Written by Runjini Raman
I remember taking my first standardized test when I was in third grade. At the beginning of the test, all students had to turn to the back of test booklet and fill out information such as their name, birthdate, race/ethnicity, etc. This was the first year of my life that I ever saw this question about race. I looked through the boxes (didn’t take long—there aren’t many) and tried to find one labeled “Indian” but it wasn’t there. I raised my hand and pointed this out to my teacher. “Oh,” she said, “You’re not supposed to fill that part out. I’ll fill it out for all the students later.” That seemed fine, but I brought it to her attention again that Indian was not an option. My third grade brain was trying to account for the stress and confusion I imagined her having when she sat down later that evening with the stack of test booklets and was faced with the question of how to racially identify me. “It’s fine,” she reassured me, and tapped her finger on the Name portion of the paper, to remind me what was really important about identifying myself.
I remember feeling really distracted by this issue while I took the state test. Finally, I flipped the test booklet over and, in the Race/Ethnicity section, I drew a bubble, wrote “Indian, like from India” next to it, and filled it in. I figured this was a reasonable solution and that my teacher would thank me. Later, at home, I told my mom about what happened, and she brushed it off. “Next time, just check the Asian box,” she instructed, clearly trying to assuage my elementary preoccupations with the issue and not the larger sociopolitical implications of being Indian in the American public education system. The next day my teacher informed me that she had to make a new test booklet for me because I had written on the scantron, which made my test unreadable by a machine. She never told me how she racially defined me on the new scantron.
This happened to me every year I took a standardized test until I started to reluctantly fill in the Asian box myself. I felt strange every time I did it; I would imagine the test takers imagining me as they graded my test, and I would feel a little concerned that the picture they surely developed when they read the word “Asian” (which is a problematic word in and of itself) looked nothing like me. Then I wondered why it mattered.
Now I always mark “Other” on questions about my race. This is my small way of saying, “F You” to the system that makes me categorize myself in a way that is actually, if it was done correctly, pretty easy to categorize. As I define myself, I’m South Asian (or, I could assert Sub-continental Asian) without much further complication than that. I’m easy to define as far as defining one’s ethnicity could go. How hard is that to put next to a box? If it’s not there, I refuse to check anything else.
The article we read for class this week (“Immigrants and the Changing Categories of Race” by Kenneth Prewitt) made me wonder about the implications of my newfound choice to classify as Other. Many of those implications center around the idea that, as minorities, we might be better served lumped into one category or another, because those categories have serious influence on policies created for minorities. Prewitt writes, “Where earlier policies had been discriminatory, new civil rights policies were intended to right those wrongs and benefit groups that had been ‘historically discriminated against.’ Belonging to a racial minority becomes a basis from which to assert civic rights. In this task, statistic proportionality became a much-deployed legal and administrative tool.” In other words, there was an advantage to silencing your inner turmoil about lack of representation in the census survey. Just shut up and pick the box closest to your description, and there’ll be some pay-off.
The article asserts at times there is some kind of dichotomy at play here: Either minorities fight for the mostly figurative right to be correctly represented on the survey (i.e. including categories such as Indian, Middle Eastern, African [and not just “Black”]) or get access to a bounty of rights that come from being labeled as Black, Asian, or Hispanic, whether that truly describes us or not. In that line of thinking, why not just group yourself with one category and stop complaining? Surely the moral and intellectual relief of being labeled as you truly are is not worth the civil liberties that arise from your marking yourself as a minority for the government.
I’m not convinced though that these are mutually exclusive rights. I think we’re seriously underestimating statisticians and census administrators and whomever else if we think they can’t handle the diversity that exists in America. To put it matter-of-factly: America is diverse. The story of being a racial minority in America is a story of white people trying to suppress our complexity in a variety of ways. I’ve learned to trust my instinctual discomfort with the typical racial categories on surveys because trying to lump diverse groups into five or six categories is reminiscent of the overall American historical attempt to erase racial identity. It’s basically saying that the white majority is still too uncomfortable, inconvenienced, and overwhelmed by racial diversity. If it’s at all possible (sarcasm), I think we (as in, America) can recognize this racial diversity with one thousand categories if we need to, and researchers or statisticians (or whatever) can add some numbers up if they want to make generalizations? Like maybe if they want to talk about “Asian” people they can just add up the percentage of people they think fall into that category and make their generalizations? Or, maybe, better yet, we can start talking about populations of people with a little more nuance? Maybe we can stop saying things like, “This is what Black people do” or “This is what Asian people do” and recognize the extreme diversity of the population we just categorized in terms of not just race, but color and citizenship too?
Hajer pointed out in class that a new racial categorization of “Middle Eastern/Arab” (by the way, not interchangeable terms with the term Muslim *ehm*) on the 2020 census might be problematic because it could create more awareness for the general population of the number of Middle Eastern or Arab people in their community, state, country, etc. and might have, for example, policing implications. (By the way, I hope I recapitulated this thought correctly and leave room for the possibility that I have not.) I think this is an important point, and thanks to Hajer for saying it so well in class. I wonder, though, if maybe people having more specific information about their neighbors could be a positive thing overall, even if it is not initially. It feels too submissive to deny the diversity of our minorities the right to be correctly represented because of the racist, xenophobic fear some people have of living in a world where one subgroup of the population is (more) accurately accounted for. I want to state very clearly, though, that that concern is very legitimate because, as minorities, our lives are always in danger because of racism, xenophobia, patriotism, white supremacy, etc.—but to what extent do we let the fear of white people fearing us prevent us from asserting our presence in this country? Imagine if we had a survey that collected information on the number of Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Thai, Korean, Vietnamese, Malaysian, Indonesian, etc. living in our communities as opposed to the number of “Asians.” (Or to simplify it even further, we could even take Asia apart into regional areas.) Maybe it would slowly start to change our language around how we talk about “Asians” (I can’t stop putting it in quotes). Maybe if we had a national census document that refused to reduce people to broad categories, more people would develop the language to stop doing it in everyday interactions with people. Perhaps some would meet a person they previously thought was “Asian” and have the intellectual capacity to conceptualize their racial identity as much more specific and vibrant than the conglomerated identity of the largest and more diverse continent in the world? It’s a stretch, but it could happen.