But I guess you can't have it both ways - if Black and black Hispanics should indeed be two distinct racial groups it would be a bit arbitrary to say marriages between them aren't interracial, no?
Yeah, I should have clarified. I don't think black hispanics and african americans should be classified as separate racial groups, but the two groups are definitely make up different ethnic groups. Different languages, food, perspectives on America (considering our status as 1st and 2nd gen immigrants), etc.
That said, a marriage between a black person from North Carolina and someone from Panama is about as remarkable as an white American marrying another white person from France. Inter-ethnic, yes, but not quite belonging on a chart equating it with interracial relationships.
The government definitions applied to these issues have changed over the decades in the United States. Self-designation under each set of definitions (last revised in 1997) is changing too. Americans are becoming less and less race-conscious in self-identification. I have been looking up links on this subject since a few years ago for online discussion of college admission issues in the United States.
College reporting to the federal government is based on the U.S. Census bureau definitions for ethnicity and race categories, which in turn are based on regulations from the Office of Management and Budget, which were announced on 30 October 1997
and has requested colleges change their forms by the high school class of 2010 application year to ask a two-part question, first inquiring about Hispanic ethnicity and then about race, for each student. The student will still be free to decline to answer either part of the question.
"Unlike elementary and secondary institutions, generally, postsecondary institutions and Rehabilitation Services Administration (RSA) grantees use self-identification only and do not use observer identification. As discussed elsewhere in this notice, postsecondary institutions and RSA grantees will also be permitted to continue to include a 'race and ethnicity unknown' category when reporting data to the Department. This category is being continued in the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) because the National Center for Education Statistics’ experience has shown that (1) a substantial number of college students have refused to identify a race and (2) there is often not a convenient mechanism for college administrators to use observer identification."
You can look up the detailed category definitions on the website of the United States Bureau of the Census. As the Census Bureau itself notes,
"The concept of race as used by the Census Bureau reflects self-identification by people according to the race or races with which they most closely identify. These categories are sociopolitical constructs and should not be interpreted as being scientific or anthropological in nature."
"White. A person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa. It includes people who indicate their race as 'White' or report entries such as Irish, German, Italian, Lebanese, Near Easterner, Arab, or Polish.
"Black or African American. A person having origins in any of the Black racial groups of Africa. It includes people who indicate their race as 'Black, African Am., or Negro,' or provide written entries such as African American, Afro American, Kenyan, Nigerian, or Haitian.
"American Indian and Alaska Native. A person having origins in any of the original peoples of North and South America (including Central America) and who maintain tribal affiliation or community attachment.
"Asian. A person having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent including, for example, Cambodia, China, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippine Islands, Thailand, and Vietnam. It includes 'Asian Indian,' 'Chinese,' 'Filipino,' 'Korean,' 'Japanese,' 'Vietnamese,' and 'Other Asian.'
Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander. A person having origins in any of the original peoples of Hawaii, Guam, Samoa, or other Pacific Islands. It includes people who indicate their race as 'Native Hawaiian,' 'Guamanian or Chamorro,' 'Samoan,' and 'Other Pacific Islander.'
. . . .
. . . .
. . . .
The concept of race is separate from the concept of Hispanic origin."
"Hispanics or Latinos are those people who classified themselves in one of the specific Spanish, Hispanic, or Latino categories listed on the Census 2000 questionnaire--'Mexican, Mexican Am., Chicano,' 'Puerto Rican', or 'Cuban'--as well as those who indicate that they are 'other Spanish/Hispanic/Latino.' Persons who indicated that they are 'other Spanish/Hispanic/Latino' include those whose origins are from Spain, the Spanish-speaking countries of Central or South America, the Dominican Republic or people identifying themselves generally as Spanish, Spanish-American, Hispanic, Hispano, Latino, and so on.
"Origin can be viewed as the heritage, nationality group, lineage, or country of birth of the person or the person's parents or ancestors before their arrival in the United States.
"People who identify their origin as Spanish, Hispanic, or Latino may be of any race."
The federal Department of Education National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) has posted guidance to colleges about how they are to ask about student ethnicity and race according to the federally defined categories.
The instructions on the National Center for Education Statistics website provide details on how word ethnicity and race questionnaires and how colleges should report the various categories self-reported by students to the federal government.
See the National Center for Education Statistics Race/Ethnicity FAQ
and its subpages for more information about the current of colleges as they implement the new federal regulations for high school class of 2010 applicants to college.
Students of higher education (and applicants to schools of postsecondary education) are treated as adults, and are explicitly permitted to decline to identify their ethnic or racial category.
Note that the decennial census in the United States redefines "race" categories from time to time,
an issue explored by the linked article from several points of view. Declining to self-report is everyone's right under law and something that someone of any ethnic self-identification might choose to do. People can decide this issue for themselves, but I like to emphasize in my own life, as a member of a "biracial" family, the common humanity my children, my wife, and I share with all our neighbors and compatriots. We prefer the category label "human" but accept the category label "postracial" in our household.
