Spotted here:
The American government’s standard racial and ethnic categories make a certain amount of sense.
Yeah, right up until you try to apply them to an actual group of people.
When Cyras was acquired by Ciena, we all suddenly had to know our racial classifications, because apparently Ciena was under some gummint mandate to track employment by race.
A dark-skinned Dwarf and a tall, pale-skinned Elf were lumped together under the same racial classification, "Asian", which covers a huge number of people who don't look anything alike and have no cultural similarities other than drinking tea, which characteristic they share with the English. Go figure.
An engineer who, by appearance and lifestyle was whiter'n me, turned out to be not white but Hispanic. (Well, he was from Mexico, but from one of the upper-class families, so basically a purebred expatriate Spaniard.)
An Arab complained about being classified as white; seems the last place he'd worked, people clearly hadn't regarded him as white.
And we had various professional-class immigrants of African ancestry, who presumably shared a racial classification with a very out-of-place Affirmative Action hire who worked in the mailroom for a week and then wasn't around any more.
Racial handles are somewhat useful as shorthand when describing people's appearance. The current official classifications, and the trend to racial essentialism, are every bit as bogus as the racial classifications of a century ago when "Catholic" was a race.
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