Could Stack Exchange be less American-centric?

This sort of thing is annoying even to Americans. I am part of an "invisible" ethnic group here in the USA. Anthropologists and sociologists generally admit that we exist, and sometimes even describe qualitative ways that they understand us to be different than others, but hard quantitative data is sorely lacking. If I want to see how my "people" are doing in terms of gaining higher education, avoiding incarceration, improving life expectancy, not eating the purple berries, etc., the data simply isn't there - we are lumped in with other people who are quite different from us, have different cultural practices, tend to talk differently, etc.

For a while, I've wanted to solve this by simply adding survey options so that "my" people become one of the options. That isn't really a solution, because where does it end? There are hundreds of ethnic, cultural, religious, social, sociopolitical, etc. groups here and elsewhere that are advantaged and/or disadvantaged in some way, and there are always divisions within a group that may trigger a desire to add even more options. I know someone who is descended from Québécois who moved to New England in the early 20th century and who considers himself distinct from the Acadiens of Maine and the Cajun of Louisiana in a "not my people" sense. How many "French-American" groups do we need on the form?

The problem does not end there. People who have emigrated from Africa to the USA have told me that they do not feel "African-American" or even understand African-American culture, cuisine, linguistics, etc. Does that mean we need to split the form to contain "African-American" and "African-African" options? "Africa" isn't homogeneous - does someone from Ethiopia living in one of Washington DC's ethnic Ethiopian neighborhoods feel the same way about where the widget industry is going as a Congolese engineering student attending Texas A&M? If so, what does that even mean? What would you do with such data? What about that Moroccan chef in Miami? Is he even "African" at all, or is he Arab? What is Arab anyway? If he claims to be neither African nor Arab, but a member of the "Happy Fun Rainbow People", do we accept that at face value or do we require him to provide evidence of cultural rituals, a documented history, etc.?

The reality is that the sort of data gathered by the form above has little meaning. Why was it even selected? What do you hope to gain from it? If the answer is "We don't know" or "Everyone else was using this survey question, so we did too", then you have your answer right there - there's no point to it. If you gather garbage data then your results will naturally be garbage.

I am an Australian of British descent, and I would not answer a question that required me to identify as White. I used Other rather than tick the first checkbox.

I see many US Census records and have never understood why the colour of a person's skin should be asked.

I fail to see any reason why profiling questions are included.

The purpose (we were told) of "the loop" is to tell SE what we think. The ethnic or economic status or sex of people telling them this should not matter.

The obvious question then is will SE Inc ignore or give different weight to opinions of different ethic, economic, social or geopolitical groups?

I'd have to assume "yes" would be the answer or there would be no purpose in them asking at all.

What has this ...

We’re going to be sharing our product development process with you, from feedback loops to timelines. We’ll be doing so through our new series – The Loop. You can give us your thoughts on what you’d like to see us do by filling out this survey: Through the Loop

... got to do with gathering profiling information on who answers?

This seems quite at odds with all the high words we hear from SE Inc about openness and anti-discrimination.

Is this another in the series of "accidents" SE Inc management seem so prone to having, or is it simply more evidence of hypocrisy?

The very last thing that should be happening is a process that lets managements at SE gather information that could bias the inclusiveness of opinions expressed.

This is the opposite of open and transparent.

Let me talk for a minute about the problem of being "other". It seems like such a neutral word, doesn't it? "I happen to not fit into those above categories, no harm done". When you're the "other" once, it's no harm done. But listen to me as someone who for 2000 years has been the "other", and suffered for being the "other".

When monotheism was still this newfangled thing, we were the "other". The Greeks came in with their surveys of what we call our sun-god and war-god and so on, like they did in any place they conquered, and we marked "other" on their papers, and had idols installed in our Temple, and were executed for refusing to bow to it.

When Christianity and Islam came by, we were the "other". Come the crusaders, the Inquisition, the Farhud, forced conversions, 1492 - exiled from Spain, 1650s - massacred in Ukraine. On the map of the Old World, there isn't a single place where we haven't been exiled from at least once.

Come Enlightenment, and scientific theories, religion is no longer important. Now we talk of race. And again we are the "other". It doesn't matter if for the past few centuries we lived in Europe or Asia or Africa. It doesn't matter if our skin is pale or brown or dark. It doesn't matter what god we worship, or if we worship any god at all. A drop of our blood is a contaminant unto the third generation. We are a race of our own, the "other" race. I'm not even sure what "race" is, seems like utter pseudo-science to me, but sure enough this pseudo-science was twisted to make us a special and distinct "other".

We are always the "other", the one that isn't recognised, the one that has no right to be. Make no mistake - "other" means "we don't know what you are", and from there it's one easy step to "we don't recognise you", "we do not accept you". In surveys, "other" usually equals "the ones we don't care about, so we threw them into one big box".

There are other "other"s among us - other groups who struggle for recognition, for rights, for whatever. The way we welcome others is we don't try to fit them into neat little boxes devised by someone who thinks he knows better. If for some reason SE wants to know about our nationality or ethnicity, or some other demographic, they can make it an open question. Don't tell us where we "should" belong - let us tell you where we do belong.

And for the love of everything you hold dear, don't use the word "race". That thing is abhorrent to the core.

As this whole situation recently (since the CoC update) has shown, they aren't just Americacentric, they are Silicon-Vallycentric. As James Damore pointed out, this type of thinking isn't specific to SO.

The staff have to remember that not only do ~50% of people in their own country not have the same political/social views as them, this gap is likely to widen when you consider their global reach.

SO currently wants maximum diversity, so long as you agree with their definition of diversity. Diversity of thought is not welcome in the People's Democratic Republic of Stack Overflow (PDRSO, which I now refer to it by to reflect their blatant suppression of any dissenting thought and opinion).

This is now the list.

This is a bit better, but I cannot answer the question neither as I am from Spain; I am both hispanic and european descent.

Hispanic

The term Hispanic (Spanish: hispano or hispánico) refers to the people that originate from, or reside, in Hispanic America, or from Spain. Hispanic, Wikipedia

Also I know you call southamericans latins, but truely French, Spanish, Italian, Rumanian and Portugues languages are latin, so this list may have sense in US, but not in Europe.

I don't have any trouble of sharing my personal data for statics with the community that helped me on programing learning proccess freely, but if you are going to classify us, classify us well. Big Data only works if data is correct, if not it is a waste of time.

Edit I want to add this list is unfair with arabian people. There is not an option for arabians while arabians contributed to development of mathematics, the basis behind code.

In fact, in my own country, racist questions like this are one of the biggest taboos.

Yes it seems like the height of rudeness to me -- species, gender, nationality, marital status, and age, are all "protected" classifications.

You might forgive it in a government census, possibly not though.

Somebody's place of birth even is something a friend might tell you -- and it's warm, or very uncool, to ask.

You might as well make allowances for American sensibilities too, though -- if 'they' are at home with that kind of bureaucracy then, live and let live -- it's not like everybody is obliged to take part in it I guess.

Part of my objection I suppose it's that it's such a horrific question that it could bias the rest of the survey -- whatever else they're trying to ask will only be answered by people who are willing to answer that -- which (bias) makes the survey worthless IMO but then I'm not the person asking and I don't know why they are asking, maybe it helps someone to "check some boxes" somewhere.