Written by Ryan Purcell
Completing an on online survey is a complicated and arduous task. A questionnaire recently distributed by the Cornell Department of Psychology is hardly worth the chance to win $25 in Amazon credit it offers in remuneration. The survey’s capacity to accurately reflect the psyche of Cornell students was potentially undermined by both the long duration of the process and difficult nature of the questions asked. An endless line of intimate questioning was not only psychologically taxing, but the means of interrogation were morally vexing. The survey was formatted so that the volunteer responds to general statements about their psychological disposition. ‘I cannot keep up with coursework,’ for example, is a typical statement meant to reveal potential anxiety regarding academic rigor. The problem, however, was with the responses in this line of questioning. How can anyone respond to a statement within a range from ‘strongly disagree’ to ‘strongly agree’? Life is not a scale. These responses were at once specific, and yet too broad to accurately reflect my psyche. What was more, these questions provoked self-doubt and even insecurity. ‘How many times a week do you consume more than two alcoholic beverages?’ How many times a week is acceptable? Are three glasses of wine too much? The volunteer is left in an existential void: ’how should I feel’ is raised in conflict with ‘how do I actually feel’. Nowhere in the survey was this condition clearer than in the profile question of race.
The selection in the racial identity component was problematic. As in the statement response section, the available responses for racial identity were both specific and broad. Categories like ‘Latino,’ ‘African American,’ ‘Asian’ and ‘White’ and others do well to account for the diverse demographics throughout America, but would it be more useful if they were tailored in site specific questionnaires like those distributed at Cornell? Of the 14,453 undergraduate students during at Cornell the 2013-2014 year, more than 39 percent were foreign-born nationals, Hispanic Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans, or identified themselves in more than one racial/ethic group. http://diversity.cornell.edu/who-we-are Cornell is a much more diverse population than Ohio State University where the undergraduate population of 44,201 was 72.2 percent white. http://www.forbes.com/colleges/ohio-state-university-main-campus/ The fact that Ohio State’s student body was much less diverse cannot be refuted. Given such a different racial/ethnic composition, should Ohio State have a more specific selection in the racial identity component of its questionnaires than Cornell? Should questionnaires at Ohio State, in other words, breakdown the category of ‘white’ to yield a more detailed reading of its racial composition? Should racial categories on such questionnaires represent the constituent population?
‘White’ as a category is also problematic. I expected to have little difficulty when it came to the racial identity component of the survey. After slogging through the frustratingly arbitrary statement responses I was happy to come to such a straightforward and simple question. ‘White’ I thought, directly. But viewing the full range of choices gave me pause to think. Am I ‘White’? Surely, I am wonder-bread-white, but would I have been eighty, or ninety years ago when Irish-Catholics and Jews might have been considered nonwhite peoples in America? Does the pigment of my skin constitute my ‘whiteness’? My skin is beige in some places, and even darker in others. It changes through the seasons. In the winter it will be a pasty pinkish-white. Why white though? A black person is not black. Is it a matter of how I see myself or how I am viewed by society? If my mother was white, and my father black — even if my grandmother was black— and I still looked more or less white, would I be white? What if my forgotten ancestors were black, would that make me black? Do I perform my whiteness? Is it a matter of culture? This took too much of my time, and at that point I was too far into the survey to justify giving up my chance for $25 in Amazon credit. The range of choices was not a matter of annoyance so much as the conundrum of racial identity itself. Resigned to the category that society ascribed me. ’White’ it was.
Online questionnaires are indeed difficult tasks — almost painful. But the promise of monetary payoff, in the form of Amazon credit, kept me going. And it ultimately forced my hand when it came to racial identity. I couldn’t bother with further questioning, and where was that going to lead me anyway? Was I going to quit the questionnaire and scrap my hard work and chance for payoff? Of course not. Given the choice between possible Amazon credit and rejecting the whole situation based on my moral objection to being placed into an ascriptive category, I chose the credit. It was easier. And perhaps that’s how these categories retain their credence in society broadly.