West Virginia Racing Commission License 2013-2024 Form

It’s worse than that: on most forms that have only a few options (Joseph Boyle is right that the US Census now gets more specific), Asians-and-Pacific-Islanders is all one group. That means from the Maori through Indonesia and Polynesia, then Vietnam, straight up past Mongolia, and east out to Japan and west right out past India — all one “race”. Why?Because racism, that’s why.To be specific, because historically in the US the only racial difference that counted was white/black — that is, white and and not-white. For centuries that was how distinctions of race and (implied) class were made. There were quite a few court cases where light-skinned Japanese (etc) petitioned to be declared white — they usually weren’t — and where dark-skinned South Asians (etc) petitioned to be declared non-black — which sometimes worked. In fact, it worked so well that some American Blacks donned turbans and comic-opera inaccurate “Eastern” garb to perform more widely as an “Indian” musician than they’d ever be allowed to do in their original identity.So in the 1800s, there was white and Black. Period. Well, ok, and Native Americans, but to the people that mattered, they hardly counted (and were all dead, anyhow, right?). As colonialism and rising globalization brought more and more people who were neither white nor black to North America, there became an increasing dilemma about how to classify this cacophonous mob of confusing non-white people.Eventually the terms “Arab” and “Asian” came to be widely used, and some classifiers (see also Why is "Caucasian" a term used to label white people of European descent? ) also separated Pacific islander from the general morass of “Asian”. But in general, everyone from the Mysteeeeerious East was just called one thing, unless you felt you needed to specify a country.So, like I said: racism. And a racist tendency to dismiss as unimportant distinctions between different groups of “unimportant” people.

None of the above?

Probably not. We all have to make such choices on official forms. What I find quaint is some of the ethnic groups one has to assign oneself to, the accurate options which don’t appear and the occasional odd euphemisms. I guess that is not a great surprise in a country still grappling with the legacy of slavery and the inherent racism that that “peculiar institution” engendered. If the multitude of weird, eccentric and sometimes offensive questions on Quora concerning race are anything to go by, there is a lot of grappling still to do.