In my post “Health care costs and ancestry”, a commenter says:
“Race” is a concept that should have died with disco. I imagine it will soon be feasible for every patient to have their genome analysis included in their medical file and the various risk and other pertinent factors explicated.
The chart to the left shows how race is a social construct. It’s a bar plot which partitions ancestry, and as you can see, the Asian children are a mix of European and Asian. How does that happen? Because in 1980 the US Census included people of South Asian origin as “Asian Americans.” In contrast, those of Middle Eastern origin remain “non-Hispanic white” (this not totally crazy, think Ralph Nader or Marlo Thomas). But it means that an ethnic Baloch from Pakistan is “Asian,” and an ethnic Baloch from Iran is a “non-Hispanic white.”
Only a government bureaucrat would be happy with this situation. Obvious more fine-grained genomic analyses are necessary at least to force us to acknowledge the stupidity of these bureaucratic quirks. I am chagrined to realize that I’ve put “Asian” as my race quite often on …