Testing the Waters

Hi,

This being my first post, it goes without saying that I'm a bit nervous. Even though we live in a time where so many things are public, i.e. via Facebook, MySpace,etc., having a blog is something more intimate. It's kind of like having your diary entries read by the entire world. But putting that aside, let's give this a shot...


Today,  I got a taste of just how clueless we are when it comes to ethnicity, even though we live in such a multicultural, multi-ethnic, multi-racial, multi-everything city. During one of my classes, we were given the task of creating a survey. The survey was going to be given to various people throughout Miami-Dade to determine what their top concerns are about their communities, i.e. foreclosure, crime, pollution, etc.


When it came to actually creating the "What is your ethnic background?" question for the survey, my class was literally at a loss for words. There was major confusion about what categories to include in the question. Do we include the term Hispanic and lump together all peoples from different Spanish countries? Do we specifically mention Cubans since they are such a dominant population in South Florida? What about the term "Black"? Wouldn't that include Hispanic Blacks and Non-Hispanic Blacks? I don't know the answers to these questions and neither did many of my classmates. 

The point is that even after taking sociology/anthropology courses, ethnicity is still a concept that gets muddled. It's something that people think they understand, but they really don't. It seems that sometimes the more you discuss it, the more confused you get. I'm not sure if that says a lot about the education we've been given throughout our elementary, middle and high school years, or if that is something we'll continue to debate as our communities become more diverse. I happen to think it's the latter, but hopefully soon we'll all find out.