Talk:Racial and ethnic misclassification in the United States

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Thanks for visiting my article, feel free to make changes or suggest things I missed! NaomiGK (talk) 04:06, 20 November 2021 (UTC)

This article is fundamentally flawed.

The entire premise that this article is built around is utterly at odds with modern understandings of 'race': as a social construct, rather than a biological attribute. Wikipedia should not be suggesting that 'race' can be 'misclassified' for the simple reason that people cannot be objectively 'classified by race' in the first place. AndyTheGrump (talk) 02:34, 22 November 2021 (UTC)

@AndyTheGrump: Hi Andy, I agree with your statement that race is a social construct and 'objective' racial classification does not fit within our current understanding of race. Nevertheless, like gender identity, race is a social identity that is meaningful for many people and has implications for the way people experience life and are treated by others. Misclassification is subjective and based on an individual's feeling that someone else's perception of them is at odds with their own identity. Just as people can be misgendered, they can also be racially misclassified according to their personal self-identification. Do you think this sentence clearly explains that perspective or do you suggest it be made more explicit?: "Given that race does not have an underlying biological or genetic origin, a person's race is often determined by their heritage and self-identification as a member of a racial group or groups. As a result, misclassification occurs when an individual is perceived by an observer as belonging to a racial group that does not match their own self-identification" NaomiGK (talk) 16:13, 22 November 2021 (UTC)

I think you may misunderstand some of the subtleties of the difference between 'race' and ethnicity. This may possibly be at least in part due to the narrow perspective that this article adopts on the subject. It is sourced almost entirely to material discussing the US, where the term 'race' is used by the general public (as opposed to academia) as a shorthand for a very specific set of social constructs that don't really apply anywhere else. Some of which may possibly fit in with older, now-discarded concepts of 'race' as an inherited biological attribute, but many of which have next to nothing to do with it. In other contexts, academic sources would undoubtedly be describing this in terms of ethnicity - along with social class, which in a US context is inextricably linked with how 'race' is seen - and how it is used to (mis)classify others.

The fundamental issue that arises from the way this article is constructed around 'race' is, in my opinion, that right from the title onwards, it tends to take 'race' as an a priori fixed attribute that people must have, and thereby misses what is actually going on when people discuss and debate such things. Ethnicity is complex. It is contested. It is contextual. It is fluid. It needs to be discussed as such, rather than as something that people 'have', either as a biological attribute (which it clearly isn't), or even as a simple self-assignment. The last is a good starting-point, but even that misses an awful lot of what ethnicity is about, and what it is people are doing when they talk abut it, or think about it.

I'm a former anthropology student, and one of the things that has stuck with me from my studies was an awareness of a particular trap that anthropologists in particular seem to have fallen into on numerous occasions. It is known (for reasons I won't go into here - look it up for yourself if you are interested) as 'emic-etic confusion' and refers to the almighty tangle you can get yourself into if you mistake the culturally-specific concepts those you are studying use amongst themselves for superficially-similar concepts used within academia. Sometimes the trap is hard to avoid. It may even be impossible to avoid sometimes. Which makes it imperative when writing on what ought to be a global overview rather than a narrow US-centric perspective (Wikipedia aspires to extend well beyond that, though it doesn't always succeed), that one doesn't mistake (or misclassify) particular facets of local discourse (i.e. about 'race' in a US context) for the broader subject matter that an article on any such topic ought to address. To be blunt, I don't think this article should be using the word 'race' at all, without the quote marks that signal the lack of any broader objective meaning to the term. It isn't a given. It is something you (as a psychology student, I see from your talk page) might do better to present as part of a culturally-specific discourse, even if (especially if!) the culturally-specific discourse is one you yourself are a part of.

Having said that, I'd like to stress that I wish you well in your studies, and that, caveats about what I see as a flaw in the article structure aside, I don't consider this a bad article, or as anything other than a sincere effort to tackle what is a very tricky subject. Presumably at some point this article will be assessed as a part of your grades, and when it is, whoever is doing the grading will quite possibly see my comments here. And quite possibly decide the either I'm asking far to much from a psychology undergraduate, or that I'm writing total BS. That is down to them. My more general concern is to ensure that Wikipedia articles on tricky subjects are as good as they can be (which given the 'anyone can edit' sloganizing of Wikipedia doesn't always mean a great deal), and to maybe point the creators of such articles in directions where they might otherwise have failed to look. So to whoever is assessing this as an academic assignment, I'd say assess it as such, and take my comments as coming from another perspective. Even if it is 'wrong' from my viewpoint, it is an interesting starting point, and a darn sight better than almost every student-assignment Wikipedia article I've seen. AndyTheGrump (talk) 18:13, 22 November 2021 (UTC)

Thank you for explaining your disagreements in more detail, I did misunderstand your original position and I greatly appreciate you taking the time to clarify. I think your comments deserve more thought and research on my part, especially considering that the term 'racial misclassification' is what is used in psychological and public health literature, regardless of if it is a misnomer. Nevertheless, I agree that Wikipedia need not be subject to this limitation and the article should transcend culture-specific contexts unless its explicit goal is to discuss misclassification in the U.S. I will think about how to reconcile the issues you presented, which may be indicative of larger misuse of the term 'race' in academic research, and let you know some changes I plan to make. Thank you again! NaomiGK (talk) 22:37, 22 November 2021 (UTC)

@AndyTheGrump: Hi again, Andy. I have made several, article-wide changes including modifying the title of the article to include ethnic misclassification, narrowing the scope of the article to the U.S., and defining race and ethnicity with more nuance. After much thought and debating about whether or not to remove the term 'race' from the title altogether, I concluded that it is important to include given that academic literature on the topic exclusively uses the term 'racial misclassification.' While the designation does not align with anthropological understandings of race, I do not believe the term 'ethnic misclassification' fully captures the intent of researchers, especially public health researchers who study how misclassification results in underestimations of disease prevalence in Native American populations. Furthermore, I believe contextualizing the phenomenon to the U.S. helps clarify that the term is culturally-specific and depends on societal conceptions of race/ethnicity. I would love to know your thoughts on the changes mentioned and appreciate your continued interest in the topic! NaomiGK (talk) 08:19, 6 December 2021 (UTC)