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A Colorful Case for Outside-the-Box Thinking on Identity | Olivia Vinckier | TED

Have you ever been forced to limit your identity to a single box on an application, survey or census questionnaire? For many, it is a futile and overall outdated exercise, especially for those with multiracial and multi-ethnic backgrounds. Olivia Vinckier makes the case for recognizing and accepting, rather than limiting, the growing reality that identity…

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Have you ever been forced to limit your identity to a single box on an application, survey or census questionnaire? For many, it is a futile and overall outdated exercise, especially for those with multiracial and multi-ethnic backgrounds. Olivia Vinckier makes the case for recognizing and accepting, rather than limiting, the growing reality that identity is multifaceted, ever-expanding — and more colorful than you think.

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50 Comments

50 Comments

  1. Recks

    December 15, 2022 at 2:26 pm

    Most of the time they ask because they want to target your culture for marketing purposes

  2. Creators Child

    December 15, 2022 at 2:28 pm

    Racism only exists because people like this like to promote “different races”…… well… I’m from the Human “race”…….. how about you?
    We are all brothers & sisters in Christ ❣️

  3. Walt Anthony

    December 15, 2022 at 2:32 pm

    this application doesn’t have a box that fits my multiracial lineage ….. woe is me

    congrats, on all the issues of race and identity, you found the least important one to complain about

  4. Rick Lambert

    December 15, 2022 at 2:35 pm

    I’m a mixed breed, I check all the boxes that apply, no matter if the instructions say I can only check one. I’m not here to be boxed.

  5. Saran Bhatia

    December 15, 2022 at 2:39 pm

    👍

  6. Brett

    December 15, 2022 at 2:46 pm

    For people that need to feel different, like her, let them put percentages of each race, next to each box, they check.

  7. HezekiYah Huckaby

    December 15, 2022 at 3:02 pm

    smh this required a whole Ted Talk?? geez this is so basic though.

  8. Ligia Sommers

    December 15, 2022 at 3:09 pm

    Beautiful 🙏🏻🌹✨🙏🏻

  9. THATMOFODIRT

    December 15, 2022 at 3:12 pm

    It’s as if we shouldn’t judge by skin color but by content of character.
    If only the people who always want to talk about color would actually do it instead of always having a conversation about it.

    • catherine melnyk

      December 15, 2022 at 3:31 pm

      I agree. To constantly bring up the topic of race, doesn’t that just reinforce the division? PS I liked your reference to Dr King’s I Have a Dream speech.

  10. Boomerino Kripperino

    December 15, 2022 at 3:23 pm

    The primary colors are red green blue, come on!

    • Grái Konungr

      December 15, 2022 at 6:04 pm

      No

    • Boomerino Kripperino

      December 16, 2022 at 6:29 am

      @Grái Konungr ahh you ingest a copious amount of copium as a side to your alternative facts main course?

    • Grái Konungr

      December 16, 2022 at 7:06 am

      @Boomerino Kripperino She told a story about drawing/painting her family, you uncultured moron. RYB is traditionally used when mixing paints. Edit: granted, I do understand she didn’t explicitly make that clear

    • joni jokunen

      December 16, 2022 at 11:28 am

      Only in the RGB color model, that’s based on how the human eye sees colors. However, there are many different models or systems with different primary colors, and you can’t say that one is more correct than another. It also matters whether the colors are produced by additive or subtractive mixing. For additive mixing, the primary colors are red, green and blue like you said, but for subtractive mixing they’re cyan, magenta and yellow.

    • Boomerino Kripperino

      December 17, 2022 at 7:26 am

      @joni jokunen now that’s education! Hallelujah!

  11. Brian McInnis

    December 15, 2022 at 5:54 pm

    1:28 Not social ones, no.

    • Mr Rod

      December 16, 2022 at 1:53 pm

      Obviously you didn’t listen to what she said

  12. Bo Duholm

    December 15, 2022 at 5:54 pm

    I love your friend who said, “You should not be defined by one of your colors.” what a great way of looking at the world.

  13. The Mighty Zim

    December 15, 2022 at 5:55 pm

    If your mom is Ashkenazi…you’re one of “God’s Chosen” according to supremacist ideologues.

  14. Brian McInnis

    December 15, 2022 at 5:57 pm

    1:43 Asian isn’t a race. It’s a continentality which includes numerous races, including white ones such as Russians.

    • Mr Universe

      December 16, 2022 at 1:17 pm

      Exactly

    • Mr Rod

      December 16, 2022 at 2:01 pm

      @Mr Universewhite isn’t a race either. The notion of using colour to identify race is a stupid American concept.

    • Mr Universe

      December 16, 2022 at 4:01 pm

      @Mr Rod please remind me when I said white was a race again?

  15. bj0rn

    December 15, 2022 at 6:22 pm

    Which box to tick? How to identify yourself? How to present yourself to others?
    Here’s an old radical idea: Be yourself and treat people as individuals.

