Newsgroups: ut.general
Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!csri.toronto.edu!clarke
From: clarke@csri.toronto.edu (Jim Clarke)
Subject: "Joining the count"
Message-ID: <8903232049.AA29714@yorkmills.csri.toronto.edu>
Keywords: Are you a visible minority?
Organization: University of Toronto, CSRI
Distribution: ut
Date: Thu, 23 Mar 89 15:49:31 EST


So:  are you going to fill in question 3 on the U of T "Employment Equity
Survey"?

If you're a university employee, you're going to get this survey next week.
Its question 3 asks you to "check the box beside the wording that best
describes the group with which you identify."  The choices are "Aboriginal
Person", "Black" and so on.  (Why not "Black Person", I wonder? -- but
that's a stylistic quibble that I shouldn't bring up here.)

I've always refused to answer this kind of question, or answered "North
American", though I've never attained the level of articulateness displayed
by Les Earnest in the February Communications of the Association for
Computing Machinery.  (Nor, fortunately, do I have his extensive experience
with the problem.)

One of Earnest's comments seems especially relevant:  "... the fuzzy old
concept of racial classification that had been a tool of racists for so
long came to be embraced by their former victims and those who believed
you had to classify everyone and compile statistics to combat discrimination."

Just because question 3 refers to "visible minority groups" doesn't mean it
isn't talking about race.  I certainly won't answer.
-- 
Jim Clarke -- Dept. of Computer Science, Univ. of Toronto, Canada M5S 1A4
              (416) 978-4058
clarke@csri.toronto.edu     or    clarke@csri.utoronto.ca
   or ...!{uunet, pyramid, watmath, ubc-cs}!utai!utcsri!clarke