Defining Race in Education: Your Thoughts Please

reply to post by smyleegrl


In response to your question, I think they may be doing that for a very practical reason. There are so many races already identified, that TPTB may feel that the term Bi-Racial already covers all the options. People think bi--racial and they autonatically think Black/White. For every two different races you have, you have a child that can be, and probably is, a product of any of those.

Simply "Bi-Racial" is just too all encompassing anymore.

Too many "mutts" out there.

reply to post by smyleegrl


No, no, you got my post wrong, you have not offended me at all, the school system in the state I am a resident did, no only when they profile students by ethnicity but by what is in the south call "color" counting.

To me it doesn't matter, all children are in school to learn not to be profiled and counted, distribution of funds should be equal not in favor of one school or the other due to the higher racial count of one group or the other.

Thanks for posting this thread, I have experienced this type of things going on in schools here in my neck of the wood in the south, I never feel that is right for the children or the families.

reply to post by smyleegrl


Race is a social myth. It does not exist. There is only an ethno-cultural and genetic gradient that loops and swirls around the globe from one society to the next.

Whatever bureaucracy has attempted to codify any formal racial stratification in our society has done so poorly and with a sort of echo effect back into these same imagined categories.

Caucasian is about as loosely understood as you can get. It could someone from Portugal, someone from Vladivostok, someone from Mecca, from Tehran, from London or New Delhi. Those are all "Caucasian" peoples, yet the truth is that North Africans and Iberians have varying degrees of "African" genes mixed in. Arabs also have some mixture that also involves "Asian-type" peoples as well as "African". Russians and Poles also have "Asian-type" Mixtures, along with many Scandinavians. The Iranians and Indians have varying degrees of "Asian-type" mixed in. Many Indians also appear to have the "First Wave" mixed in as well (the darker skin tones that lead to "darker skinned Asians" in Southeast Asia, Indonesia, the Philippines and beyond).

African-American is perhaps the better terminology, because they are a mix of Sub-Saharan African and "Caucasian-American" mixtures. They are not "African" - insofar as African is also not any "one" thing and for the most part, African-Americans, especially light-skinned African-Americans, are bi-racial by default. The term African-American, for most of that group, does define a bi-racial, bi-cultural identity.

American-Indian (aka, Amerindian; aka, Native American; sometimes grouped with Alaskan Native or Pacific Islander) is another doozy. You are talking about people in from many different ethnic backgrounds, traversing many different "colonization events" of the Americas and also parsing in peoples who came from a completely different track (pacific islanders) who happen to have similar physiognomic features, though due to different underlying genetic chemistry.

Asian (look at the Caucasian paragraph above, and reverse it, add in the following includes those people of Chinese descent, though also including Pacific Islanders who mixed with the "First Wave" (Considering the peoples of Borneo or Australia). Where do Turks fit in here? How about Hungarians? And so-called South Asians / Indians, who are also Caucasian.

There is no "race", there are only poorly defined groupings based on historio-cultural legacies and pseudo-science.

So, personally, the school making use of such terminology really does nothing for me other than to prop-up - to a greater (leaving "bi-racial" in) or lesser degree (taking "bi-racial" out) - a basically farcical position of human division.

Originally posted by Unrealised
Simply sounds like either a type of survey, or, a way to distribute funding to certain areas, and not necessarily to the schools.



It's a sad fact that people still want to separate based on breed, but time will hopefully kill this silly ritual.

It is not silly. As biological organism's, the different and individual races have a right to exist. What your advocating under international law is GENOCIDE! You can call sameness "progress", but in reality it is nothing more then genocide.