Language desk
< April 26	<< Mar \| April \| May >>	April 28 >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Language Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is a transcluded archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

April 27

Describing an individual

Say that a chart contains a person's general information: name, date of birth, age, location, etc. And in one column is listed whether the person is Black, White, Hispanic, etc. That last column should be labelled as "Race" or "Ethnicity"? Thanks. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 11:00, 27 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

For what it's worth, the 2010 US census separated Hispanic from Race, as Hispanic is not a race.[1] If you want a single column, Ethnicity should cover it. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 11:57, 27 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

If race and ethnicity are fused into a single column, the column should be (and commonly is) called “Race or Ethnicity”. If they are given separate columns, “Black or African American” goes under “Race” while “Hispanic” or “Hispanic of any race” goes under “Ethnicity”. The census form that Bugs has linked to separates them into two groups, one giving subsets of “Hispanic, Latino or Spanish origin” where “Origin” could be interpreted as close to “Ethnicity”; the other is called Race”, and then completely screws it up by including many ethnicities or origins as races (e.g., Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, etc.) Loraof (talk) 18:43, 27 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

In the UK census, "Ethnicity and National Identity" is used. [2] Alansplodge (talk) 20:43, 27 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I am referring to this chart, here: List of offenders executed in the United States in 2019. What is the best way to title column #9 (currently, "Ethnicity")? Thanks. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 21:57, 27 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The most logical column title would be "Skin color". But how is this column meaningful? And where are the references that state the color? I think the column should be deleted. True ethnicity would be very difficult to determine. Jmar67 (talk) 22:21, 27 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Jmar67: "Hispanic" is not a skin color, at last check. Thanks for your "helpful" comment. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 00:15, 28 April 2019 (UTC) 00:14, 28 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

If Joseph is wanting to make a point about correlation between race and executions, it would be better to find a source that talks directly about that. Trying to just add the column could be seen as Original Synthesis. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 00:01, 28 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Inmate prison profiles always list the race of the inmate. So, let's stop with the OR and synthesis, etc., mumbo-jumbo. It is a very basic feature of prisoner profiles. Ya know, so when the prisoner escapes, they know who / what they are looking for. They can describe the escapee. Race is pretty basic to a prisoner profile. Let's use common sense. My question is: should that column be titled "race", which it had always been listed as? Or "ethnicity", which someone had recently changed it to? Thanks. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 00:13, 28 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

And, by the way, every list of death penalty cases, capital punishment, executions, inmates, death row, etc., always details the race of the inmates. Come on. Take off your "Wikipedia" hat (i.e., looking for rules and policies that you can smugly claim are being violated) and use common sense. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 00:19, 28 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Do your sources literally say just plain "white" or "black"? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 00:57, 28 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

You might consider "Racial/ethnic group" as a less specific, compromise term. Jmar67 (talk) 01:05, 28 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed: the Prison Policy Initiative (a US pressure group) uses "Race/Ethnicity" which is a little more concise. The US Department of Justice - Bureau of Justice Statistics goes with "race, and Hispanic origin" (p. 6) which seems rather clumsy.Alansplodge (talk) 16:28, 29 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The problem with certain racial/ethnic groups, at least as they are understood in the U.S., is that they are non-exclusive, for example many people with a cultural background from several Caribbean countries including the Dominican Republic and Cuba are both "Hispanic" and "Black"; and not in a biracial way (i.e. they don't have two parents, one from each category). That's why the U.S. Census asks the "Hispanic/Not Hispanic" question separately from the "Racial identity" question. --Jayron 32 18:15, 29 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I know this question was almost certainly intended to be about the USA, and the answers have largely addressed it that way, but it's worth recording that different countries address this kind of labeling in many different ways. For example, here in Australia, neither race nor ethnicity have any formal meaning. The terms are simply not used at government level, nor by most organisations. The national census asks people to describe their ancestry, and nothing else in this area of classification. Over 30% of respondents say "Australian". That doesn't mean they are of Australian Aboriginal ancestry, rather that their families have been in Australia for so long that anything from earlier on now means nothing to them. One kind of exception to the above is that many government forms ask people "Are you an Australian Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander?" This is often simply for statistical reasons, but sometimes additional assistance can be provided to such people. HiLo48 (talk) 01:26, 1 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]