From: mday@jukebox.lcs.mit.edu (Mark Day)
Subject: Re: Census report
Organization: MIT Laboratory for Computer Science
	<MDAY.92Sep24102452@jukebox.lcs.mit.edu>
	<1992Sep24.213613.4640@lmpsbbs.comm.mot.com>
Date: Sat, 26 Sep 1992 18:45:19 GMT

   lam@popeye.comm.mot.com (Dan Lam) writes:
   > mday@jukebox.lcs.mit.edu (Mark Day) writes:
   >
   >   Arthur_T_Hu@cup.portal.com writes:
   >
   >   Whos is an Asian? Depends on which box you check, or if you wrote in
   >   your ethnicity if it was Laotian or some other Asian group too marginal
   >   merit its own box. I heard of at least one Asian who was insulted and
   >   checked "other". This is bad, because we need to know how many Asians
   >   there are. 
   >
   >People can identify themselves any way they like.  Personally, I wish
   >that more people had chosen the content-free descriptions like
   >"Mongrel" or "None of Your Business".  I don't think you have any
   >business telling people that it's "bad" to check "Other".

   I have to disagree with you on this despite the fact that  most of
   your posts are very well thought ones and the ideas you express are very
   coherent (unlike those expressed by Arthur).

Well, thanks for the compliment, but you're being too hard on Arthur.
Arthur's coherent, he's just often wrong in spite of being coherent.

   In Arthur's original post, the ASIAN mentioned felt insulted because
   his/her ethnic group was too marginal to merit its own "box".  He/she
   checked the "other" box instead of writing down his/her own ethnicity
   (sorry I have to repeat the story but this is how I comprehend Arthur's
   message).  To me this Asian person merely just doesn't give a damn about
   cencus.  By checking "other" he/she had DISTORTED the cencus data and
   cuased an INACURATE COUNT of his/her own ethinic group.  Many
   government agencies use census data when making certain policies .  
   Distorted census data may hurt/favor some ethnic groups.

True, this caused a distortion of the census data.  The question is,
why is the government collecting that census data, and what will they
use it for?  My observation is that there is actually no defensible reason
for collecting that information other than our continuing national obsession
with this fiction called "race".  Now your example...

   I used to tutor some Laotian and Cambodian high school kids at a local
   non-profit organization.  Now imagine if census data showed that
   Laotions rarely exist (due to lots of them being insulted and checked
   "other"), it would be impossible for such a tutoring progam to justisfy
   its partial funding from the government and/or other agencies.

You're right that you would want accurate data about the number of
people who speak, say, Lao, in a given area so that you could allocate
resources effectively and efficiently.  I have no objection to that.
But that has nothing to do with ethnicity or race.  In the case in
question, the number of "Asians" in an area provides you with no
information about the need for tutoring, because they might be
recently-arrived Laotians or they might be nth-generation AAs with
English skills comparable to whites.  Similarly, the presence of a
large white ethnic-Russian population might indicate a need for such
tutoring, if most of those people have recently arrived; but not if
they've been in the country for generations.  If you want to
understand the need for language tutoring, you have to include
questions about native language in the census (which indeed there were
on the long form, if not on the short form).

An "Asian" who gets insulted and checks "Other" instead of "Asian"
doesn't affect any meaningful number, s/he only affects the count of
"Asians" subsequently released by the Bureau of the Census.  Frankly,
I can't see any use for those racial statistics -- we might as well
divide the population into height ranges as into these goofy
categories of "Asian" "Black", etc., and at least then we'd have an
objective way to determine the category of every individual.

--Mark Day

mday@lcs.mit.edu
Newsgroups: soc.culture.asian.american