Hi 120mm,

Quote Originally Posted by 120mm View Post
I love your "race" comment, Marc. I am allegedly Irish-Something, but because I am an anonymous adoptee, who really knows?

My eye-doctor studies ethnic anthropomorphic(sp?) characteristics, and claims my large and well-developed epicanthric eye folds suggest Asian or Middle-eastern descent.

Basically, in the racist world of "equal opportunity" you are what you say you are.
It is an odd setup in a lot of ways . One of the things that Boas really pushed was to look at individuals rather than phenotypic groups. You're right about the self-declared categories but, it's interesting to note, that you can only use "approved" categories.

I got called by Statistics Canada for a survey of PhD graduates, and one of the questions was my "ethnicity". Being in a somewhat frustrated mood with such silly questions, I answered with my father's family ethnicity, which is Visigoth (yeah, we can track our family back about 1600 - 2000 years, or at least the clan). Well, Visigoth wasn't an "approved" ethnicity so they asked for another one. I gave them Mohawk, which is legally true by Mohawk law (not Canadian law) even though I have no Mohawk blood (long story). It probably ruined their stats but, if they are going to not accept a self-defined ethnicity that they don't list, then their survey isn't worth much.

One of the things I've noticed about PC academia is that there is a distinct game of victim poker going on. The more "your people" have been "abused", the higher the cards in the game. This really came out when I was doing my MA (in Canadian Studies). I realized very quickly that I had 5 strikes against me: white, male, straight, Anglophone, from Toronto. I was informed by one professor that I could never "really understand Canadian culture" because of my "limitations" - this despite the fact that my family has been in Canada for over 200 years and she, who of course did understand Canadian culture, was an American who came to Canada in the early 1970's with her draft dodging boyfriend . Needless to say, I became quite "sensitized" to the "racist, sexist and homophobic" attitudes of my "culture", i.e. PC academia .

The one good thing about that entire experience was that I developed a distinct distaste for PC morality masquerading as "academic research".

Marc