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measurement. For example, where geographical location and race have been confounded, as with the Hispanic-American groups, people have in the past often simply opted to identify themselves as "other." The size of this residual category, and the potential sampling errors it represents, remains an unsolved difficulty in collecting Hispanic-American census data (1998, 4346). |
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In the controversy surrounding the OMB decision, many African-American leaders (among others) argued that if everyone went by the scientific classification and coded themselves as belonging to multiple races, valuable demographic information and resources could be lost for many African Americans (Frisby 199596). Regardless of the scientific or genetic basis for the category, they said, racism against people with any black African ancestry was real, and the category was necessary to obtain resources and justice. This stance, sometimes called strategic essentialism by critical race theorists, lives precisely at the pragmatic junction between that which is perceived as real, and the consequences of that perception. Other leaders approved of the category choice change, seeing it as potentially liberating. Keen debate about the nature of these categories continued for months, including issues such as whether the indigenous people of Hawaii should be grouped with Native Americans and how to categorize people of more than one national and ethnic heritage. In October 1997, OMB decided to allow people to identify themselves as of more than one race, that is, to check more than one box. They could not, however, identify themselves as multiracial. The enormous expense and inertia of the decision is striking. It is estimated that it will cost millions of dollars. It is not often that individual categories are championed as social movements; even more rarely does an entire schema come under scrutiny. |
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The South African case relates directly to all questions of information systems design where categories are attached to people. It is an extreme case, but at the same time, a valuable one for thinking about the ethics and politics of information systems. Not all systems attempt to classify people as globally, or as consequentially, as did apartheid; yet many systems classify users by age, location, or expertise. Many are used to build up subtle (and not-so-subtle) profiles of individuals based on their filiations to a myriad of categories. In the process of making |
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