We Need to Fill in the Blanks in our Social Identity Data

Everytime I see a stat like “25% of respondents are Black”, I see only one piece of a four-piece puzzle filled in. With only this piece, I don’t know how to use this information. I don’t know if it matches the category from my dataset, I don’t know if it reflects how I want to engage with the idea of “Black”, and most importantly I don’t know who is drawing these identity boxes and why.

When it comes to social identity data, these are the blanks that always need to be filled in:

Who defines the categories?
What categories are there?
Who makes the selection?
What was selected?

Let’s look at an example.

25% of students are Black.

Seems simple on the surface, but it’s got three major blanks to fill in. We know that 25% of students were identified as Black. Who made this selection?

25% of students self-identified as Black.

Ah, ok cool. So the students chose themselves. That seems like it’s putting the power into their hands, but what did they get to choose from? The options provided are just as important as the choice, if not much more so. They might have well-represented the preferred choice of the chooser or not. Every…