Consensus forms and the Equal Opportunities section of any application form ask for anonymous and confidential information, requiring one to define their identity in two main ways. This is purely for statistical information. I find both methods of identification problematic, mainly because of the use of certain labels. For example, the first method is to ask one to define their ‘Gender’, offering the option of ticking ‘Male’, ‘Female’, or ‘No Answer.’ Do you spot the problem? The question blurs the distinction between Sex and Gender. Although it is easy to confuse the two labels, they are in fact different. The World Health Organization offers useful definitions for these terms:

“Sex” refers to the biological and physiological characteristics that define men and women.
“Gender” refers to the socially constructed roles, behaviours, activities, and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for men and women.

When Equal Opportunities or Census forms ask a question about ‘Gender’ but offer answers about ‘Sex’, they are guilty of converging the two terms and jeopardising one’s freedom to express their identity. It suggests that those belonging to the ‘Sex’ category of ‘Male’ must necessarily act in accordance with the social expectations associated with the ‘Gender’ category of ‘Masculine’. Of course, the same problem applies to the usual equation of ‘Female’ and ‘Feminine.’ These questionnaires enforce the pervasiveness of gender characteristics, allowing sexual inequality to remain embedded in our society. With this in mind, can anyone really blame YUSU for the recent fiasco concerning the pink and blue bags offered at Freshers’ Fair?
Moving on to a second way of identifying oneself on Consensus forms: the categories of ‘Ethnic Groups’. On a recent application form I filled out, the categories were adapted from the 2001 Census, and I was asked to select ONE category only. Each category also had respective sub-categories. Allow me to go through them for you.

WHITE *British *Irish *Other
MIXED * White and Black Caribbean *White and Black African
*White and Asian *Any other Mixed background
ASIAN OR ASIAN BRITISH *Indian *Pakistani *Bangladeshi *Any other Asian background
BLACK OR BLACK BRITISH *Caribbean *African
*Any other Black background
CHINESE OR OTHER ETHNIC GROUP *Chinese
*Any other ethnic group
*No Answer

It is probably most useful to firstly define the term ‘ethnic group’. An Encyclopaedia Britannica article describes it as:
‘a social group or category of the population that, in a larger society, is set apart and bound together by common ties of race, language, nationality, or culture’.
The categories offered seek to place people in boxes where their position in society can be easily understood. This must surely be their only use. Are these categories still useful today? Have they ever been truly useful in describing a person’s identity? Well, to answer the second question first, yes they have. When looking back to the bygone ‘glorious’ days of the British Empire, ethnic categorization was a necessary instrument in securing the superiority of white Brits over the colonized people in Africa and India. Indeed, ethnicity and race are two terms that are often used interchangeably, and for that reason, I shall provide a definition of ‘Race’ from the website of the Understanding Race Organization:

The term is used to refer to groupings of people according to common origin or background and associated with perceived biological markers. Among humans there are no races except the human race. […] Ideas about race are culturally and socially transmitted and form the basis of racism, racial classification and often complex racial identities.

By adding cultural dimensions to ethnicity, the British Empire was able to perpetuate the myth that Britain was everything that these ethnic groups were not. In contemporary literature about colonized people, Indians and Africans were often portrayed as stupid, slothful, savage, and unhygienic. By contrast, Britons were intelligent, diligent, and civilized. An ‘us’ versus ‘them’ dichotomy was created; Englishness was played off against ‘Other-ness’. The establishment of this myth formed the backbone of the logic of imperialism; one, that white Brits had the right to rule over other inferior races, (an idea informed by the logic of Social Darwinism); and two, that white Brits had a duty to care for these inferior races supposedly in possession of minds no more developed than that of a white British child. Ignoring the illegitimate nature of these generalizations, and the fact that they also glossed over internal divisions such as class, I suppose we could say that the category of ‘Ethnic Groups’ has been useful in the past, though whether its usage was praiseworthy or not is a matter for another article.

To answer the first question, it really must depend on how people identify themselves. Do people describe themselves by their ethnic group? Possibly. It is quite feasible that some people feel comfortable in an easily understood category, and, at the same time, feel a sense of belonging with other members who identify themselves in the same way. The idea of nationality is also bound up with this. However, if you concur with the views of Benedict Anderson as set out in Imagined Communities, you will regard the nation as a culturally and socially constructed entity, rather than a fixed body.

It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.
Yet again, we see that the categories of ‘Ethnicity’, ‘Nationality’, and ‘Race’ are all far too simplistic, despite the fact that we take them for granted as being legitimate sources of identity. What happens when these ideas are complicated? What happens when one person belongs to more than one ethnic group? Looking back to the example of the British Empire, children with white fathers and colonized mothers were often discarded by society. By straddling both sides of the colonial divide, children of mixed heritage presented a difficulty to the dichotomy of the superior colonizer and inferior colonized. By blurring this boundary, such children demonstrated that representations of ethnic groups were simplistic and socially constructed, not natural and given.

How then, do people of mixed heritage describe themselves? I have no authority to suggest anything other than my own personal experiences, and this is what I humbly offer to you. My mother would ethnically be classified as Chinese. However, she was born and raised in Malaysia. My father would ethnically be classified as Indian, although he was brought up in Kenya, and eventually became a British citizen. I was born and raised in England. In my life, the categories of ‘Ethnicity’, ‘Race’ and ‘Nationality’ all seem to contradict each other when I try to identify myself using these terms. My passport states my nationality as British. I suppose I am ethnically Indian-Chinese, Indianese or, my personal favourite, Chindian. I often must neglect my traces to Malaysia and Kenya. On consensus forms, the categories offered do not allow me to be placed in a box, as I am such an extreme case. No, wait, I’m wrong. There is the category of Mixed Other, which groups all the anomalies together. Simply put, that is how this category makes me feel. An anomaly, a social error, an ‘Other’ with all the connotations that existed during the age of Empire. It is for this reason that I do not identify myself using these terms. I do not really identify myself as anything; the categories that are used in society do not allow me to, and this is my point.

The terms and categories used in social discourse are often simplistic, and their legitimacy is taken for granted. Because of this, I must resign myself to ticking the boxes of ‘Mixed Other’, or ‘No Answer’. Either way, neither describes who I am.