Public Service Announcement: Calling people African-American is racist now.

[loinburger]

If I were an anthropologist or census taker or whatever then I might find it frustrating to suddenly discover that what I thought was a safe term for referring to black Americans was no longer a safe term (at least according to Whoopi Goldberg), but otherwise I can't think of a situation in real life (as opposed to e.g. in this thread) where I needed a safe term for referring to black Americans. For example, the COO at my last job was black (or African-American or dark-skinned or whatever), and at no point did I ever have an exchange like the following:

loin: The COO wants us to upgrade the database
Co-worker: Which COO?
loin: The black COO
Co-worker: Oh, okay

or

loin: The COO wants us to upgrade the database
Co-worker: Which COO?
loin: The black COO
Co-worker: Don't you mean the African-American COO???
loin: I am slain

or

loin: The COO wants us to upgrade the database
Co-worker: Which COO?
loin: The black COO
Co-worker: Well of course he'd get uppity about the database being the wrong version

And so on

[Kidlicious]

You're for real?

x post

[NICE MOBIUS]

Kindly elucidate

[Kidlicious]

There's nothing racist about saying African-American. She simply can not be trying to take race out of the equation for accusing normal people of being racist for using that term. You can not possibly be that stupid.

[rah]

If I were an anthropologist or census taker or whatever then I might find it frustrating to suddenly discover that what I thought was a safe term for referring to black Americans was no longer a safe term (at least according to Whoopi Goldberg), but otherwise I can't think of a situation in real life (as opposed to e.g. in this thread) where I needed a safe term for referring to black Americans. For example, the COO at my last job was black (or African-American or dark-skinned or whatever), and at no point did I ever have an exchange like the following:

Yes, this could be a big issue in market research. It's bad enough that now we split color and heritage. White Hispanic just seems plain silly. Hispanic is Hispanic.
If we have to differentiate between black, black AMERICAN and just plain AMERICAN, it will drive us crazy. (slightly tongue and cheek, but it could happen)

[NICE MOBIUS]

There's nothing racist about saying African-American. She simply can not being trying to take race out of the equation for accusing normal people of being racist for using that term. You can not possibly be that stupid.

Where in that link is she accusing anyone of being racist by using the term African-American? Are the voices in your head making things up again?

[loinburger]

Yes, this could be a big issue in market research. It's bad enough that now we split color and heritage. White Hispanic just seems plain silly. Hispanic is Hispanic.
If we have to differentiate between black, black AMERICAN and just plain AMERICAN, it will drive us crazy. (slightly tongue and cheek, but it could happen)

I think the safest route would be to just let people write in their race / ethnicity / heritage / whatever, then use optical character recognition and natural language processing to categorize the results. You'll wind up losing about 5% of your data from people having unrecognizable handwriting or filling in absolute nonsense, but that's better than pissing off a potential customer either by providing too many or too few options.

[Kidlicious]

Where in that link is she accusing anyone of being racist by using the term African-American? Are the voices in your head making things up again?

I would stop typing everything that comes to your head if I were you.

[NICE MOBIUS]

I ask you again:

Where in that link is she accusing anyone of being racist by using the term African-American?

[Kidlicious]

I ask you again:

Where in that link is she accusing anyone of being racist by using the term African-American?

The statement only makes sense that way dumb****.

[Ben Kenobi]

I would argue that African-American is offensive to Americans who believe that their identity is American first, not whatever the color of their skin. That being said - that Whoopi is asking for this, I find hilarious.

I wouldn't say it was racist per se, because it was coined because it was considered a way to say, "hey we're American too", except without saying that. So there. I wouldn't shed a tear for it's demise. Black is easier and less-pretentious.

[Aeson]

I think its a good thing if we drop race altogether. Loin can remeber his COO's name just in case, Rah can dive into more nefarious marketing (social graphing, cross referencin browser cookies and dna samples, ouija boards), and Ben can just hate everyone for being mugged.

[rah]

I think the safest route would be to just let people write in their race / ethnicity / heritage / whatever, then use optical character recognition and natural language processing to categorize the results. You'll wind up losing about 5% of your data from people having unrecognizable handwriting or filling in absolute nonsense, but that's better than pissing off a potential customer either by providing too many or too few options.

I'm sure the final resolution will be similar to that, but then we run into issues doing trending and stats because of the smaller sized cells. Especially if we're trying to predict behavior.

[rah]

I think its a good thing if we drop race altogether. Loin can remeber his COO's name just in case, Rah can dive into more nefarious marketing (social graphing, cross referencin browser cookies and dna samples, ouija boards), and Ben can just hate everyone for being mugged.

Damn, out of thanks already today.

[loinburger]

I think its a good thing if we drop race altogether. Loin can remeber his COO's name just in case, Rah can dive into more nefarious marketing (social graphing, cross referencin browser cookies and dna samples, ouija boards), and Ben can just hate everyone for being mugged.

My COO had the same name as me, so I had to refer to him as "the COO" or else people might think I was talking about myself in the third person