Wikipedia talk:Race and ethnicity

About this essay

This is an expanded and sectionalized version of something I originally posted as a sub-thread at Wikipedia talk:Categorization/Ethnicity, gender, religion and sexuality, on 9 June 2018 [1]. The response was favorable, so I decided to work it up.

It's very different from the usual Wikipedia essay, being something of an educational piece instead of the typical "do it this way, not that way" pseudo-rulemaking. While this does touch on policy and best practices here and there, it's primarily aimed at the editorial mind, not behavior.

It doesn't address race from the Racial bias on Wikipedia angle, which is certainly a valid one, within the confines of race as a social construct and all the effects that has. Rather, it's an anti-racialism summary of why people's beliefs that "races" are a biological fact are confused and misleading. We shouldn't be "pegging" our article subjects with racialist labels, absent a strong WP:ABOUTSELF or WP:RS identification of the subject with that label. (And in the latter case, be skeptical anyway.)

The genesis of it was the pervasive assumption (especially among American and British editors) that "race" or "ethnicity" are must-include factoids for categories, infoboxes, and leads, and that such matters are both necessarily objectively factual and easily ascertained. I was inspired to essay-ize it after encountering some responses in a similar thread, from English-fluent Wikipedians in other parts of the world than these "big two", who find our cultural belief in and dwelling upon "race" to be perplexing and akin to religious dogma, reflective neither of biological reality nor other cultures' approaches to humanity. Another rationale was the frequent pseudo-scientific trolling at Talk:Race (human categorization).

I'm not going to source this like an article. WP:Do your own homework, basically. If you're a died-in-the-wool racialist, feel free to write your own counter-essay. I'll be quite happy to poke lots of holes in it. >;-)
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  13:44, 15 July 2018 (UTC)

Well, as far as how editors and professional biographers should behave, this essay is completely wrongheaded. The biographical point isn’t the scientific validity of race and ethnicity. The point is the identity or identities of the biographical subject. If that subject identifies in a certain way or certain ways, regardless of how others may view the validity of that identity or those identities, that identification or those identifications should be discussed. Here on Wikipedia, if reliable sources state that a particular subject identifies in some particular way or ways, that information should be included in the subject’s article. We don’t get to “correct” the identities of others, as though that could even make sense. Antinoos69 (talk) 22:16, 9 October 2018 (UTC)

Um, the essay already covers that, and you've utterly misread it if you think it suggests "'correct[ing]' the identities of others". The entire point of it is to not dwell encyclopedically at all on subjective ethno-racial labeling, absent the specific condition that the label in question is directly tied (in the preponderance of reliable sources) to the subject's notability. And it's not like I pulled this idea out of my butt; it's the rationale the community used in removing the |ethnicity= parameter from {{Infobox person}} in a big RfC. There's an entire notice box about this at the top of Template:Infobox person/doc.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  21:32, 11 November 2019 (UTC)

Hi, nice to meet you

I am radical cosmopolitan, not died-in-the-wool racialist. But what I wrote appears as counter-essay to yours. So all your holes would be welcome:

Wikipedia:Topics where reliable sources should be banned from Wikipedia indefinitely Maxaxa (talk) 13:58, 21 June 2023 (UTC)

A minor point

I sympathize with the essay but have a minor comment on one sentence: "Conversos – Spanish Jewish families that survived the Inquisition by conversion to Roman Catholicism". This is factually wrong because the Inquisition was set up to police Christians only. Jewish families fell under its jurisdiction only after they converted to Christianity, not before. --Hispalois (talk) 12:28, 9 August 2019 (UTC)

Good point.  Fixed.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  21:27, 11 November 2019 (UTC)

How about 'Ethnicity/race', not just 'Ethnicity', as a header in Template:Infobox U.S. congressional district for example?

U.S.-census-based national/state/district electoral and maybe other Wiki pages draw on data labeled 'race' and 'ethnicity' by the Census but call it just 'Ethnicity' in the infobox. I just encountered this labeling at NJ 3rd's page. When there I found a bare url to the Census and ended up having to do a fairly complicated set of edits to address it. The specific element here -- to have the header be simply 'Ethnicity' -- struck me as potentially confusing, at least, and I noted that in my footnote. (The footnoting was further complicated because there was no way to put line-cites on the race/ethnicity percentages due to the pre-formatting; maybe I'll take that on separately. In any event, though, it explains my somewhat jerry rigged footnote of 'Population' only, in the infobox.) This article talk page seems maybe the place someone would engage on my nitty gritty little observation. I'll cross-post this to the template talk page and I think I'll go for the label-change there unless I hear other compelling opinions. Any ideas? Thanks. Swliv (talk) 23:50, 6 July 2020 (UTC)