The latest version of the Minorities in Higher Education Report
has a lot of detailed numbers (all based on reports colleges make to the federal government) about the growth in college enrollment in all the reported ethnic categories, and the growth of the reported category "race/ethnicity unknown." The "race/ethnicity unknown" category has been the fastest-growing category by far in the reported years.
The "Self-designation" for Native American does have some rules based on blood and tribal enrollment. A entity (e.g. college) not reporting on this correctly can bring some consequences.
I don’t see how the sexes within a race can be different. For every Male that’s interracially married that’s one female that has to be interracially married.
It could come down to parts of the population that are not married to skew it. IE in prison, if one sex marries older or same sex marriages.
But I suspect it’s actually more about perceptions.
That's exactly what it is. For every Asian woman who marries a white or black man, there's (statistically) an Asian man who has to either marry a white or black woman or remain single. Likewise, for every black man who marries a white or Asian woman, there's a black woman who has to marry a white or Asian man or remain single.
Now, it's true that for every Asian woman who marries interracially, there has to be a white or black man who also marries interracially, but in practice, having a large white majority population means that proportionally fewer whites have to marry interracially to really muck up the proportions among minorities.
Statistically, Asian men and black women tend to remain single as Asian women and black men tend to marry interracially. One possible interpretation is that there's kind of a continuum:
Black White Asian
where women interracially marry to the left and men interracially marry to the right. But it doesn't loop around.
No, because these aren’t pairs of people separated at birth. There’s groups of one thousand men, and one thousand women per racial group represented here.
I agree on the perceptions though, there’s a ton of demographic sloughing going on here that can’t be represented simply.
I am surprised the number of white men marrying asian women is so low (though it is high compared to others). I imagine living in NYC skews my view a great deal though.
You're looking at it from the wrong side. 1.4% of all white men marry an Asian woman (I'm ignoring the minute amount of gay marriages and marriages to non-Americans). However, a stunning 18.8% of all Asian women marry a white male. Only roughly 7.5% of all white males could possibly marry an Asian woman. In that light, 1.4% is quite a lot.
A side comment, we really have to collectively agree to drop "whom". It's archaic and has not been part of common usage for at least the last century if not longer. It's noticeable only with the unusually low frequency it shows up and does nothing to aid or clarify communication. It's like spelling "old" with a silent final 'e', "olde".
It's time to get over this and move the language forward a bit, thank you.
It still shows up in formal writing with some frequency, but it's slowly fading away. Most modern formal writing guides usually have a footnote or some such to note that. In less formal speech, it's pretty much unheard these days.
Anecdotally, I went and searched my email archives, going back to 1992, and I found a couple dozen uses of it, all in emails I received from religious family members quoting the bible.
So ... you've come full circle back to prescriptivism then? Great, now you just have to get on the faculty at Oxford and you can foist your opinions regarding correct usage of the English language on the world. Or failing that, you can work your way on to the editorial board of the newspaper-of-record of major Anglophonic nation, like, I don't know, the New York Times.
In spite of Obama being a product of such a mixed-race union, he picked 'Black' as his racial categorization in the 2010 census, according to an article linked from there.
I think that's backwards. A person equally white and equally black should not become black out of political expediency. They should be equally representative of both of their heritages.
WTF?! Can we stop calling NATIVE AMERICANS indians already.
Since I was born in America and my family is from the country of INDIA, I guess I am known as an Indian American?
Are American Indians, children of Americans who are born in India? Logically thats the only thing that makes sense.
Just cause someone made a mistake we shouldn't propagate it. Otherwise we should all start using titles given to various ethnic groups which are no longer politically correct.
You have a good point, but it came across poorly. If you want people to listen to your ideas, let them know using respect and proper language. HN is not a place for slang, rants, or frequent uses of capitalization.
I would prefer it if people responded to the content of a remark, rather than the tone. I agree with what Paul Graham wrote here:
"The next level up we start to see responses to the writing, rather than the writer. The lowest form of these is to disagree with the author's tone. E.g.
'I can't believe the author dismisses intelligent design in such a cavalier fashion.'
Though better than attacking the author, this is still a weak form of disagreement. It matters much more whether the author is wrong or right than what his tone is. Especially since tone is so hard to judge. Someone who has a chip on their shoulder about some topic might be offended by a tone that to other readers seemed neutral.
So if the worst thing you can say about something is to criticize its tone, you're not saying much. Is the author flippant, but correct? Better that than grave and wrong. And if the author is incorrect somewhere, say where."
I myself have been downvoted a lot due to tone, rather than substance. This, more than anything else, has caused me to cut back my participation on Hacker News. If people are going to react to my tone, then I do not think I want to post much here.
