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this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2023
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No Stupid Questions
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I know this is very common in the US but as an European this is still a weird concept for me to keep track of a person's ethnicity at all.
Does this have any implications whatsoever in terms of benefits or something? Otherwise I'd just let it be.
Spaniard here. I did some remote work with a North American company and in my profile my race was "Latino". I tried to explain I'm caucasian but it was futile.
I had that exact conversation at work a few days ago. Someone was insisting that Spaniards are Latino, so I asked them if Spain is in Latin America or Europe. That was the key to them eventually figuring it out.
When I was in similar situations I'd point out similaities to them. So e.g. if spaniards are latinos because they speak spanish, then people from the UK are all Americans because they speak English.
Dependent on the level of education, you might have to flip them both ("US people are all english") because they might actually believe that English people are US-emmigrants.
They were wrong. Spaniards are definitely not considered Latino here.
I'm American, and of Spanish descent. On all my paperwork it says Latino, people here often don't get the difference because they forget Spain exists.
Except when they call all Latin Americans "Spanish" 🤦♂️
There are definitely white Latinos in the US, it's a race vs. ethnicity thing. But definitely no Latinos from Europe!! 🤣
I’m mostly Sicilian and Irish but my great grandmother on my mom’s side is Spanish. People usually don’t know where I’m from so just settle on thinking I’m Jewish, but I had people think I was Latino more recently. I’m more used to it happening to my mom because she’s a lot more tan than I am.
I'm Australian and the one that really gets me is when Americans refer to indigenous Australians as "African American" because of their skin colour. They're in no way from Africa or America, but nice job appropriating our native people.
How often do Americans refer to aboriginals as African Americans? This is not a common situation.
It happens enough for me to have noticed it a few times. It probably helps if you work with Americans in Australia.
It happens enough for me to have noticed it a few times. It probably helps if you work with Americans.
It's like people overcorrecting and using "whom" when "who" really would be correct. Ditto "you and I" vs "you and me". People get corrected enough times to be embarrassed, but still don't have any interest in correct usage, so they just blanket apply what they think is the rule rather than trying to actually learn any of its nuances. It's not a perfect analogy, but I can imagine people just reverting to "African-American" as a no-thought safe bet when referring to brown people.
Aren't you kind of appropriating Indigenous Australians? I mean they're not "your" native people, right?
Native Australians are not native people of Australia?
Yes they're native to that land, but they're not Zik's Indigenous Australians! That's what I meant about appropriating them, the way they wrote that was just too ironic.
He was using "we" to refer to his country, obviously
"Appropriate" in terms of taking literal possesion of something - "our" as in "my bed", "our car". I am fairly sure it's a joke, read the wording again.
Right, and therefore appropriating the natives, whose land he is on. That is the irony. I'm in the US, and they're not our Native Americans. That's just not something you can say.
Shit Americans say, lmao
I believe it’s a legal thing where HR has to track the ethnicity (if applicant discloses) due to equal employment. Basically the US federal government wants to know if a company is discriminating against a protected class during hiring and employment
Europe has a different history with heritage and bloodlines of indigenous people so it makes sense it’s not as big of a conversation there.
In Aus, we’re a settlement too, therefore conversations of heritage matter a great deal. Speaking in practical terms, there can be potential benefits to identifying as indigenous in the form of welfare due to the disadvantages indigenous people face.
An extra reason (or even the main one) is that we have a bad history when it comes to racial registration. The countries that suffered the worst during the Holocaust were the ones that had a registry of the Jewish population that the Nazis could just look into when they took over.
The downside is that it's much harder to identify racial profiling at work for example. It's also basically impossible to see if violence on POC is more prevelant.
If they came to power again but with access to people’s 23andMe or Ancestry results, things would get really scary very fast. Most white people I know who took it aren’t actually 100% white, including myself. I’m a little bit black. It’s just not enough that I would justify changing what I’m listed as on documents.
What a frightening perversion of something designed to be innocent, or even helpful.
Keeping track of race is entirely optional.
You’re 100% free to decline including it on any personnel file or application (with the exception of acting/modeling). It’s also self-identifying.
Consider that as a multi-racial pluralistic society - our values will be different than a European country whose major ethnic groups are the indigenous people.
We have an unfortunately long legacy of systematic racism issues. Communities or color experience slower emergency response times, fewer school resources and teacher pay, redlining and gerrymandered districting, food deserts, fewer public transportation options, and often fewer per capita polling stations on Election Day.