@Swliv: I think we will need a lot of adjustments like this, especially since the US in particular is bad about distinguishing between ethnic groups in the anthropological sense, areas of ancestral geographical origin, and color-based "racial" categorization, among others. (And, consequently, many of our editors and readers also share these confusions.) Exactly what to fix and how at which templates and other pages is probably going to be case-by-case consensus formation work, and an incremental process.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  16:28, 28 November 2020 (UTC)

A disagreement

I'm honestly sorry to have to say this, but this essay is absolute nonsense. I don't have time to go through all of the errors. Churchyard Dog (talk) 11:32, 9 May 2021 (UTC)

"From a modern scientific standpoint, ancestry comes down to haplogroups. But haplogroups, it turns out, do not correspond to things like "Italian", or even "African" – neighboring groups in Africa often have more diversity in their genes than is found between the Welsh and the Japanese."

...what? Churchyard Dog (talk) 11:34, 9 May 2021 (UTC) Striking sockpuppet comment. Generalrelative (talk) 21:09, 9 May 2021 (UTC)

Related discussions elsewhere on WP

It's probably worth assembling links to previous (and ongoing) disputation that relates to this sort of question:

• Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Biography#RFC on CONTEXTBIO (January 2024)
• Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Biography/2023 archive#Ethnicity
• Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Biography/2018 archive#RfC on use of Spanish regional identity in biography leads

There are a lot of others.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:22, 6 January 2024 (UTC)

"Erasure", "visibility/representation", "tagging" and related matters

This essay needs to be expanded with some discussion of concerns that are sometimes at cross-purposes to each other or to WP policy/guidelines/consensus (which may shift over time).

• Advocacy pertaining to particular identity groups (ethnic, racial, national, regional, political, sexual/gender, religious, and other) often raises concerns about Wikipedia content and:
  • Erasure, with meanings that involve and overlap with social amnesia, social invisibility, politics of memory, social exclusion or marginalization, and subject-specific variants/subtopics like racial color blindness, LGBT erasure, bisexual erasure, gender-blind, lesbian erasure, etc.
  • Visibility/representation, including social representation generally and most especially its subset media bias, including specifics like representation of African Americans in media, media portrayal of LGBT people, Jewish visibility, no innovation without representation, gender diversity, etc. (sometimes involving intersectionality, as in media portrayal of LGBT people of color). Wikipedia is a form of "media" in this kind of analysis, and an important one, being among the top 10 most-used websites in the world. See also: Equal Visibility Everywhere, Lesbian Visibility Week, Asexual Visibility and Education Network, Disability Visibility Project, Women Artists Visibility Event, National Trans Visibility March, LGBT visibility in the Eurovision Song Contest, Netflix and LGBT representation in animation, Cartoon Network and LGBT representation, Disney and LGBT representation in animation, LGBT representation in children's television, LGBT representation in The Simpsons, LGBT representations in hip hop music, Gender representation on corporate boards of directors, Gender representation in video games, Miss Representation, African-American representation in Hollywood, gender in horror films, etc. (Some of these could probably benefit from merger; they vary from focusing on efforts to get more/better representation, to being critical views of current representation as insufficient or distorted, or are a mixture).
• People may also engage in "tagging" of article subjects with ethnic and other labels (especially queer-tagging, Jew-tagging [2], Muslim-tagging, atheist-tagging, and Black-tagging, the last often firmly rooted in one-drop rule beliefs). This may take place in the lead section of bios, by adding categories to bios, and by injecting labels into running text in other articles. The unrelated, even opposite, reasons for this are at least threefold:
  • Antagonistic desire to label the subject in a way that the labeler believes will prejudice other readers against the subject or imply some kind of bias or other association. The tagging may be supported by sources or not, and is usually not pertinent to the subject's notability in any way.
  • Promotional desire to label the subject in a way that "claims" the subject of part of a particular group, even when the connection is marginal, uncertain, or not particularly pertinent to the subject's notability.
  • Obsessive over-categorization by neutral-minded editors who have absorbed racialist or similar thinking patterns and who do not want to accept the idea that just because a label could possibly be applied according to some sources does not mean that it must be applied in encyclopedic material (and the lead section in particular). This labeling is often unrelated to the subject's notability.

 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:04, 20 January 2024 (UTC)