  16. FrightBox

    December 15, 2022 at 6:29 pm

    You look like a Native American, like me. You’re an Amazing American 🎉❤

  17. bj0rn

    December 15, 2022 at 6:32 pm

    Here’s an old radical idea: Be yourself and expect others to treat you as an individual.

  18. bj0rn

    December 15, 2022 at 6:32 pm

    If boxes on forms is causing problems: remove the boxes.

  19. IronMongoose1

    December 15, 2022 at 6:34 pm

    I can see some positives to this idea, but it also risks making the way in which the information is processed in the back end more opaque or less reliable. Probably an open-ended question PLUS some more thoughtfully developed multiple-choice follow-ups is the best solution at this time.

  20. HIfoxyroxy

    December 15, 2022 at 7:33 pm

    Preach

  21. kodowdus

    December 15, 2022 at 8:40 pm

    The U.S. OMB mandated that all federally funded data collection instruments allow for persons to check more than one of five designated “race” categories back in 1997. (Pacific Islander became a separate “race” category in the process, but Middle Eastern/North African did not make the cut.) The problem is that this is ultimately a moving target since scientifically there”s no such thing as “race” (other than “human”) in the first place, so it would be even more productive to use words like “ancestry” or “ethnicity” when capturing people’s verbatim descriptions of their identity.

  22. Yuriy_Lux

    December 15, 2022 at 9:24 pm

    Is this coming out of Ohio? 😂

  23. crouton

    December 15, 2022 at 11:14 pm

    most mid ted talk i’ve ever heard

  24. debra walker

    December 15, 2022 at 11:58 pm

    I fit into 1 box, but DO I?????? I wonder why we still have the boxes at all. For medical reasons I can understand but for everything else why do we still submit to this ridiculous practice on everything from filling out a job application to opening a online account.

  25. Mojo

    December 16, 2022 at 12:37 am

    This ridiculous

  26. आदित्यAditya मेहेंदळेMehendale #BringBackDislikes

    December 16, 2022 at 2:25 am

    Wrong. If the census asked you “what is the size of your nose – small, medium, or large?”, You’d say “that is a BS question, that ought not to exist on a census-form” and would continue to not fill-in any answer. Not answering BS questions, and even calling them out, is a skill we direly need today.

  27. J Hughes

    December 16, 2022 at 4:41 am

    wupdidu.

  28. kk

    December 16, 2022 at 5:00 am

    I hate identity politics, it does nothing other than separate people and create conflict. We are all human and that should be enough

  29. RehanRC

    December 16, 2022 at 6:39 am

    Lol, Steve Jobs is an aesthetic.

  30. esstown

    December 16, 2022 at 6:54 am

    There’s far too much emphasis on gender and race nowadays – as if they’re the only things that identify us.

  31. Pravin Dahal

    December 16, 2022 at 9:14 am

    Westerners finally figured out that they as spiritual humans can choose to be anything, they can identify with anything… and what do they choose? Genders, sexual orientations and race. 🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️

  32. Andy Cordy

    December 16, 2022 at 12:46 pm

    A delightful presentation. Society still has much catching up to do. Sadly social systems take the path of least resistance towards managing statistics within categories. It is a natural process of our brains to group anything into categories to simplify our view. Perhaps this was excusable before the spread of computer data handling but the speed with which computers can process data means that there is room for diversity if only systems allow. As an ideal, I’d like to be in a category of one. I don’t want to be categorised with anyone else on the grounds of; race, which I regard as outmoded and unnecessary; age, gender, sexuality, partnership status, employment status.

  33. Jerry VanNuys

    December 17, 2022 at 7:06 am

    I’m not “White”, I am “European-American”.
    I was born in the United States but “White” does not represent my diverse European background of Swedish-German-Italian from my mother’s side and the German-Irish (with Native Arapaho) from my father’s side.

  34. Lieve Leysen

    December 17, 2022 at 8:05 am

    👏❤

  35. real Jx3

    December 18, 2022 at 3:48 am

    The US is extra extra weird, in all aspects not just race, but the world is not like that.
    And how is it ok for any organization to ask about race?
    The US forces people to be aware of their race but again, that’s not the world.

    The US also labels everything (from brands to musicians, from political ideologies to races) in a very drastic way And it might be because social status is everything in the US and these labels help quantify everything and place them in the hierarchy. Drop the labels, all of them. And certainly don’t make them more precise, more drastic, that’s extremely counterprpductive.

    Anyway, she should go study abroad and she should not care or be aware of her race, race is not relevant.

  36. Niranjan Hanasoge

    December 18, 2022 at 8:37 am

    So in America, they teach that green is _not_ a pure rainbow color? Weird! 🤔

  37. Monang

    December 18, 2022 at 2:49 pm

    B Human 👌

  38. Asch •

    December 19, 2022 at 1:35 am

    That was a 6 minutes of nothing burger about forms.

  39. Shimona Hirchberg

    December 19, 2022 at 11:14 am

    All Jews are indigenous to Judea, in SWANA. Some of us may have lighter skin than others, but we’re not white as an ancient ethnoreligious group (predating religion and race)

  40. JaMEFMEB

    December 19, 2022 at 1:15 pm

    box ticked: Human.

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