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by skissane 1607 days ago
In Australia, I've never seen a government form asking your race. They'll ask questions about country of birth, language spoken at home, indigenous status, etc – but none of those map exactly to "race" as that concept is understood in the US.

Here, the government, media, etc, generally prefer to refer to people using fine-grained ethnicity/nationality terms, not in terms of coarse racial categories.

1 comments

> In Australia, I've never seen a government form asking your race. They'll ask questions about country of birth, language spoken at home, indigenous status, etc – but none of those map exactly to "race" as that concept is understood in the US.

That's because a majority of Australians are one generation or less removed from being immigrants. It's rather hard to sell the idea of a united white/brown/yellow/black race to people whose grandparents won't talk to each other because of the last genocide.