As I’ve mentioned many times, I hold a lead position on The Ace Community Survey. One of the things we track, is ethnicity/race. Many years of dealing with that nightmare of a section has greatly impressed upon me the complexity and ambiguity of the concepts.
One of the big complications is, we’re an international survey. Well, the survey is in English and recruits from English-speaking online communities, so it tends to be biased towards predominantly White countries and the US in particular. But you know what they say about race being a social construct? The primary consequence is that different cultures have constructed race in different ways. The secondary consequence is that even within a single country there are multiple interacting constructions of race. There’s basically no neutral way to ask about race, nor analyze the results.
So I’m going to talk about the ins and outs of race, drawing upon my experiences with our international (but US-dominated) survey.
Our survey questions
You can take a look at our 2018 survey questionnaire; race, ethnicity, and nationality are addressed on pages 5-19.
- We ask people to write in their race and/or ethnicity.
- We ask people to choose any number of racial/ethnic categories from a long list of options. The list consists of various racial categories common in the studied population (e.g. Brown, White, Jewish), and various regions of the world (e.g. North African or Southeast Asian).
- We ask people if they’re an ethnic minority in their community, and then in their country.
- We ask people for their primary country of residence. Basically this is a nationality question, but asking about nationality gets complicated for multinational people.
- For the three most common countries (US, UK, and Canada), we ask a set of questions based on the national censuses of those countries
When we started out, we just asked for nationality, and then the national census questions. This is necessary, because we’d like to compare our data to national census results, which requires asking questions in a similar way. And yet, it was unsatisfactory, because national censuses have a few strange ideas about race and ethnicity. So that’s why we added sections 1, 2, and 3.
National censuses
Although the US, UK, and Canada are culturally quite similar compared to other parts of the world, there are already slight differences in how they model race and ethnicity.
In the UK Census, the major ethnic categories are: White, Black, Asian, Other, and mixed. Each category is further subdivided. White includes “Irish” and “Gypsy or Irish Traveller”, and everyone else is “Other White”. There are several Asian subgroups, but one thing that might surprise US readers, is that the biggest Asian groups are Indian and Pakistani–the word “Asian” makes most people in the UK think of South Asian groups, rather than East Asian. “Black” includes “African”, “Caribbean” and “Other Black”. The only named subgroup of “Other” is “Arab”.
The Canada Census has a more expansive list of groups–which are not called ethnic groups but “visible minorities”. The visible minorities are: South Asian, Chinese, Black, Filipino, Latin American, Arab, Southeast Asian, West Asian, Korean, Japanese, other, and multiple of above. They also measure a few Aboriginal groups, which are considered ethnic groups rather than visible minorities. White is defined to be those who are neither a visible minority nor Aboriginal.
In the US Census, the major racial categories are: White, Black, American Indian or Alaskan Native, Asian, and Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander. If you’re in at least two of those categories, then you instead get placed in the “Two or more races” category. Hispanic and Latino are not considered races, but ethnic groups, and are asked about separately. So apart from the “White” group, we also have the “White, not Hispanic or Latino” group.
So, let me observe some differences. First, in the UK it’s called “ethnicity”, while in Canada it’s called “visible minorities”, and in the US it’s “race”. The Canada and the US also have a separate concept of “ethnicity”, a seemingly arbitrary distinction between some racial/ethnic groups and others. You also might notice differences in granularity, with the UK using the broadest categories, and Canada choosing to spell out a lot more distinct groups.
Finally, there are differences in which groups are even counted. For instance, the Canada Census cares a lot about Canadian Aboriginal groups, but the other countries do not. The US has several Native groups that the other countries do not. And the UK doesn’t have a Latino group.
Race in the US vs Race in the US Census
The differences between the three censuses are indicative of how race is differently understood in the different countries. But also, each census isn’t entirely accurate to how race is actually understood in that country. I can’t speak to the UK or Canada, but in the US, there are some pretty glaring issues.
