[notahacker]

I think "this is the weird phenotype/culture hybrid people treat this person and their family as" is a less backward approach than "here's some pseudoscience to try to disprove that Jews and Aryan ubermenschen are of intermixed ancestry and actually pretty difficult to distinguish physiologically [at least without looking for specific genetic markers we fortunately haven't the technology to identify]", even before we get onto the why is this being looked into question.

Conceding a socially significant category isn't actually very analytically rigorous and might as well be treated as just a label shows more thoughtfulness than inventing a lot of nonsense to try to give it the appearance of rigour.

[wongarsu]

If you describe it like that it sounds like a classical descriptivism vs prescriptivism argument. Nazi Germany leaned hard into prescriptivism, trying to have hard rules for everything, while the US goes with a descriptivism "whatever the people call it is right".

But that sounds fundamentally incompatible with having a fixed list of categories, with that approach surely it would have to be a free text field (or at least a couple categories, along with either a text field or an "other" category, like with gender nowadays)

[notahacker]

> But that sounds fundamentally incompatible with having a fixed list of categories, with that approach surely it would have to be a free text field (or at least a couple categories, along with either a text field or an "other" category, like with gender nowadays

I agree, but generally it is, in my experience, as well as almost invariably being completely optional.