The Ways In Which We Divide

Depending on how much you know about the woman pictured at the right, there are a nearly infinite number of ways to describe her. I would say she is pretty, you might disagree. But from just looking at her picture, there is no meaningful way we can describe her other than to say she appears to be white. Can you tell me where she was born? What is her cultural background? Does she claim to be of any one particular religion? Can you categorize her in any meaningful way that would help others know the breadth and width of her personal demographics?

Perhaps the more important question, however, is why must she be categorized at all? And actually, the answers to that are myriad. Humans as individuals and as collectives have a desire to categorize things. Marketing departments use categories to determine targetable demographics. Governments use categories to establish various laws, such as Affirmative Action or the disbursement of school funds. Whether right or wrong, categories and demographics play a major role in every day life.

What are the major categories? I’d say the top three are age, gender and race. And while a glance at a person will give you clues to all three, the only way to know which categories a person falls into is to guess or to ask or to research. So we look more closely, we ask questions, we take a census… We count and categorize and divide.

Unfortunately, people and organizations (like the government, colleges, the NAACP, ACLU and a whole slew of other acronyms) make grave errors when categorizing. First and foremost, there is the bias inherent in any group establishing its own criteria for categorization. It’s the shortcomings of a “we make the rules, we decide who is one of us” mentality.

Secondly, and more apparent, are the mistakes in definition. For instance, we bandy about the politically correct term “African-American” mainly because Jesse Jackson has scared people away from using the color description of black (for more on this specific subject, see the article Black and White and Said All Over). This causes a confusion between the definition of race and the definition of geographical heritage. Race is a matter of genetic make-up; heritage is a matter of shared background. And it is certainly possible for someone with pale skin pigmentation to share a background with somebody of a dark skin pigmentation.

“African-American” and other hyphenated descriptors have nothing to do with race and everything to do with nationality. And nationality is a function of citizenship. Born in the United States? Then you are an American. Your passport will say nothing else, even if you were born 2-inches north of the Mexico border to a woman who entered the US hidden in the back of a truck.

Thus, race should be defined by genetics, nationality by citizenship.

Gender is also a definable category, though with modern medicine, it’s become a bit more difficult to determine than checking under the hood. Psychological issues aside, however, your gender is either male or female based on your chromosomal make-up. No amount of surgery or cross-dressing or feeling like the other gender will change that.

Age is pretty cut-and-dry. You can try to hide chronological evidence, but time is a constant.

In addition to these three major ways of dividing ourselves up - both for our own ends and so Coca-Cola can sell us more sodas - the are other major demographic categories that add to the confusion. There’s religion, for instance. For some people, religion is a matter of birth - they make it part of their genetic make-up solely based on who their parents are. This leads to some very deadly mistakes, but I’m not going to go into the huge differences here between, for example, the nationality of “Israeli,” the ethnicity of being “Hebrew” and the religiosity of “Judaism” - just rest assured that they are as different as night and day as being born of Italian descent and Catholicism. One may be part of the other’s culture, but not necessarily.

So then, what does that leave us with? I think it leaves us with a decision as to whether it is important to each of us individually to be defined by ourselves or others. I say let the pollsters divide us how ever they want. But let’s be smart enough to know that in dividing us, they do not define us.

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