First of all, the distinction between race and ethnicity is bogus. Because Hispanic and Latino are not considered “race”, they’re omitted from the question about race, which tends to really confuse Hispanic and Latino people. The real purpose of asking about Hispanic and Latino origins in a separate question, is that the census didn’t allow people to select two or more races until the 2000 Census. So it was a way for people to select Hispanic/Latino and something else, and be counted as both things. Even now, combining ethnicity and race questions would be problematic, since a lot of Hispanic/Latino people are mixed, and therefore would be placed into “Two or more races” instead of “Hispanic/Latino”. Which, is a problem that already affects other groups, especially decreasing the count of American Indians, and the count of Asian people in Hawaii.
The second biggest problem in my opinion, is a lack of accounting for people who are Arab, or from the Middle East or North Africa (MENA). Arab and MENA are not among the options for race, and the stance of the US Census is that such people are “White”. I’m not sure how they’re actually categorized in practice, but I suspect many of them end up in the White category in one way or another. It’s funny because some of these people definitely don’t have light skin, and would not be read as White in real life. Even the ones with light skin might not be read as White any more, not since 9/11.
There’s some tricky politics in there. NPR says that MENA groups have been pushing to add a MENA category for a long time. But at the moment, some people are worried that the Trump administration would add it and then use it for evil. The Trump administration for its part, mostly just wants to count more people as White, to contribute to the perception that White people are still holding onto dominance. Oh, and the Trump administration wants to add a citizenship question, which will not actually get accurate numbers on citizenship, will discourage people from responding, and reduce representation of blue states and districts. Yeah, that’s a thing.
Philosophical questions
Let’s back off from the politics, and ask some broader questions about how race and ethnicity are understood. There aren’t any right answers to these questions, instead I’m identifying questions that different cultures might have different ways of answering.
- Are race and ethnicity distinct concepts? Which categories are racial categories, and which ones are ethnic categories?
- Is race/ethnicity distinct from nationality? This is not so much an issue in the US, UK, and Canada, but in other countries the concepts are often partially collapsed. For example the Japanese Census only asks about nationality.
- How granular should each group be?
- How do we deal with mixed people? For instance, I’m White/Chinese/Filipino, should I be counted as both White and Asian, just one, or just a separate “two or more races” category? Next, consider the case of a Chinese/Filipino person, who might be considered mixed in Asia, but in the US is just considered Asian.
As far as granularity goes, there’s effectively no bottom. The other day, I was reading about how there are over 300 native ethnic groups in Indonesia. Obviously in the US we can’t tell. We don’t know enough Indonesian people, and barely understand the distinction between Indonesia and India. (Hint: India is the 2nd most populous country in the world, Indonesia is the 4th.) I think there’s a tendency to collapse these “exotic” groups into very broad categories that they would not have chosen themselves.
On the flip side, there’s also a tendency for “dominant” groups to collapse themselves all into a single category. Like how in the US all these distinct groups consider themselves simply “White”. Or in Japan, most Japanese nationals ignore ethnic differences and just consider themselves “Japanese”. I also want to use China as an example, but China has a lot of things going on, and I hardly feel qualified to comment.
How our survey interprets race
In the context of a survey, there are two distinct levels of granularity: the level of granularity used to write the survey questions, and the level of granularity used to analyze and report the results. I’ve already described the granularity we used for the questions, but what about the analysis? If you want the details, you can read our report on the 2016 survey, pages 11 to 15. Honestly it’s too much to explain here.
But I’ll note a few general strategies. First, we believe in reporting on multiple levels of granularity. This increases the number of tables and makes it more confusing, but hopefully more people can find the statistics relevant to them. In the US, UK, and Canada, we include analyses that are identical to those of their respective censuses, for comparison purposes. For international data (that is, the entire pool), we include an analysis based on US-centric categories (although not quite the same as the ones in the US Census).
Maybe using US-centric categories is cultural imperialism or something. But the idea is that the cultural imperialism is already occurring, and we’re just trying to describe it. These people are from all over the world and have different concepts of race, but they’re still occupying these online communities that are dominated by the US and culturally similar countries, so they get read through that lens whether they like it or not.
