No Stupid Questions

Spaniard here. I did some remote work with a North American company and in my profile my race was "Latino". I tried to explain I'm caucasian but it was futile.

I'm Australian and the one that really gets me is when Americans refer to indigenous Australians as "African American" because of their skin colour. They're in no way from Africa or America, but nice job appropriating our native people.

I believe it’s a legal thing where HR has to track the ethnicity (if applicant discloses) due to equal employment. Basically the US federal government wants to know if a company is discriminating against a protected class during hiring and employment

Europe has a different history with heritage and bloodlines of indigenous people so it makes sense it’s not as big of a conversation there.

In Aus, we’re a settlement too, therefore conversations of heritage matter a great deal. Speaking in practical terms, there can be potential benefits to identifying as indigenous in the form of welfare due to the disadvantages indigenous people face.

Keeping track of race is entirely optional.

You’re 100% free to decline including it on any personnel file or application (with the exception of acting/modeling). It’s also self-identifying.

Consider that as a multi-racial pluralistic society - our values will be different than a European country whose major ethnic groups are the indigenous people.

We have an unfortunately long legacy of systematic racism issues. Communities or color experience slower emergency response times, fewer school resources and teacher pay, redlining and gerrymandered districting, food deserts, fewer public transportation options, and often fewer per capita polling stations on Election Day.

Until race stops being an observable factor for community outcomes, we still have a lot of work to do.

Many organizations see and understand this. As part of their sense of corporate social responsibility, companies make a good faith effort to hire from a ethnically diverse pool of candidates. If all your candidates are white - a company needs to ask itself if that’s a reflection of their own hiring biases or if that’s a systemic issue within the talent pool? It’s good to know these things - because industry surveys are constant - which help local leaders, non-profit organizations, colleges and universities, and governments do their jobs.

Meeting diversity goals is good for a variety of reasons. Importantly in capitalism, it’s good to investors because customers tend to prefer supporting diverse companies. Perhaps more importantly than that, different backgrounds offer different modes of thinking when it comes to problem solving. Crowd sourcing from a bigger idea pool is good for productivity.

I work for an American company and during global meetings when US HR are bringing up race, it feels really weird. Especially when you see that the percentage of white people stays the same and it's minorities competing with each other.

I doubt anyone but me has even looked at it in years so I doubt I'm benefiting somehow.

It is a strange practice now that I think about it. Never occurred to me that it wasn't normal.

No difference in benefits, the point is for companies to make themselves accountable that they are helping to improve the racial gap among their ranks. You can’t know that you’re improving, if you don’t keep track of the data behind it.

Nah my job is terrible I'm barely getting the due benefits lol. Thank you though. I figured I'd have to do something malicious for it to matter, but I've never even thought about this stuff.

It is kinda odd that they ask at all.

I think it's probably more likely HR purposely 'fat fingered' it to pad their minority stats for equal opportunity employment. Maybe I'm just cynical.

That 99% claim seems ridiculously high to me. Do you live in Oklahoma or something?

As a European, please help me understand. Why would you get fired? What implications does ethnicity have on your job? Why would anyone want to falsely claim to be Native American?