|
|
|
|
|
|
|
biguity impossible. In so doing, the texture of the filiations they created were knotted, twisted, and often torn: another nightmarish texture (Star 1991b). |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Earlier, the term torque was used to describe the twisting that occurs when a formal classification system is mismatched with an individual's biographical trajectory, memberships, or location. This chapter has probed more deeply into how this unfoldsthe prototypical and Aristotelian are conflated, leaving room for either to be invoked in any given scenario (especially by those in power). The South African case represents an extreme example. For those caught in its racial reclassification system, it constituted an object lesson in the problematics of classifying individuals into life-determining boxes, outside of their control, tightly coupled with their every movement and in an ecology of increasingly densely classified activities. Each borderland case became a projection screen for the stereotypical fantasies of those enforcing the borders themselves. The stories of Sandra Laing, Dottie, and Ronnie van der Walt are ones that help illuminate what can happen when such a classification system is enforced and policed. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
In some ways the South African stance is a mirror image of the current American dilemma. In the mid-1990s, a group of Americans held a march on Washington, with the goal of having the the option of choosing multiple racial categories added to the U.S. census.
34 This would replace the vague and to some insulting ''other" category. They argued on both scientific and moral grounds that multiracial was the appropriate designation, one which would not force individuals to choose between parts of themselves. Yet many civil rights groups vigorously opposed them. Robbin (1998) recounts the struggle over the decision taken by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in 1997 to allow people to choose more than one racial category on the U.S. Census and in other federal government forms. This decision was known by the innocuous name of Statistical Directive 15. Arguments over the nature of racial classification in the U.S. census go back over many decades but with the advent of affirmative action and other similar measures in the late 1960s and early 1970s, race classification became even more consequential and contested. Robbin identifies three major issues involved in arguing for or against changing the categories: the controversy about whether or not to name (and how to name) racial and ethnic groups in government data; the exclusion of minority populations from the decision-making process within the U.S. Census Bureau; and the difficult questions of data quality and |
|
|
|
|
|