UC Berkeley must redesign data practices to give visibility to mixed-race students

Posted in Articles, Campus Life, Census/Demographics, Media Archive, United States on 2019-08-26 01:25Z by Steven

UC Berkeley must redesign data practices to give visibility to mixed-race students

The Daily Californian
Berkeley, California
2019-08-22

Genevieve Xia Ye Slosberg | Staff

Every mixed-race person is familiar with this moment — you fill out some sort of form, and it asks for your race. You check one of them, and then when you attempt to check another, it either unchecks the first or tells you you are unable to select more than one. So you begrudgingly either choose just one or click “Other.”

This dilemma relates to a common complaint of multiracial individuals — being forced to “choose a side,” as if one of our races should automatically carry more weight than others. And in data collection and aggregation, choosing a side becomes ever more important, as it could determine resource allocation for diversity and inclusion work.

Diversity and inclusion is trending in higher education at the moment. But it is difficult to envision being inclusive of a group as diverse as multiracial students when race data collection hardly recognizes our existence…

Read the entire article here.

Tags: , , , ,