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Week 12 · Assignment: Traditional alternative (no AI)

Week 12 — Whose Boxes? Race, Ethnicity, and the Census Categories — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Cultural Anthropology Free sample edition
Traditional alternative (no AI), unpublished. In the course this is a separate assignment that ships unpublished beside the adaptive assignment: same objective, no AI. An instructor who prefers it publishes it and unpublishes or deletes the adaptive one, as the note at its top says.

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Assignment 11 of the term — work four short problems from the 2024 census categories and an illustrative form, read them as an anthropologist, and explain race and human variation to someone who has them mixed up.

This week you met human variation as continuous, skin color as an adaptation to ultraviolet light, the two attributed figures for where most variation lies, Boas's 1912 study of immigrants' children, race as a social classification with real effects, ethnicity and ethnic identity, and the 2024 census categories read as the issuing body's own. In this assignment you work four short problems, interpret each one, and explain this week's ideas to someone who has them mixed up. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Ethnography Workshop practise the same ideas from other angles. It builds on Week 7's authority and stratified society, on Week 3's emic and etic categories, and on Week 2's idea that culture is learned, not inherited.

The task

The week's shared material is Dataset G, the course's sourced real figures, plus an illustrative form constructed for this course. From them:

  • in 2024, the Office of Management and Budget revised its standard to use 1 combined race-and-ethnicity question with 7 minimum categories: American Indian or Alaska Native; Asian; Black or African American; Hispanic or Latino; Middle Eastern or North African; Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander; and White; Middle Eastern or North African is the newly added one, and the office describes the categories as socio-political constructs;
  • the Census Bureau states that its race categories reflect a social definition of race, not a biological, anthropological, or genetic one, and that people may report more than one race;
  • an illustrative "check all that apply" form, constructed for this course, was returned by 8 people: 6 checked 1 box and 2 checked 2 boxes.

A friend sees your notes and says, "The census boxes are the natural human races, and skin color tells you which box anyone belongs in." Your job is to reply the way an anthropologist would, starting from a few plain numbers.

Work these four problems, showing your arithmetic:

  1. The Office of Management and Budget's 2024 standard has 7 minimum categories, and 1 of them, Middle Eastern or North African, is newly added. How many of the minimum categories were not newly added in 2024?
  2. On an illustrative "check all that apply" form, 6 people check 1 box each and 2 people check 2 boxes each. How many boxes are checked in all?
  3. The same illustrative form was returned by 8 people, and 10 boxes were checked in all. How many more checks are there than people?
  4. Of the 8 people who returned the illustrative form, 2 checked more than one box. What percent of the people checked more than one box?

Beside each answer, add one brief interpretation:

  • Problem 1: name the issuing body and how it describes its own categories, and explain why a revision that adds a category shows the categories are made by people rather than found in nature.
  • Problem 2: explain the Census Bureau's statement that people may report more than one race, and connect a person who checks 2 boxes to human variation being continuous rather than sorted into separate boxes.
  • Problem 3: set race apart from ethnicity with one example of each, a shared heritage and a society's reading of bodies, and explain why a form that asks about both in one combined question still leaves them two different ideas.
  • Problem 4: explain race as a social classification with real effects, keeping both halves, and use authority to say who has the right to draw a society's boxes and why that right does not turn the boxes into biology.

Explain it to a non-expert

Your friend thinks the census boxes are the natural human races and that skin color tells you which box anyone belongs in. Write a 3–5 sentence message that explains human variation as continuous, a gradient rather than boxes; says that skin color tracks ancestral ultraviolet light and predicts no other trait; treats the census categories as the issuing body's own; and names one limit, such as that the form in this task is illustrative. Explain any technical term in everyday words. More than one good reply is possible.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a friend who says that "the shoe sizes on a store's shelf tags are the only sizes feet come in." Model reply: "Those sizes are the store's labels, not the shape of feet. Feet come in every length in between, and a person can fall between two sizes or wear a different size in another brand. The store picked the sizes so it could stock its shelves, and it could change them next season. One caveat: one store's tags do not tell you how every maker sizes its shoes."

Use that pattern for your friend, with your own wording and evidence.

Show your arithmetic. A reader should be able to reproduce every number you report from the figures in the problems without guessing which figures or steps you used.

Deliverables

Submit a single report containing:

  • the four answers, each with the arithmetic shown and the brief interpretation the task names for that problem;
  • your message to the friend, explaining human variation as continuous, saying skin color predicts no other trait, treating the census categories as the issuing body's own, and naming one limit; and
  • a one-line restatement of the figures you used, so your answers are reproducible.

Keep it to roughly one page. Clear and correct beats long.

Choose how you show it. Present your report as written text, or as a recorded audio or video explanation of about three minutes with a transcript, or as a labelled chart of the form's tally described in words with a short explanation. Every form is graded by the same scoring criteria. Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text.

How you'll be graded

The full analytic rubric is attached to this assignment in Canvas.

Academic integrity and AI use

This version is designed to be completed without AI: do the computations, the interpretations, and the writing yourself, without a chatbot or other AI tool. You may use a calculator or a spreadsheet for the arithmetic. Describe the census categories only as their issuing bodies describe them, name people only by role, and do not borrow a figure or a detail about any real people from another source without citing it. Submitting AI-generated work as your own, or copying another student's work, is an integrity violation under the course policy.

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