I don't think this is as much about tone as it is the manners and recklessness. You are using Paul's essay, How to Disagree, to take an in-depth look at comments, but you're forgetting the basic rules that are set forth in the HN guidelines.
Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to face conversation.
...
Please don't use uppercase for emphasis.
angryindian's comment disregards both of these rules. And while it is not mentioned in the guidelines, most HN users would agree that poor grammar, punctuation, and writing overall signify that a comment has been made without proper time and/or thought.
The manners and the quality of the comment are the reasons why I disliked it. The tone is something different all together (don't confuse it with manners). As Paul said, a tone is hard to judge and varies from person to person. However, manners and quality of writing are something that get in way of the substance and bring down the overall quality of the site. Comments that lack these traits should be frowned upon.
Before you cut back on HN, think about what tone really is.
Ah, there's several orthogonal levels of discussion going on. It's true that responding to tone is a poor form of disagreement, but it's a very good form of enforcing social norms. And once social norms are violated, it's often better to try and enforce them than to ignore the violation and engage the violator on his own terms.
philwelch, I think you miss the point. If the downvoting was aimed at remarks that were attempting to sabotage Hacker News, then you might have some ground to stand on. But the posts I'm thinking of involve material that I think should be allowed on Hacker News. So then the issue comes up, whose community norms are you enforcing? Not mine, that is sure. And what happens if I find myself in a community whose norms are different than mine? I leave. What is the end result of that, repeated, for many people?
My experience online has seen the same pattern, over and over, since the 90s:
1.) community is diverse and interesting
2.) core group finds some way to enforce community norms that match the preference of that core group
3.) some people leave the group because they disagree with the community norms being enforced by core group
4.) community becomes less diverse as it becomes increasingly associated with its particular community norms
5.) community becomes less interesting for the diverse group, simply because it is now less diverse
Downvoting on Hacker News is limited to those who've acquired some points, so when we talk about downvoting, we are automatically talking about a core group.
I like the way Clay Shirky describes things in his essay "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy"
I do think, at its best, Hacker News functions both as a source of information, but also as a source of emotional support for those who are trying to do startups. To the extent that the emotional support is an important element, what Shirky says about Bion is relevant:
"Bion was a psychologist who was doing group therapy with groups of neurotics. (Drawing parallels between that and the Internet is left as an exercise for the reader.) The thing that Bion discovered was that the neurotics in his care were, as a group, conspiring to defeat therapy."
and in particular:
"Now, Bion decided that what he was watching with the neurotics was the group defending itself against his attempts to make the group do what they said they were supposed to do. The group was convened to get better, this group of people was in therapy to get better. But they were defeating that. And he said, there are some very specific patterns that they're entering into to defeat the ostensible purpose of the group meeting together. And he detailed three patterns."
To the extent that Hacker News exists to be supportive of entrepreneurs, then aggressive downvoting is part of the pattern whereby a group undermines itself. I am going to be misunderstood on this point, so let me be clear: I do not think perpetual cheeriness is supportive of entrepreneurs, rather, I think honest feedback is, even when that feedback is harsh. Therefore I think a harsh tone is often the best way to be truly supportive of an entrepreneur. But a harsh tone is what often draws downvotes on Hacker News.
What you call "enforcing social norms" can also be called "telling people to go away". Because that is the effect - you are telling people "If you use that tone, we want you to go away." And this is in regards to remarks that are true. We are, after all, discussing remarks that were correct but got downvoted because of their tone. To me, this is the early part of the process of uniting a group against an external enemy:
"The second basic pattern that Bion detailed: The identification and vilification of external enemies. This is a very common pattern. Anyone who was around the Open Source movement in the mid-Nineties could see this all the time. If you cared about Linux on the desktop, there was a big list of jobs to do. But you could always instead get a conversation going about Microsoft and Bill Gates. And people would start bleeding from their ears, they would get so mad."
Hacker News is still young, and has not yet acquired this kind of total group think. But that is a risk that it faces. And the External Enemy it seems the most likely to unite against is those of us who say harsh but true things about technologies and startups.
I think I mostly get downvoted when people think I'm saying something negative. I think others also get downvoted for similar reasons. Positive remarks (about a person or business or technology) seem to get less downvotes than negative ones.
If you "enforce community norms" against people who say things that are true, but whose tone is harsh, then you will end up with a community where only a so-called "positive attitude" is allowed. And the kind of positive attitude I'm thinking of here is superficial and dangerous. I wrote about this in 2009, and I will quote myself:
What is the point of this thing called a “positive attitude”? Much of it is political – a desire to avoid facing painful realities. Often this is done to keep together a coalition of people – that is, to keep a group of people supportive of a project. We might be talking about the Iraq war, where the American government has relentlessly painted a prettier picture than what reality justified – and this lying was meant to keep the American people supportive of the war. Or we might be talking about a money losing business, in which case the workers and managers might by lying to the investors, so as to keep the investors supportive of the business. And for those who want to make their living that way, this is the one real use of a “positive attitude”.
