Race and Ethnicity

[drnikki]

(current version here: https://github.com/drnikki/open-demographics/blob/master/race.md)

This version was made with a very-strong US bias and, even with this US bias, I think it's still incomplete. Would love a PR with an inclusive list or restructuring.

[guptatrisha97]

Hi! I want to contribute to Outreachy through this project as I am very passionate about the topic. The link gives 404 error, can you give me the correct link, please?

[jywarren]

This is complicated!

In our recent survey at Public Lab, we went with this, but are dissatisfied:

What is your race (or ethnicity)?
* [ ] Multiracial or Multiethnic
* [ ] Native Hawaiin or other Pacific Islander
* [ ] American Indian or Alaska Native
* [ ] Asian
* [ ] Hispanic of Latino
* [ ] Black, African, or African American
* [ ] White or Caucasian
* [ ] Prefer not to say
* [ ] Other:

We also used checkboxes, and we added (vs. our prior surveys) African as we have a number contributors from Africa who didn't find a place in the original US-centric list. I could imagine "Middle Eastern" and several others -- would it be bad for this list to be very long? Could it be narrowed by continent (or otherwise with sub-categories?) I'm multiracial and would like to see that represented as well.

I also support the wording do you identify as which is currently listed at https://drnikki.github.io/sphinx-ghpages/questions/race.html -- +1! @ebarry we should use this wording!

This is of course a gigantic complex thing. But to add one more that gets at the crux of why we want to know this information (at Public Lab), I'm very interested in ways to assess if we are successfully supporting people who've been excluded on the basis of race or ethnicity, at BOTH a global and local scale.

I've pondered if it's possible to ask people if they identify with... the dominant culture of their area... ? A difficult thing to articulate but I'm sure this has been carefully considered by more informed people than myself!

[brihijoshi]

Hey @drnikki,

I was looking into the various factors of social stratifications like Ethnicity or Race. I wanted to know why we are not considering 'tribes' as a factor/option in our question. There are several cases in India (I can tell you from a local perspective here), where people identifying themselves with their tribe do not like to associate with a particular race or an ethnicity, hence this list excludes them.

Some links I referred to - difference between a tribe and an ethnic group

In India, we often use 'tribal minorities' or 'scheduled tribes' as a term. Do you think we can word it a little better and include it?

[drnikki]

@brihijoshi How would you feel about opening a pull request to add additional questions to race/ethnicity asking if people identify as indigenous or native (which is a north american term) and also asking if people identify as minorities in the area where they live?

[brihijoshi]

Hi @drnikki, I will just word it appropriately and send a pull request. Thank you! :D

[brihijoshi]

Hey @drnikki, I have sent a pull request #34 for the question on minorities. I couldn't quite understand the indigenous/native terminology. I will research about it and add it in a separate pull request.

[emmairwin]

@brihijoshi This question could be determined as being a minority in any way , in the area you live. Can it be rephrased to:

Do you identify yourself as a member of a minority racial, ethnicity or tribal group in the area you live?

[emmairwin]

This is a good resource, on this question and census - and gets to the heart of issues with international standards, as well as overlap of race/ethnicity

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2F978-3-319-20095-8_2.pdf

[jywarren]

Ooh awesome, thank you! @ebarry take a look!

[jywarren]

Thanks everyone for a great thread here. I'm wrapping up a big community survey where we are trying to better understand diversity and inclusion at Public Lab, and we used @emmairwin's wording above.

We've collected some interesting data on how people identify their a) race/ethnicity and b) status as a minority in the place where they live, and the split between these is quite large so far (not yet published) in terms of people identifying as part of a non-white group, but not considering themselves in a minority group locally. This makes some sense, as our community is geographically quite diverse.

Anyhow, I noticed that the Open Source Survey at https://opensourcesurvey.org/2017/ doesn't ask about race/ethnicity, but about whether they identify as a minority in their home country or their current location (which i appreciate as also important!). Is there other data available about open source communities or even software authorship more broadly, that we might reference in understanding our own community?

Thank you!!! 🙌

[jywarren]

Hi again - i went down a rabbit hole again on this topic, and found some interesting resources I wanted to share:

A PDF from the US census on the distinction: https://www.census.gov/mso/www/training/pdf/race-ethnicity-onepager.pdf

This is an interesting piece critiques the US census' current separation of an "are you Hispanic or Latino" question from a separate race question. https://www.salon.com/2018/03/01/the-us-census-bureau-keeps-confusing-race-and-ethnicity_partner/ One key quote I appreciated was:

By not including a single Hispanic origin group under the “White” or “Black” race box, the 2020 census inadvertently contributes to the false idea that people of Hispanic origin are all of the same race or color. But Latin America and the Caribbean were the site of European colonization of Native American communities and the enslavement of Africans forcibly transported to the Americas. There are white, black and Native American Hispanics.

The last time this was really updated in the census was 1997. Note that the whitehouse.gov page on the 1997 race/ethnicity update is gone now: https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/fedreg_1997standards

The Trump administration won't be adopting an Obama-era proposal to add a "Middle East or North Africa" category (MENA), separately from "White" as well as offering a Hispanic or Latino option for /both/ race and ethnicity. This article has example forms for both versions:

https://www.npr.org/2018/01/26/580865378/census-request-suggests-no-race-ethnicity-data-changes-in-2020-experts-say

Anyhow, that combined form that was not adopted has top-level and 2nd-level checkboxes which seemed an interesting approach:

Finally here is a nice piece by Gene Demby from NPR's Code Switch podcast on how the different categories have changed over time in the US census, and how people's usage of them has also changed:

https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/11/09/455331023/a-graphic-shows-how-much-the-race-question-on-the-census-and-america-has-changed

Sorry to add yet more to an already long issue!

[jywarren]

Just reporting back that we've published our software contributors survey results here including questions developed out of discussions in this thread!

https://publiclab.org/notes/liz/04-15-2019/report-2019-software-contributors-survey

[patcon]

Thanks Jeff! Shared with my own community, and really appreciate the share-back -- we'd never have the resources to do the massive and thoughtful legwork you've all done :)

[jywarren]

:-) feel free to re-use the survey materials we've prepared! One of our largest long-term goals is to participate in a more standardized set of survey questions so it's easier to understand our own community in relation to other communities.

On Tue, Oct 22, 2019 at 3:27 PM Patrick Connolly notifications@github.com wrote:

Thanks Jeff! Shared with my own community, and really appreciate the share-back -- we'd never have the resources to do the massive and thoughtful legwork you've all done :)

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[brainwane]

To build on what @brihijoshi said, I think it would likely make sense to add caste as a dimension along which to collect information. I'd defer to Equality Labs on how to word that; see "Appendix VI: Survey Questions" in their Caste in the United States survey for some examples.

[klonos]

I would like to see "Arab/Arabic" and "Middle-Eastern" added to the list of races, as I feel there are many people that identify as these groups that don't feel comfortable being grouped as "white" (for lack of better option other than "self identify", which to me sounds like an option for people in groups of considerably less numbers globally).