When You Have a Hammer: Statistical Races Misused
When You Have a Hammer: Statistical Races Misused
This chapter uses the metaphor “when you have a hammer” to underscore how racial statistics can be misused by converting an issue or policy that is not about race into one inappropriately racialized. The first example is a census strategy to improve measurement of hard-to-count population groups. The second example, the case of genetic medicine, is more complicated and substantially more consequential. The statistical races now deeply embedded in American politics and culture are convenient shorthand for asking whether better health might be provided if treatment and medicines are targeted to the government's official race groups, thereby treating those groups as biological and not just statistical realities.
Keywords: racial statistics, race, racialization, population groups, census, American politics, statistical realities
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