So there you have it. Race. Much credit goes to Bauer McClave for her work on this part of the survey.
In Latvia last census was in 2011. I just checked the questionnaire. There wasn’t a single question about race. The word “race” wasn’t used anywhere at all. That makes sense considering the fact that race is a fictional and imaginary construct.
Instead there were the following questions:
1. In which country were you born? (Free space to write in something.)
2. Which country do you belong to? (Free space to write in something.)
3. What is your status at that country? (Possible answers from which to check one: citizen, alien, refugee, stateless person.)
4. What is your nationality? (There’s free space to write in whatever you want; no possible options are given for checking one.)
5. Which language do you use most commonly at home? (Possible to check one of the options for languages that are most commonly spoken in Latvia, but there’s also free space for “other; please specify.”)
One thing I disliked about the questionnaire was the question about sex, where you had to check one of the only two possible answers, ether “male” or “female” with no other options given.
Other than that, there weren’t any other annoying questions, the questionnaire was mostly about how much education you had, what kind of work you do, your income, family status, where you live, with how many other people in your household, that sort of stuff. There were also a bunch of questions about homes (how large is the living space, what type of heating system is there, when was the home built, do you have a bath/shower at home, do you have a water tap at home, is there an indoor toilet, etc. similar questions; there were also options for “homeless” and “living in some non-living space”).
@Andreas Avester #1
I would describe that as an example of what it looks like to “collapse” race and nationality. There are certainly some advantages to that choice–for example you don’t really have to choose the granularity because the granularity is basically set by the size of each country. I observe that countries, just like races, are also fictional constructs, but I think we can all agree that there’s a bit more force to them–or at least we can agree on what they are.
I can’t really speak to the situation in Latvia, but in the OP I mentioned Japan, because I did some research on it years ago for an analysis of a Japanese video game. From a US point of view the cast lacked diversity, but from a Japanese point of view, the cast was diverse because of how multinational it was.
In Japan, many people think of their country as being monoethnic, even though from an outsider perspective Japan has many distinct ethnic groups. There’s a preference for lighter skin, and discrimination based on skin tone, but that discrimination is not conceptualized as racial. There’s also a tendency to ignore ethnic divisions in other countries, e.g. the stereotypical American is light-skinned, blonde-haired, and blue-eyed, even if they know at the back of their minds that not all Americans are like that. One of the consequences, is that when Japanese people immigrate elsewhere, and their descendants immigrate back, they’re seen as a distinct group (Nikkeijin) and reportedly not treated very well.
Not sure about other Hispanics, but remember that Mexico has it’s own views on race. It gets carried to the US when we come here. Lot’s of people want to consider themselves white. Mom was one, though it was obvious she was a mestizo.
@robertbaden #3,
Yes, that could go some ways towards explaining why the US Census’ classification system for Hispanic/Latino people is so weird. They have to deal with the understandings of ethnicity/race held by both long-time US residents as well as the ones carried over from Mexico.
I don’t pretend to be an expert on this particular subject, but here are a few things I learned by looking around. Hispanic and Latino are US constructions, and people under that label often but not always prefer more specific terms. Mexicans made up 63% of that group in the 2010 census. Mexico has its own construction of race that echoes the US construction but is not identical. Apparently Mexico has not conducted censuses on race for most of its history, which certainly goes to show that racial constructions can persist without a census to reinforce it.
Census questions about one’s primary country of residence or citizenship make sense. Sure, countries might be just the result of arbitrarily drawn lines on a map, but nonetheless the fact that you have some country’s citizenship has practical real-world implications, so the question is relevant. Same goes also for somebody’s country of residence. Where some person lives impacts their life. Thus I don’t mind answering such questions. Also the question about what language people speak at home is relevant, because the state is funding schools where kids are taught in various languages, thus it makes sense to know how many people prefer to use which language.
On the other hand, if somebody dared to ask me about my race or the ethnic origins of my biological ancestors, I’d get annoyed and refuse to answer.
