What do you think about this video about race in Germany vs the US?

The only reason to ask about race on anything is to keep racism alive and well. Until we stop making different accommodations for different races, we will continue to look at race as a divider.

I personally think the only category that needs to be on the census is citizenship. Since the census is used to help determine representation in the government and how tax dollars should be allocated, all that comes back to citizenship (voting, taxes, etc). Legal immigrants that qualify as citizens are counted. People with a temporary visa or that are in the country illegally should not count.

It’s certainly a pickle. On one hand, race isn’t real, and perpetuation of the concept of race is the structural underpinning of racism.

On the other hand, racism is real, and assessing race is the only way to create actionable policies that attack the problem of racism.

I guess I’m sort of with the supreme court’s logic they used when upholding affirmative action: that this was a necessary tool for a time, but one day would not be. Is that day today? I really don’t know, but we certainly seem more racially divided than ever, though that concept could just be a product of more general divisions, plus racial prejudice.

@Smashley I honestly believe that, while racism and racists exist, they are a far smaller problem that it is touted to be. And most racists are completely ignored by the vast majority of society, if not downright denounced. Society is policing itself on racism.

People talk about systemic racism, but none of those people can actually point to anything built into society that is racist. They talk about white privilege but can’t actually articulate what privilege a white person has than other races don’t have. All they can do in both situations is claim some nebulous behavior that favors whites or keeps blacks down…things like that. No specifics, just claims. But as long as you can make claims and people give you an ear, you can keep racism alive and well and use it to benefit yourself in some way.

But because the US does track race statistics, we don’t have to rely on anyones feelings. We have hard numbers about wealth, poverty, life expectancy, medical outcomes, and police interactions, that show us that there are forces at play that are undeniable. If they are not the product of overt racism, it stands to reason they are the products of larger, structural issues.

Statistics, like everything else, can be manipulated, though. Example: you frequently hear about blacks being incarcerated at a higher rate than whites. Sounds ominous and racist, right? But the ones making this claim are missing a few things about statistics. Each black incarceration counts more towards the rate than each white incarceration. But more importantly, it ignores the statistics of who commits the most crimes? When you look at murders, 50% of murders in this country are committed by black people, men mostly. And most of those murders are against blacks. Yet black people only make up about 13% of the population. So is it racist to say that committing crimes should result in incarceration?

Another aspect is that by separating out things into race, you are keeping alive the idea of separation of people by that division. It might make actually figuring out the larger structural issues better, rather than allowing a cubby hole of race as an answer. Going back to the incarceration rates of blacks, let’s say you looked at all incarcerations and started looking at things like make up of the family of the offender. Is it just a single mother or father raising the family? What sort of schooling was attained by the offender? Were they products of the public school system? What were their attendance and grades like? By looking at things like this we can start narrowing down real issues and not just right things off as race.