Comments on: Racial (And Ethno-Religious) Confusion

By: Rachel S.

Rachel S. — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 23:47:42 +0000

Robert, Your apology is accepted.

By: Robert

Robert — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 23:36:16 +0000

Rachel, you know what? I apologize - it wasn’t you. I thought it was, but it was another person on another blog.

[Emily Litella voice - NEVER MIND!]

By: Rachel S.

Rachel S. — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 22:05:35 +0000

Brandon the data is from the SDA archive at Berkeley. They make GSS data available and you can run stats on it– http://sda.berkeley.edu/archive.htm

By: Rachel S.

Rachel S. — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 22:02:20 +0000

Robert, I challenge you to find a place where I said an anti-Muslim incident was racist?

By: RonF

RonF — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 20:42:06 +0000

I wonder what definition of “mixed race” they’re using.

Self-identification would be my guess. I can describe myself accurately as mixed-race, as I have a couple of Black African ancestors about 4 generations back. But you’d identify me as White if you looked at me.

By: Robert

Robert — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 20:05:52 +0000

Wait a minute, if religion isn’t race, how come you’re always describing anti-Muslim incidents as racist?

By: Cath

Cath — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 19:59:34 +0000

I’m just tickled that these guesstimated groups all add up to 209%. It’s like Brian Fantana from Anchorman is doing the math. “60 percent of the time, Pacific Islanders are the majority every time.”

By: Jess

Jess — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 16:45:54 +0000

1) People thought nearly 20% of the US population was Jewish?!!

2) I can only speak about the UK, but I’m pretty sure the Jews are considered a race - and for this reason are the only religious group, along with Sihks, protected under anti-racist hate crime legislation.

By: Brandon Berg

Brandon Berg — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 16:33:18 +0000

I had the same questions as Sailorman, and I couldn’t find anything in the codebook at this site, which supposedly has the data through 2000. Is there a newer version somewhere else?

By: will shetterly

will shetterly — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 15:28:00 +0000

Because of my interest in class and race, what strikes me is that people’s perception of race lines up fairly well with the racial picture of US poverty: below the poverty line, it’s about 50% white, 25% black, 22% Hispanic/Latino, and 3% Asian. Since Hispanic/Latino can be black or white, it’s easy to distribute that to come up with guesses of 59% white and 31% black.

I do hate having to deal with racial statistics that don’t add up to 100%, but we can thank the census acknowledging the vagueness of “race” for that.

Sally, the 300-year-old idea of “race” demanded a biological model. As soon as you make it a social model, you’re acknowledging that the word no longer makes sense: you’re now talking about ethnicity or tribe or social group instead. If you don’t acknowledge that in polling, people will continue to think you mean skin color alone. I’m not quibbling about the evolution of the meaning of “race”; I think it’s kind of charming that it’s regaining its original meaning. I’m just noting that most people think of race as biological because legal racism was based on biology.

By: Sailorman

Sailorman — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 15:20:50 +0000

Interesting.

A couple of followup questions, if anyone happens to know…

1) Did they do any breakdown w/r/t who was guessing? E.g. do people who self-identify as white tend to estimate white %age differently than others, and so on? Are people better at guessing their own %, or at guessing others’ %?

2) What’s the variation/mean/median? IOW, are there a small population of folks whose outlying guesses are skewing the numbers from reality, or does the difference really reflect an accurate assessment of what people think?

By: Sally

Sally — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 14:56:18 +0000

What’s funny is that I’m Jewish, and I tend to underestimate the Jewish population of the U.S. 2% seems really high to me!

People think that 43% of Americans are mixed race? I wonder what definition of “mixed race” they’re using. Like, are they counting any white person who has an American Indian ancestor as “mixed race”? Or hell, any African-American who has some white or American Indian ancestors? If you’re thinking about race as a biological reality, rather than a social construct, I guess I could see how you could think that a really high percentage of Americans are “mixed race.”