In Latvia it’s possible to choose not to answer questions about one’s nationality. People can choose their nationality to be written in their official records, including the passport, but it’s voluntary. I have chosen to refuse to disclose my nationality/ethnicity to my country. My country knows what citizenship I have, and that’s sufficient, they don’t need to know any more details about my ancestry. And they definitely don’t need to know how much melanin I have in my skin or what is my natural hair color.
I suppose I don’t mind that in the census there’s a question about one’s nationality/ethnicity as long as the field is left blank for each person to write whatever they prefer (including the option not to answer at all).
Here somebody’s nationality is routinely a pain to determine. For example, my boyfriend’s ancestors are from Lithuania, but he doesn’t know Lithuanian language. Instead he speaks Latvian, Russian, and English. Which one of these four should he pick as his single nationality? Alternatively, I have a friend whose ancestors are from Ukraine, but he speaks Russian, English, and Latvian. Should nationality be determined based upon one’s native language or their ancestors’ native language? And what about all those people who have two native languages? For example, my mother had two native languages, and the language she currently speaks at home is neither of those two. Personally, I speak six languages, so I get to pick any nationality I like. I actually don’t really know the ethnicity of all my ancestors, but it must have been a mix, because some sort of a mix is what most people have here. Here most people are white, and we cannot tell each other apart visually. Thus “nationality” becomes pretty meaningless and ultimately, also pointless, because people intermingle a lot, majority don’t live in closed communities segregated by ethnicity. Of course, there are plenty of people who self-identify with some ethnicity and for whom their roots and cultural heritage are important. My own decision not to associate myself with any ethnicity is probably the minority choice.
@Andreas Avester #5,
… as opposed to race?
I don’t mean to question the appropriateness of the Latvian census questions for Latvia (I definitely don’t understand Latvian social politics well enough for that!), but I would push back against the idea that nationality is the only “correct” way to conceptualize racial (or race-like) categories.
One thing I find very interesting about the Latvian questions (as described in comment #1) is that they break up the concept of “nationality” into several parts: where you were born, which country you belong to, your nationality, and what language(s) you speak. Honestly I’m not clear on how these components are distinguished, and it sounds like the answer is that they’re not very well distinguished. If someone isn’t sure which of four nationalities to select, couldn’t they list all four? (Also, I must admit I’m confused as to what nationalities Russian and English would correspond to, since they’re official languages of multiple countries.)
Andreas Avester, any categorization that causes people in a particular society to have different social status, different chances in life and so forth is a meaningful categorization in that society, no matter how arbitrary the basis of categorization. And the way to document the impact of the categorization, as well as to test whether the impact is increasing or decreasing over time is to ask about it. And categories will be fuzzy for some people because that’s how anything involving humans is.
Yes, we don’t really recognise the concept of “Latin” or “Hispanic” here in the UK. To us they’re the language of the ancient Romans and another word for “Spanish”. If we had to describe the ethnicity of the people who routinely use those terms for themselves in the US we would probably go with “South American”, “Central American” or just “American”. That’s when we don’t just go with their country of origin, which is a more usual way to categorise people over here.
Indeed, most British people tend to think in terms of ethnicity only when it applies to other British people, as one way of distinguishing between ourselves. Foreigners are already conveniently categorised for us by nationality, so the difference between a black and a white American, or a Han and a Uigur Chinese is neither here nor there. Though regional identity is probably more important in the UK than ethnic identity. I have a friend, for instance, whose father is from Mauritius and his mother from Yorkshire, but who is resolutely a Londoner first and foremost. Even among ethnic minorities who do place great pride in their ethnic heritage, there is often a strong regional component too – Black Londoners tend to feel far more solidarity with other Black Londoners than with black people from elsewhere in the UK, for instance, as do the Birmingham Chinese, Scots of Italian origin and so forth.
This breakdown exists, because otherwise a lot of people would be unable to answer at all. “What language do you speak most commonly at home” is an easy question for most people to answer. A person’s most commonly used language is a fact with a tangible answer. Similarly, one’s place of birth is also a fact. Same goes for asking where somebody lives right now or what citizenship they have. Those are questions that are easy to answer. More nebulous questions about imaginary concepts, on the other hand, are hard for many people (especially those with a mixed ancestry) to answer.
