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Racial Bean-Counting Gets Harder...

... in part because there are too many multicolored beans. Thus, the Washington Post reports today,

Public schools in the Washington region and elsewhere are abandoning their check-one-box approach to gathering information about race and ethnicity in an effort to develop a more accurate portrait of classrooms transformed by immigration and interracial marriage. Next year, they will begin a separate count of students who are of more than one race.

You?d think that at some point the entire apparatus of racial classification would simply collapse from its own ridiculous weight, if for no other reason than that the classifications are increasingly meaningless.

?The racial categories have lost their meaning,? [Faifax County, Virginia, school superintendent Jack] Dale said. He pointed out that the black or African American group could include a student born in Virginia or Nigeria, while the white group includes students of Middle Eastern descent.

What difference do the different colors of the students make? If none, why continue to go to all the trouble of collecting the meaningless data?

Full post as published by Discriminations on March 23, 2009 (boomark / email).