Race and caste in the two largest democracies

Matt Yglesias, who inherited the last name from his Cuban grandfather while the other three grandparents were Jewish, questions this bizarre ritual of race and majority and minority, and notes:

America has never operated with a stable conception of race. The factoid that 50 percent of our latest baby crop is other than non-Hispanic white is true only relative to the 2000 census scheme. There’s no reason to believe that this particular categorization will continue as bureaucratic practice or social reality.

Crazy stuff.

Whenever I am asked for race/ethnicity information, I choose whatever I want to be that very minute.  As I have blogged about earlier, sometimes I have been an Asian Indian, sometimes a white, and sometimes an African-American.  I believe I am correct in all the three choices: born in India. But, then born as a brahmin in India means that there is the perennial question of whether brahmins were at least part of the group that wandered into the Subcontinent from the Caucasus, which then means I am a Caucasian!  And, hey, ultimately we are all descendants of ancestors who decided to look what might be there outside the African continent and, thus, I am an African-American, too.

On the other side of the planet, India's effort to count people by caste is well underway. Unfortunately!  The purpose?

As with the British census it is seen as a means of classifying and categorising the social universe into groups entitled to or not entitled to certain benefits.

I tell ya, we humans are crazy anywhere on this planet!