Yep, it’s a mess. Actual human beings often don’t neatly correspond to some silly classification attempts. People tend to travel, they tend to make babies with other people of different nationality/ethnicity/skin color, children routinely never learn the native language of their ancestors, etc.
So am I. I told you it’s a mess.
Here’s how I was taught at school: “race” is exclusively a matter of skin color and a person’s visual appearance; common “race” categories being “white,” “black,” and “Asian.” I was taught that race is an outdated and racist concept, that people shouldn’t be judged or divided according to their skin color, that even asking somebody about their race is a written questionnaire can be perceived as impolite. The Latvian word that translates as “race” is rarely used for categorizing people, the only people who routinely categorize others based on their race being white supremacists. If I was optimistic, I’d believe that Latvian census didn’t ask any questions about somebody’s race or skin color out of politeness in an attempt not to be racist. Since I am a cynic, I instead assume that there were no questions about race or skin color due to majority of population being white. Major ethnic groups in Latvia are Latvians, Russians, Poles, Lithuanians, etc., and all of them are white. Thus asking people about their ethnicity/nationality makes more sense than asking about race only to find out that well over 90% of the population called themselves “white,” that’s no big discovery, because you could find out this fact simply by looking at people on the streets.
The Latvian word that was used in the census, “tautība,” usually gets translated as “nationality,” but it can also mean “ethnicity.” Here “nationality” is a distinct concept from “citizenship,” as these two often aren’t the same for some person. Asking people about their nationality is perfectly polite, and it cannot cause raised eyebrows the way how questions about race could. Here somebody’s nationality is supposed to be determined based on (1) their parents ethnic origins; (2) their native language. Of course, for many people these two aren’t the same. Frankly, there’s no real definition for “nationality” here, it’s just how most people feel about it here. It’s a murky concept with no clear meaning. Anyway, when classifying people, it would be preferable to say that some Latvian citizen is “Chinese” or “African American” thus referring to their nationality/ethnic origins. Referring to the same people as being “Asian race” or “black race” might get perceived as less polite.
In Latvian there’s also a separate word that directly translates as “ethnic origins.” There is little expectation that this one must be the same as nationality for some person. For example, there are a lot of people who have Russian, Polish, Lithuanian, German, etc. last names but still call themselves “Latvian.” As long as some person speaks fluent Latvian, they are allowed to call themselves “Latvian” even if their ethnic origins are something different.
@ Andreas Avester#9:
hah, i was about to post the following, seems like there’s a similar ethos in france and latvia as regards race, and i’m guessing in other european countries as well! the difference being france is an ex-colonial state, with a pretty large (15, 20%..?) non-white population (mostly north- and west-african). anyway
.
yeah, french census also doesn’t include ethnicity.
i think we have a serious problem with race actually. (ok, who doesn’t.) many white french people, and the mainstream media, and most of the intellectual class, firmly believe that even mentioning race is kinda racist, or at least slippery-slopey.
.
“races don’t exist” is this super common and religiously-proferred phrase, to the point where you suspect it’s mostly performative: when in doubt, reassert your adherence to the core republican value of colourblindness. corollary: mentioning or asking someone’s ethnicity is frowned-upon; any talk about race generally is probably racist and tends to make people super uncomfortable; and of course talking about racism is super racist, ooooh yes. well, you can say “racism bad”, but any mention of systemic and institutional racism gets the whole room real shrill, real fast.
.
of course we do talk about race all the time, but only via euphemistic proxies. a big one is “personnes issues de l’immigration” meaning “immigration-descended people” (though everyone knows we’re not talking about, like, those of Portuguese descent) or even more awkwardly “personnes issues de la diversité” which is just progressive-sounding word salad. or— ah but of course: “muslims”! nothing to do with race, very convenient. lately, enlightened republican secular values are invoked ever more often as supposedly the shining antithesis of the sinister threat posed by cultural islam or hijab-wearing women, or “radicalisation”, or street praying (yeh heavy shit i know /s) or whatever, which 99% of the time is obviously just a fig leaf for spewing racist shit about black and brown people.
