Science, minorities, and science-blogging.

I'm an avid reader of some of the blogs over at Scienceblogs.com. Recently, there was a "much ado about nothing" when some anonymous person with way too much time on their hands went through all the Scienceblogs, copied out the posted photo of the blogger(s), and created a webpage showing how "Aryan" Scienceblogs is. (At least this guy didn't look at the German Scienceblogs! The petty-minded little bigot wouldn't know what to do!)

Anyway, the funniest thing was that he (I'm assuming that it's a 'he') put Scienceblogger 'Razib' in the category of Caucasian, in amongst the white people. If the guy had read Razib's blog for any amount of time, he would have thought twice about putting him in with a bunch of whities. Anyway, Razib's changed his blog photo, so that he (Razib) is no longer hiding behind his cat.

He's also written about how this whole thing is rather stupid - especially when it comes to the topic of Asians in science, pointing out that in some disciplines, Asians outnumber whites:

I assume you're not surprised?

1) There's a big difference between "Asians" and "Underrepresented minorities."

2) In most cases Asians are more overrepresented than whites. In fact, there are so many Asians in Electrical Engineering that whites are a touch underrepresented!

3) I perceive two general dimensions in the Asian data. First, one of practicality, and second, another of mathematical rigor. The more "practical" a field is, the more likely Asians are likely to be represented. Therefore, more in engineering than in physics. How many physicists do you know who went into engineering related work when the academy didn't pan out? For many of them a undergraduate engineering degree would have been the most optimal choice in terms of their career with hindsight. Second, the math aspect explains something like economics vs. the other social sciences. I know that political science, sociological and psychology use plenty of statistics, but econ can verge into applied math when it comes to the obsession with modeling.

What I want to know, however, is how are Hapa included in the above categories? Are we "underrepresented minorities" or are we lumped in together with our "non-White" ancestry? The other thing I want to know is why is this even an issue? I mean this in three ways:

1. This shouldn't be an issue because we - as a nation - should be moving away from categorizations based on the stupid social notions of 'race'. Being a "half-breed mutt" myself, I would hope that these silly notions would just disappear, but until they do, I'm stuck in limbo-land whenever dealing with people who cannot pigeon-hole me into the "correct" racial group. (Those arseholes.)
   
2. Among United States citizen scientists (see, I'm not including immigrant scientists who - by definition - aren't considered "minorities," since they aren't citizens), the majority of scientists are White. Therefore it's stupid to think that more than a minority of sciencebloggers should be non-White. Of course, if the site were called "Electrical Engineering Blogs," one would expect to see more Asians than Whites - and there would be decent (but weak) reasons for an outcry.
   
3. So long as Scienceblogs doesn't have a racial policy; advocate for one; show favoritism for one type of "race" over another; or hire a Scienceblogger that promotes the racial superiority of one race of scientists over another (without good scientific evidence to back up his or her claim), the question of the racial make-up of Sciencebloggers shouldn't even be one for consideration.