Who is to define your identity?
To categorize people into different groups seems to be not only a fundamental function of human cognition, but also of our whole society: child vs. grownup, man vs. woman, black vs. white… Based on such categorizations, we assign rights and duties as for example the right to vote or the monthly fee we have to pay for our health insurance. How people get categorized by others, however, does not necessarily accord with how they categorize themselves.
A New York Times article I stumbled upon some days ago prompted me to do some research on the internet. This resulted in a vivid example of such “categorization disagreement”: race in the U.S. census. Until 1950, census takers were sent out by the government to record data on the residents of the USA. They categorized people into different racial groups based on their appearance. Later, the U.S. government changed their way of data collection: they began to assess their residents by letter. This meant that people now categorized their race themselves. This new self-assessment had a huge impact on the statistics on race. For example, between 1940 and 1990, the Native American population increased by 455 % (up to almost two million). Even though there is more than one reason for this rapid population growth, research shows that self-assignment of race is the most important factor. Another example: in the 1910 census, 65.5% of Puerto Ricans were categorized as “white” by census takers. In 2000, 80.5% of Puerto Ricans categorized themselves as “white”. As shown, this is not due to an actual growth of the white population, but rather due to differences in race classification. (For more census statistics, see here and here.)
Until 1950, the U.S. government obviously took the question of race as a biological, “scientific” question – in the sense that it was taken as something that could be objectively “measured” by looking at the colour of another person’s skin. In the course of time, the U.S. government allowed people more and more to take part in the assessment of their race by letting them choose their race categories themselves, and also by including additional categories that were supposed to better fit to people’s own representation of their race. Hence, the question of race became more a social than a biological matter – and more a matter of choice than of “objective” measurement.
This development of the U.S. census mirrors a general development in western societies: today, we see belonging to a race and ethnic group as a fundamental part of a person’s identity (in the social science meaning of the term). And we’ve got the intuition that people should be allowed to build up their identity themselves. We do not want census takers to “steal” her Native American identity from a woman by categorizing her as “white” just because she is “objectively” very light-skinned. Correct? Such a shift from a biological reductionist to a social constructivist view point can be observed in other domains as well. For example, we now distinguish between “gender” and “sex”, to allow for the fact that a certain sex does not automatically go along with a certain sexual identity.
As a social psychologist I cannot help being politically liberal. Hence, I appreciate this development. However, I wonder: How far can we go with letting people assess their identity themselves? Should this be fully independent of their genotypic and phenotypic attributes? Imagine I would have grown up in an African American community and identified fully with their culture. Would and should this allow me to categorise myself as “black “– despite me getting ridiculously pink as soon as a single ray of sunlight gets hold of me? Would it be “true” if I ticked “black” on a census form? Or is all this only about finding the right mixture of biological and social parts of categories? Do we need a social vs. a biological distinction (like gender vs. sex) in more domains?
Please share your thoughts!