.
(i should note this cautious censorship of racial epithets suffers one exception: the roma. I’m not sure why but romaphobia in france is pretty extreme and pretty normalised, it’s scary.)
.
now, i’m white, so i don’t know what non-white people in france think of this avoidy, colourblind culture; but most (all?) french non-white people i know seem to have zero holdups when it comes to describing people by their ethnicity and talk about racism etc. so, my guess it’s just regular old white fragility to the power of post-colonial guilt, and “races don’t exist” really means, “LALALALALA oops were you saying something? don’t mind if i change the subject, do you?”
Andreas Avester:
This seems very similar to Finnish usage of the word “kansallisuus” – or perhaps rather how it was used by educated people in recent history. The original reference is to a geographically or politically defined nation, but since late 19th century there was the construction of a cultural community defined by shared native language, and the word was adapted to this secondary meaning. (Naturally, these distinctions are very easily lost to common people, if they are the language majority in their own country)
I also see a parallel in English reference to “indigenous nations” within the US, Canada, Australia etc.
Nice to be a commenter here! Now I’m testing if I can use my WordPress login, as it seems to be on offer after I logged in at Affinity.
@cartomancer #8,
That’s interesting, and very different from the US construction. The presumption in the US is that our racial categories are (or should be) universal. This is somewhat nonsensical–obviously in Asia, the category of “Asian” is way too broad to be useful–and I believe is an unnamed source of friction between internet social justice and people from certain countries.
@Andreas Avester #9,
Thanks for the elaboration! It’s interesting that language appears to be an important component of this construction, but it makes a lot of sense.
The closest thing in the US is probably the “Hispanic” label. Prior to 1970, this group would have been called “Spanish-surnamed” or “Spanish-speaking”, but then the US Census decided to call it “Hispanic”, which allows for people who don’t speak Spanish or have Spanish surnames. Of course, Spanish being so common throughout the world, there is no illusion that “Hispanic” corresponds to anything resembling nationality.
@milu #10,
Thanks for the account. I briefly looked up ethnicity in France, and I’m told that they have historically adopted the strategy of cultural assimilation, so then it makes sense that most of the prejudice is targeted at first- and second-generation immigrants. I would agree that this is basically racism under another name.
Over here in Europe, it’s bog standard in public discourse to conflate political nations with linguistic nations, in a manner that tends to erase language minorities in each country. I guess the US construction of “Hispanic” people arose from lumping together immigrants from countries that are perceived as Spanish-speaking, with no regard for indigenous and other language minorities in those countries.
I suppose you could take all the native speakers of a global language, such as Spanish or English, and construct an ethnic group of “Hispanic” or “Anglo-Saxon” people that doesn’t mainly correspond with any particular state, region, culture or race. As such, it’d be pretty meaningless to its members.
The state of Latvia, I understand, was essentially formed to support Latvian-speaking culture in a small, culturally uniform area that was formerly colonized by German and Russian speaking people (Andreas may elaborate on this). Finland, as a state, happens to mostly coincide with traditionally Finnish-speaking area. We used to have a substantial, politically dominant Swedish-speaking minority that gradually lost power after Finland was separated from Sweden. Finnish-speaking culture then became a basis for our national identity, while the issue of language accommodation (between Finnish vs. Swedish speakers) was entrenched in politics.
milu @310
Yep, who doesn’t. There are plenty of nationalists in Latvia. Usually they are careful to never say that they have anything against people with darker skin tones, instead they are talking about differences in culture and how immigrants could have problems adjusting to local customs and values.
That’s nice to hear. I was already starting to wonder whether there’s something wrong with my perception regarding questions about race. I mean, I have never ever seen a questionnaire in Latvian language asking respondents to specify their race. Personally, I also feel uncomfortable when seeing people getting asked about their race (at least not without a good justification for why somebody really needs to know the respondent’s race). Simultaneously, I also see English-speaking people routinely ask questions about somebody’s race and classify people according to racial categories. I was already starting to wonder whether there’s something wrong with me considering how I feel so uncomfortable about something that’s a common practice in various English-speaking countries. Anyway, it’s nice to know that I’m not crazy and people in France also feel similarly to how I do.
