Over winter break, a sophomore who declined to be named (let’s call her Anna Z) logged into Banner Self-Service, and the website greeted her with a complicated question divided into neat checkboxes. Connecticut College wanted to know if she was Hispanic or Latina, and how she would describe the rest of her ethnic heritage.
It was an essay question disguised as multiple-choice. “My mother is French, and French is my first language. Culturally, I don’t know anything about my Puerto Rican heritage,” she explained. “I don’t think the survey had a way to represent that. I just put ‘Hispanic’ and ‘Caucasian.’”
What Anna encountered was the new race and ethnicity survey, which the College added to the website as required by the US Department of Education’s modifications to its own categories. As the email announcing the survey explained, the new categories would “bring recordkeeping… into line with the categories already used by the US Census Bureau and other federal agencies.” Unfortunately, the implications of categorizing race go far beyond the data collected and the gray three-ring binders that hold it.
The new survey’s categories are based on nomenclature the Census Bureau has been using since 1997. Since the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, American schools have been required to collect data, and the mandate was renewed with the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) which received bipartisan Congressional support.
Under NCLB’s original stipulations, each state could survey and report ethnicity data in a manner of its choosing. Texas, for example, decided on a three-category system, and labeled each student as African-American, Hispanic, or Caucasian.
In addition to the Department of Education’s required system of six categories, Connecticut College has added 28 more categories for a fuller picture of students’ racial backgrounds.
John Nugent of the Office of Institutional Research, who sent out the notice announcing the new survey, said that the information has implications at the national and college level.
Nugent explained that the college only reports the six required categories to the Department of Education, and that the other 28 are exclusively for college records.
“The data informs public policy, such as comparing graduation rates among ethnic categories, and drives initiatives for affecting what people call ‘traditionally underserved populations,” he said, “but that analysis doesn’t get broken down into our subcategories.”
As for college use, Nugent said, “We use the data to let people know about opportunities they might find interesting. For example, the Hispanic Studies Department asks every year for a list of all the Hispanic students on campus.”
Nugent stressed that the college doesn’t require a response. “It’s not ‘tell us or else,’” he said, “but we try to let people know that there are implications if you opt out.”
Still, in responses to such college search publications as the Princeton Review, the college ranks racial or ethnic status as an “Important” decision factor, where “Geographical Residence” is only “Considered.”
According to Nugent, the college also uses ethnic data in the Admissions department. “It factors in, but I don’t know how it does,” he explained. “I think it’s much more related to the general distribution of ethnic diversity among an incoming class than a decisive factor in any single applicant.”
The survey masquerades as a casual and unimportant piece of everyday information, but asking someone to tell you their “race” is a thorny question.
Over the last two hundred years, identity has been increasingly shaped by social conceptions of race, fed by the European communities of armchair anthropologists and social Darwinists who developed many of the concepts that continue to permeate our society as stereotypes and bigotry.
To describe your racial background, in other words, is to translate your personality into a host of pre-formed and generally inapplicable assumptions about your personal history.
As with Anna Z, an ethnic description of a person can often be an entirely misleading representation of his or her background. Even when there is a difference between the cultural backgrounds of two people, it might be lost in ethnic data we use to measure “diversity.”
Facilitating diverse points of view in our academic and social lives are highly emphasized, on campus, and “diversity” figures prominently in our mission statement. The survey data is one way for the college to measure its progress toward this desired variety, and this goal is evident in the wording of the categories. The survey offers ten subcategories of “Asian,” but just three different kinds of “White.”
A liberal arts community seems like the ideal place to practice what so many intellectuals preach, especially in light of Obama’s election and the “postracial” rhetoric that followed. A new system of racial categorization seems contrary to this initiative.
Professor Simon Hay of the English department was “pissed off” to have to take another race survey. “The people who put these surveys together and use them know race is complicated,” said Hay, “but they can’t put ethnicities into a survey without turning them back into the same reified categories we are trying to undermine.”
New Zealand, Hay’s birthplace, is one of the many places on the globe which doesn’t seem to be represented by the survey. Nugent also named Morocco and Brazil as ethnicities that “don’t quite fit” into any subcategory.
On campus, reaction to the survey is lukewarm. Many students did not raise their eyebrows at the additional request for ethnic identification. Some were unfazed because the new survey was already partially filled out based on the old seven-category survey, in which only one ethnicity could be selected.
This version also included the decidedly non-ethnic category of “Non-Resident Alien.”
“I don’t remember answering,” said senior TJ Gaffney. “But I think ‘White’ was already checked off.”
The students who did react strongly tended to be unimpressed. “I didn’t respond,” said freshman Ines Muganyizi. “I didn’t see a category for ‘African,’ just ‘African-American.’ So it didn’t apply to me.”
Some students did respond did so in a spirit of resistance to the emphasis on race as a defining characteristic in a student’s academic identity. Senior John Prokos reports, “I didn’t think it was important for them to know. I think I answered ‘Pacific Islander.’”
Nugent could understand with the sentiments of disenchanted responses like Prokos’s. “Many people would just like to say, ‘I’m a human being.’ I don’t think anyone at the college is thrilled that we had to do this. But you’ve got to use something, so we say, ‘hey, this is not perfect,’ and take it with a grain of salt.”
Although the response among faculty, staff, and students is invariably either indifference or opposition, the survey was not a college decision, and that a shift of emphasis away from race would have to come from the greater structures of national education policy.
“As soon as you start scrutinizing any system of race categories, it crumbles,” said Mr. Nugent, “but the federal government is sort of a six hundred pound gorilla. When they decide you have to report race and ethnicity data, you pretty much have to do it.”
I don’t think the author of this article really understand the difference between race and ethnicity. In fact, I flat out disagree with how “asking someones race is a thorny subject”. Race is physical. I can almost see the example with ethnicity in Anna’s case, but at the same time the survey never asked for Anna’s life story, the survey is simply asking your ethnicity, which is essentially a collection of cultures that had a nature and nurture affect on you. It does not matter whether or not you grew up speaking French but never heard anything about your Hispanic heritage. To claim that you are ethnically Hispanic is to claim that at some point, the Hispanic culture affected you, be it through racial issues or linguistic issues, or some story your dad told you when you were little that made you want to do some project.
I just think that this article was an attempt to bring issue to something that we all have to do: Summarize History by putting an x in a box. It sucks, but it can be a lot easier than your making it.
I just believe its none of your GOD Dammed business. Who knows what this is really for. Since my name is attached to it, and not a blind survey. How do I know they will not use it for other reasons