The March 10 Otago Daily Times editorial on the "vexed census ethnicity question" is timely for me and my students as I teach the University of Otago’s introductory anthropology paper ANTH 103. I agree with the editorial that the race idea is “mostly discredited” now, certainly biologically.
There is no DNA evidence for discrete human races among our species, Homo sapiens, even when one compares isolated populations. Variations in genetic expressions across the globe do not reflect race. For example, populations differentiated by selection for lactose tolerance track the spread of cattle domestication from Southwest Asia into North Africa and Europe. This co-evolution enabled high levels of milk consumption across multiple "white" and "non-white" groups.
So, where did a popular essentialised race idea come from? Many of my students are surprised to learn that this notion is of relatively recent origin. Essentialist race was forged by early modern Europeans to justify the colonisation of Indigenous populations and the enslavement of African peoples.
Slavers on both sides of the Atlantic referenced Noah’s Genesis 9 curse that grandson Canaan should become a "servant of servants" to construct African race from, and justify servitude on, Canaan’s mythic, racialised descendants.
In the US, race and white supremacy flourished across public policy and statute to enable and legalise native reservations and relocation as well as African slavery into segregation and Jim Crow. Influential nineteenth- and twentieth-century evolutionists misapplied the anthropology of their time to invent non-Nordic or non-Aryan "races" were inferior in biology, behaviour and culture.
Official race definitions today, when used, generally disavow assumptions of inferiority and channel a fluid ethnic group identity where ancestry is optional among shared attributes.
But the legacy of problematic and ambiguous race continues. Almost apologetically, US census officials (www.census.gov) advise that they still collect race data as required by the US Office of Management and Budget. More than one race can be selected among US census categories. These “are considered separate from the concept of Hispanic origin” for unstated bureaucratic reasons.
The census concedes that self-identified race categories “generally reflect a social definition” as recognised in the US, “and not an attempt to define race biologically, anthropologically, or genetically”.
Stats NZ uses ethnicity for group identification and “a measure of cultural affiliation”, distinguished from “race, ancestry, nationality, or citizenship”. Ethnicity as defined covers people with “one or more elements of common culture that need not be specified, but may include religion, customs, or language”. Religious communities with strong group identification from unifying origin myths in Judaism, Islam and even Catholicism and the Latter-day Saints conceivably might become ethnic. But ethnicity has been criticised for its vagueness and potential misuse.
It has become a popular synonym for "other" minority groups and their traditions globally. The majority observer gaze may be silently normalised behind the designation multi-ethnic, and in the casual racism of a concomitant question to people of colour especially, "but where are you really from?".
An alternative if still fluid group definition with Indigenous roots that does not, per se, hide a majority view may be peoplehood. From Indigenous New Zealand, Māori are tangata (southern takata) whenua, while Moriori of Rēkohu (Chatham Islands) are tchakat henu: the people of the land. Peoplehood is central also to a famous Māori whakataukī (saying): He aha te mea nui o te ao? He tāngata! (What is the most important thing in the world? It is people!). In the original telling, as Justice Joe Williams has noted, he tāngata incorporates all those to whom one might be connected, past and future. That affiliation extends from lineal descent — whakapapa — to encompass the larger world.
Moreover, in the Māori version of Te Tiriti (The Treaty), kawanatanga, or centralised British governance, is established to prevent harm “ki te tangata Maori ki te Pakeha”: on the people who are Māori and on the Pākehā.
Ditching ethnicity in the census to ask "who are your people?" might pick up immigrant and other sub-national affiliations more equally in this world of change and fluidity. It would also acknowledge those who wish to affiliate as a national people only: "New Zealanders".
A whakapapa of self-identified peoples at multiple scales and from different world views would be created back to the introduction of British-settler Pākehā in Te Tiriti, alongside tangata/takata whenua and tchakat henu as original peoples of the land. That strikes me as a more authentic New Zealand census approach as it references the nation’s founding document to respect and encourage diversity in unity.
— Ian Barber is a professor of anthropology and archaeology at the University of Otago.