I’m comfortable talking about the fact that people whose bodies look in some specific way get routinely discriminated. Or that people who speak some minority language get abused. I mean, those are sad facts, and the society should address the problems and try to improve the existing situation. It’s wrong to ignore discrimination and refuse to even acknowledge or discuss the problem. I just try to be careful not to ask for some other person’s race or ethnicity, instead I let them choose whether they want to tell me at all, and if they chose to do so, I let them pick whatever word they prefer to self-identify with. I also try to never enforce some label upon another person. It’s up for them to decide, not me. I won’t ask “are you black?” to some person whom I have never seen. Nor would I declare “your skin looks dark enough in my opinion, you must be black.”
lumipuna @#14
Not exactly. “Supporting Latvian-speaking culture in a small, culturally uniform area” is an aspiration goal of Latvian nationalists. Even they aren’t delusional enough to call such a goal realistic rather than aspirational. Here’s some demographic data.
1925 data:
Latvians – 73.4%
Russians – 10.5%
Belarusians – 2.1%
Germans – 3.8%
Jews – 5.2%
Romani – 0.2%
Poles – 2.8%
Lithuanians – 1.3%
Plus some other nationalities.
2017 data:
Latvians – 62%
Russians – 25.4%
Belarusians – 3.3%
Ukrainians – 2.2%
Germans – 0.1%
Jews – 0.2%
Romani – 0.3%
Poles – 2.1%
Lithuanians – 1.2%
Plus some other nationalities.
Cultural uniformity is impossible, given these numbers.
Language accommodation is a huge political issue here. Latvian nationalists want to close Russian schools. Russian nationalists want Russian as a second official language.
Siggy @#13
How else do you determine ethnicity if not by looking at people’s spoken languages? I mean DNA testing wasn’t available in the past and isn’t that prevalent even now, thus most people truly do not know where exactly their ancestors came from. I haven’t done a DNA test, so I don’t know about myself. In a country where various ethnic groups have different skin color, it is possible to separate people based upon their visual appearance, but this wouldn’t work in a place like Latvia where everybody looks pretty much the same. Theoretically, it’s also possible to divide people according to their religions or customs, but these criteria for dividing people seem less common than their spoken languages. Or visual appearance in regions where various groups of people actually do look different.
@Lumipuna #14,
Yep that’s right. It even includes Brazil even though they speak Portuguese. Although in practice, the US image of “Hispanic” is dominated by Mexicans, since they are the most numerous.
@Andreas Avester #15,
From what I hear, this is a common feeling! Lots of people from different parts of the world find it really strange how race is discussed online, and they don’t know why. There’s a good reason: about 60% of the English-speaking internet is from the US! And US people are often not clued into the implications of having a worldwide web.
As a US person with a passing familiarity with anti-racist activism, I want to make it clear that the US construction of race is not total garbage, and discussing race explicitly has a lot of advantages for fighting racism that could extend to other countries. But it’s also important to acknowledge how race/ethnicity/nationality is constructed very differently in other countries. There are advantages and disadvantages to these other constructions, and there’s also a lot of justification for a country-dependent construction.
Thanks, Andreas. I meant cultural uniformity in the sense of nationalistic aspiration, or in relative terms compared to more culturally diverse countries.
lumipuna @#17
This is something only nationalists and xenophobes desire. For a normal person without any prejudices cultural uniformity is irrelevant and not even particularly desirable. Personally, I don’t care if my neighbors speak a different language and have somewhat different customs. As long as they don’t make too much loud noise in the middle of night, I don’t really care how they live.
Besides, you cannot have cultural uniformity even when everybody speaks the same language and has the same skin color. For example, I have more in common with an American atheist who loves William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s art than with a Latvian Christian who is into Andy Warhol’s art.
On a certain level I consider race to be nonsense, since my mom and I would be considered different races. Dad’s parents came from Germany, and I look more like him.