Race

The term “race” as used in contemporary discourse, whether academic or demotic, purportedly refers to the distinct ancestry of a differentiated human population. Exactly what specific collection of features in a person’s ancestry determines his or her race seems less easy to discern from current usage. Nor can we always tell whether the elements involved in assigning a racial label to one group will correspond identically to the characteristics used in classifying another group under a different racial category. For instance, on May 12, 1977, the Office of Budget Statistics issued “Directive 15: Race and Ethnicity Standards for Federal Statistics and Administrative Reporting,” which classifies the U.S. population into five segments according to origins. Unlike the Asian, Black, Native American, and White subdivisions, when it came to the “Hispanic” segment, which encompassed people of “Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Central or South American or other Spanish culture or origin,” the classification brought together various subgroups “regardless of race” (“Background: Development of Directive 15,” 1994). U.S. Hispanics thus became an “ethnicity”as opposed to the other four subdivisions that consisted of “races” in the official taxonomy that the U.S. Census Bureau would recognize. Yet, one wonders how Asian Americans can constitute a single “race” given that the configuration of ancestries and phenotypes in their midst appears at least equally diverse.