This is the only positive attitude that a project really needs: the belief that a project can succeed. Once you have that belief, everything else should be criticism: what isn’t working, what needs to be fixed? Happy talk is the enemy of truth, and lies are an effective way to take a viable project and kill it.
What I said in 2009 applies to Hacker News in 2011. Harshness can be a good thing, but you won't get much of it if you downvote it in the name of "enforcing community norms".
lkruber, I think that you are missing the point. What you have written obviously comes after great time and thought, but I'm essentially going to ignore it as I disagree with what you say in the first paragraph.
If the downvoting was aimed at remarks that were attempting
to sabotage Hacker News, then you might have some ground to
stand on. But the posts I'm thinking of involve material that
I think should be allowed on Hacker News.
I'm going to keep this short.
First of all, you imply that intentions matter (by using the word "attempting). The truth is that they shouldn't matter. If someone comes to HN trying to contribute with good quality but fails, they should be treated the same as those who come looking to make trouble and end up making content of the same bad quality. In essence, we shouldn't look at people's intentions because they are impossible to judge and because it is something that isn't done in the real world.
Secondly, you mention that you think the posts you're thinking of should be allowed on HN. But the truth is that philwelch and I don't. The whole point of this argument is exactly that. You then ignore this argument and go onto to tackle bigger and unrelated problems. Rather, you should have just stayed with the same issue we have been discussing the past few comments.
" But the truth is that philwelch and I don't. The whole point of this argument is exactly that."
Yes, exactly. That's what I said. The disagreement is fundamental. I was trying to get you to realize what the end result will be of the trajectory you are following. But you write "I'm essentially going to ignore it". As such, there is not much more that I can say. It is time for me to end my participation on Hacker News.
I urge you to reconsider being influenced by a minority who aren't using the voting feature with the spirit intended. Your contributions are very rarely net downvoted, and your average karma/comment is actually better than almost half of the http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders list.
I was responsible for downvoting that comment as I disagreed with the content. What bothered me was the following phrase:
I urge you to reconsider being influenced by a minority who
aren't using the voting feature with the spirit intended.
As this was clearly directed to people like me, I feel the need to justify my intentions. Saying that I am part of the minority and am using the voting feature incorrectly is a bold statement that is coming without justification or evidence. Both of you should go back and read the HN Guidelines again in order to be reminded of what determines if a comment is of good quality or bad quality. I use the voting featured based off the HN Guidelines, which I would say is the spirit intended. It's that simple.
You are correct. I'm sorry, for some reason I honestly thought our host (and the author of "How to Disagree") had taken a stand against such downvotes, but after doing my homework I'm somewhat dismayed to see he's fine with it.
I am sure we can stop as soon as Columbus Day is removed from the list of holidays and stops being listed as discovering America.
On a serious note, there have been a lot of attempts to remove "Indian" from the naming, but most of those have actually been pr failures and not generally accepted. The weight of history is pretty strong. The whole "feathers not dots" differentiation is probably gonna be with us for a long time.
What? American is the official demonym for US citizens. Sorry for the confusion, but American is the only correct demonym and has been for a long time.
Edit: Actually, when is there ever any confusion? There isn't a whole lot the "Americas" as a whole have in common. If you want to do continent-based demonyms, just prefix North or South.
> The Americas, or America, (Spanish: América, Portuguese: América, French: Amérique, Dutch: Amerika, Aymara: Amërika, Quechua: Amirika, Guaraní: Amérika) are lands in the Western hemisphere, also known as the New World.
I was initially being sarcastic but if you want to get serious on the topic, let's at least admit that there would indeed be confusion for an extraterrestrial coming to Earth for the first time. Wouldn't you find it funny if people from China were called Asians instead of Chinese or if Mexican people called themselves Americans instead of Mexicans?
I was initially being sarcastic but if you want to get serious on the topic, let's at least admit that there would indeed be confusion for an extraterrestrial coming to Earth for the first time
If that's the primary confusion scenario, I think I'm comfortable with the way things worked out. ;) Also, I was mostly commenting on wyclif, I got your sarcasm.
Thankfully the Mexicans don't get as upset about our appropriation of the term "United States", as they have just as much claim to it. (Estados Unidos Mexicanos) Otherwise, we from The Land Between Mexico And Canada would have nothing to call ourselves that doesn't ruffle someone's feathers.
As I understand it, Columbus was trying to find an easier route to India and thought he had arrived in India when he arrived here, thus the term "Indian" being applied to natives of this continent. They had no idea there was a whole undiscovered continent in the way of getting to India by sailing West across the Atlantic.
