudo” box for race and actually evaluate the applicants from their stats and stories, while factoring in their SE status.
Let's push for better granularity among racial categories, not the elimination of collecting important demographic data. Nothing is perfect, so by your logic we should also get rid of gender and likely some other demographic identifiers as well.