RE: [huml-comment] Request for a motion on PC-33 -Section 4.4.6-r ace

["Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@ingr.com>]

Title: Message

It is a label or sign often used in databases and other communicative

forms.

 

It might be assigned or self-selected.   It might involve choosing one

member of the codelist or several.  That is, it could be defined by

extension or intension.

 

HumanML can provide contexts that inform such selections but race

itself is not a primary context or category.

 

Your example, "the black experience living in America", requires a

location, a temporal descriptor, a set of observable or self-selected

characteristics, and a set of episodic descriptions or prototypes

to illustrate "experience".   Such a set would properly be a book,

an article, a communication but not a primary type.

 

len

From: Ranjeeth Kumar Thunga [mailto:rkthunga@interposting.com]

I am casting my own vote to yes, remove the term "race" from physicalDescriptor--based on the posts, it really isn't a specific description of a physical characteristic, but the result of a derivation of other characteristics.  It certainly has predefined codelists in existence, but there isn't a universally accepted definition, so it might as well be best be derived from the primary, which would obligate it to be explicitly defined.

 

It feel it think it does belong in the PBS however, which is why I hesitated.  However, that doesn't mean that race is also a primary, primordial, fundamental personal identity we would like to often communicate.  It isn't necessary a cultural characteristic, but a means of personal identity that is at the core of how many of us define ourselves.  To be able to communicate or embody the "black experience living in America" for example really is experience not about culture or any specific physical description, but something transcendent.  In the ideal world, possibly we wouldn't define our core self based on our race, but that is how we communicate, and a concept we would want to communicate, now.