Until race stops being an observable factor for community outcomes, we still have a lot of work to do.
Many organizations see and understand this. As part of their sense of corporate social responsibility, companies make a good faith effort to hire from a ethnically diverse pool of candidates. If all your candidates are white - a company needs to ask itself if that’s a reflection of their own hiring biases or if that’s a systemic issue within the talent pool? It’s good to know these things - because industry surveys are constant - which help local leaders, non-profit organizations, colleges and universities, and governments do their jobs.
Meeting diversity goals is good for a variety of reasons. Importantly in capitalism, it’s good to investors because customers tend to prefer supporting diverse companies. Perhaps more importantly than that, different backgrounds offer different modes of thinking when it comes to problem solving. Crowd sourcing from a bigger idea pool is good for productivity.
Over here (Austria) asking about race or processing this information in regards to a job wil land the employer in hot water really quickly, since it opens them up to racism claims.
I used to work for an organization that provided legal, educational, medical and social services to inner-city children and their families. These families were mostly Black and Latino.
If we were hiring for a job that had an equally qualified black and white candidates, the choice is clear. In order to be successful, you need to have good professional relationships with clients. It is far more effective if the client can relate to one's lived cultural experience. It's also very important for at-risk children to see relatable adults succeed in a world that has been systemically unfair to them.
In Austria, this hiring process may be considered racist. But here, we recognize that there are a lot of fringe benefits when hiring for diversity.
In fairness, race is not something that's discussed unless it's directly related to the role. As stated above, you are free to check "Prefer Not To Say" if an application asks about race. Most of the time, that information is used for census and surveys.
Having done a lot of HR in my life, you'd be surprised how many hiring managers are passively racist.
I've seen applications rejected simply because the hiring manager doesn't want to embarrass themselves mispronouncing a name. Or they assume communication language skills without ever talking to someone. Or they not-so-sublte, "I can just feel this one won't be a good fit".
Like, "Really, Bob? What's on Fatima's resume gives you that impression? She's clearly qualified."
I wonder how much worse the racial wealth gap would be if 'equal opportunity employment' wasn't a thing.
I understand what you mean, that in some specific situations hiring for a specific race can be a benefit, but in cases like that you can hire for something similar that is legal again here too. E.g. you could hire by experience with certain communities, for example. Or you can hire for "sympathy". "This person is personally a good fit to our company and the role". With that point you can hire whoever you want.
This is also the Achilles heel of the anti-discrimination laws, since the hiring manager can just say "The applicant's personality wasn't a good fit" to anyone they want to discriminate against.
And yes, I have personal experience with how racist and sexist some of my bosses have been so far.
In one company, my boss was directly excluding any applications by women for IT roles, because "they would distract the boys in the IT department". Even though all "the boys in the IT department" were in long-term relationships. (Btw, I also really hated it that he called us "the boys" even though we were all ~30).
I work for an American company and during global meetings when US HR are bringing up race, it feels really weird. Especially when you see that the percentage of white people stays the same and it's minorities competing with each other.
I doubt anyone but me has even looked at it in years so I doubt I'm benefiting somehow.
It is a strange practice now that I think about it. Never occurred to me that it wasn't normal.
Might the company be benefitting somehow? So they qualify for certain government grants or contracts because of it?
No difference in benefits, the point is for companies to make themselves accountable that they are helping to improve the racial gap among their ranks. You can’t know that you’re improving, if you don’t keep track of the data behind it.
For very similar reasons it's illegal to do in European countries. Keeping track of people's ethnicity is something which is mostly associated with Nazi's.
My company in the UK insisted that I fill in a diversity profile covering a lot of what is generally considered highly sensitive information. Well the only mandatory field was the date completed... so that is all they got.
Fortunately, people of non-European ancestry are treated fairly in Europe, so there is no need to keep tabs if they are being the subject of job loss more often. In the US, people of color and particularly migrants can be discriminated against, instead of welcomed with open arms like they are in Greece, Italy, and France. If there were discrimination in Europe, you could end up with concentrations of ethnic groups in the suburbs of cities like Paris. The people there might protest or riot after perceived injustices, and we wouldn't want that.
I'm Australian and the one that really gets me is when Americans refer to indigenous Australians as "African American" because of their skin colour. They're in no way from Africa or America, but nice job appropriating our native people.