Wow, the US census racial categories in this poll seemed like a total mess (obviously not your fault, we're all forced to work with it), so I looked it up in more detail (2020 Census), and it turns out it's somehow even more of a mess than I thought:

1. Some of the categories are based on physical traits regardless of region of origin (white, black) while others are based on region of origin regardless of physical traits (american indian, asian, pacific islander, latino/hispanic), yet are treated as mutually exclusive.

2. The white category includes all near eastern (e.g. turkish), middle eastern (e.g. arab), and north african (e.g. berber) ethnic groups, which in my understanding is highly unconventional (in regular usage white usually is restricted to only european origin), yet they then immediately fail to even stick to their unconventional physical-traits-only definition by excluding equally light skinned central asian (e.g. afghan) and south asian (e.g. north indian) ethnic groups. Even within the conventional white european groups, the most popular options are bizarrely named directly after european nations with no -american suffix (e.g. english, german, italian, irish), thus mixing up first generation immigrants from the modern day european nations with people who descended from european immigrants many centuries ago and have since significantly culturally diverged.

3. The black / african american category seems to be divided almost solely by country of origin, ignoring the fact that modern african country borders mostly derive from colonial borders, which often grouped loads of unrelated ethnic groups together (e.g. hausa-fulani and yoruba in nigeria) while dividing groups at the borders (e.g. tswana in south africa and botswana).

4. The american indian / alaska native category is using a term that to my understanding is only identified with by native americans specifically from the US (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kh88fVP2FWQ), though is seemingly being used as a blanket term for all native americans. Compared to the other categories, there is a vastly larger number of specific groups listed, including more than a dozen groups with 0 members . In addition to the common sense concise names of well known ethnic groups (e.g. cherokee) and wider ethnic families (e.g. iroquois), there are bizarrely also many unnecessarily long names with multiple redundant words for extremely specific groups (e.g. inaja band of diegueno mission indians of the inaja and cosmit reservation, rosebud sioux tribe of the rosebud indian reservation arizona), names of historical multi-ethnic empires that have long been destroyed (e.g. aztec [somehow the most common of all], inca), multiple redundant names for the exact same group listed as separate options (e.g. nahua and nahuatl, maya and maya central american), and names of non-profit organisations (e.g. cumberland county association for indian people).

5. The asian category somehow manages to simultaneously exclude huge portions of asia via the mentioned unconventionally large white category, while also lumping together groups that even from a eurocentric perspective are extremely visually distinct (e.g. indians, chinese, kazakhs).

6. The some other race category seems to be a mixture of heavily mixed race small islands and a few large latin american countries (e.g. brazilian, belizean), despite other such countries being grouped with their majority ethnic group.

7. For some reason they felt the need to split off all hispanic/latino groups as an entirely separate category from white rather than a subset, which ngl comes across kinda racist, they had no problem including many tanned skin groups in the white category before.

8. Multiple entire very visually distinct ethnic families are completely absent from any category (e.g. negrito southeast asians, aboriginal australians, japanese ainu). We know from the american indian category that they don't refuse to mention groups with 0 membership, and even though they are distant in origin and relatively rare I'd be surprised if there were literally 0 of them even in major global US cities like NYC, LA, SF etc.

I'm very tempted to make a poll for the much more rationally organised racial groups covered in http://humanphenotypes.net/

@TheAllMemeingEye America has a complicated relationship with the idea of race, who knew!

@Odoacre I feel like having a history of extreme oppression of various racial groups doesn't justify having the racial categorisation in the modern day be this chaotic lol

@TheAllMemeingEye You could argue this chaotic system is itself oppression

@Odoacre this is oppression of statisticians haha

reposting - I can't believe I was the only one who voted in this poll so far

@duck_master lmao