Wednesday Night iPhone Photo – Defining Race
February 8, 2012 6 Comments
I crashed my bike last week, and by bike, I do not mean motorcycle. I mean bicycle, which I crashed soundly into the sidewalk.
The fall itself was embarrassing, but the fact that I am still recovering from my injuries that serves as another reminder of an aging body. Don’t get me wrong, the injuries are minor and I have little to complain about. I’m already able to open bottles of Kombucha again, and I can now shift gears on my car without yelping in pain. Little victories, little victories…
When I woke up the morning after the crash and couldn’t hold my right arm straight, I decided to go to the doctor and make sure that I didn’t miss something that would screw up my recovery process. At the doctor’s office, I was handed the following form.
I was fascinated by their definition of race.
Race is a way of grouping people who share common characteristics.
Race is such a complicated societal structure — a doing, according to Stanford professors Markus and Moya — which continues to impact so many people on a material level. It seems to me that Kaiser wants to justify the survey, but obviously they can’t fit a nuanced discussion of the history of race and the necessity of such surveys in our current health care climate onto a single sheet of paper. So Kaiser tries to acknowledge the importance of talking about race, but the definition is almost ominous in its innocuousness.
I’m even having trouble putting it clearly, and I have a whole blog as my playground. What I’m trying to say is that the awareness of race in this case may be positive, but there’s such a negative history behind race that an amorphous definition struck me as scary with all that it doesn’t say.
As for me and my right arm, I’m happy that a week later, I am able to make an “x” on a piece of paper without feeling pain. Little victories, little victories…
About Matthew
Great post Matthew and while I understand the why of their form it allows the government to determine who is going to hospitals , detrmine how and who can pay and how they pay…and a multitude of other information it is still none the less ominous. But if you think their description of race is ominous or the mere fact that they ask check out the census…and see how structual racism ans the exportation of racism impacts the US Census.
I do think it’s important to pay attention to the details of race because there’s still so much institutional racism (as well as personal) impacting our lives…but I’m also suspicious because hospitals (and the U.S. government, as you point out) have a history of using race to discriminate. It’s a tricky balance.
I’m fascinated by the order in which the choices are listed. It looks completely random. But why randomize? A preference can be influenced by the order in which the choices are considered, but the form isn’t asking which race the patient would *prefer* to belong to.
Maybe scrambling the choices yields fewer decline-to-states? Does it make us feel less like we’re being put into little boxes this way than if we were asked to find our places in a logically arranged list?
(Knowing you, Matthew, I suspect you’ll ask what the logical arrangement would be. What I mean is that the arrangement could acknowledge that “other,” “unknown,” and “decline to state” are different than the other choices and that those others could be arranged in a pattern, for instance: alphabetically.)
I think in my ideal progressive dream world, Kaiser puts more thought into a one sentence explanation of why they are collecting this information. E.g., “Kaiser collects these statistics to try and counter the long history of racial discrimination in the health field and to help us figure out how to ensure that traditionally underserved communities receive proper care.”
You may call me a dreamer…really, you may!
Well, falling off a bike caused me to have a diskectomy in my back, so I’m glad it wasn’t worse. There are two kinds of riders. Thos who have dumped, and those who will.
Not sure why they want to track race. Seems odd
I’m so sorry to hear about the diskectomy! I feel very fortunate to have gotten off so lightly, although I did start to have back trouble today…I suspect from carrying my backpack differently in order to compensate for the arm…but nothing near that. I hope you’re okay now.