Should we focus on interracial marriages in our families to give wikitree a more diverse tree?

Question

Most people are related somehow to someone of a different race. Would focusing on these branches of the family help connect more people to our Global Family Tree?

Comments

And here I thought we were all the same race; the human race. Are you proposing that we set up categories for races, so we can categorize people according to their race?! I add people according to whom they are related to; fathers, mothers, children, etc.

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I agree, J.  we are all the human race, the only race recognized by anthopoligists.

I believe our tree will come together across oceans, cultures, continents and years by natural growth; not by corrective pruning and trellising.

Answer 1

Hi Sharon! Thanks for your question, which anticipates the announcement, slightly delayed due to the Global Family Reunion last weekend, of our new Diversity project. You can learn more about the project at http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Project:Notables_Diversity. On our project page, we state: "Our primary goal in creating a project that focuses on diversity is to add notable figures from diverse backgrounds. We hope to ensure that individuals from all groups, and especially those who are often neglected in historical overviews, are included in the profiles that jointly make up our one world tree." We would love to have you join us in this goal.

Comments

Looks like a good way to introduce folks from other cultures, races, etc. by adding notables. Then we can look for all their non-notable relatives!

What kind of Notables do you want? Mayors of obscure villages? Chiefs of obscure tribes? Famous people like Ghandi, Desmond Tutu, and Che Gavera? Civil Rights activists? Ghingis Khan?

Sounds like a fun project!

Sharon

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Looks like a good way to introduce folks from other cultures, races, etc. by adding notables. Then we can look for all their non-notable relatives!

Exactly! We want to encourage folks to remember that our family includes everyone, of every background. We also want to have the most inclusive "cousin bait" possible. Let's make sure that genealogy continues to expand and that WikiTree is seen as a place that welcomes all our family members.

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Answer 2

I'm sorry, Sharon, but I must respectfully disagree.  That smaks of an affirmative action program to me, which is a concept I have always felt is very wrong.

It seems to me that affirmative action is an attempt to right a previous wrong by mandating the exercise of prejudice in the reverse direction from the past infliction of prejudice.  That is the equivalent of saying that two wrongs make a right!  I speak as a victim of sex discrimiation in employment.  Believe me, I know very well what prejudice feels like.  When the tide finally started to be pushed back, the last thing I wanted was to receive any benefit from affirmative action.  I found the idea that I might have my job because my employer needed a certain percentage of femal employess very degrading.  I much preferred to know that I had my job because I was competent to perform it.

Personally, I don't care if someone is white, black, purple, green, or polka dotted - everyone is something and the bottom line is that we are all people.  I am white, but happen to have a grandchild who is half black and two great-grandchildren who are 3/4 black.  My interest in my family is the same for all members.  If I have any focus, it is on those for whom it is easier for me to find out information, regardless of personal attributes of any type.

Comments

I never liked Affirmative Action either, because i wanted better jobs as school teacher/librarian, when they already had enough white females.

But if we are going to put everyone who ever lived on wikitree, how are we going to connect those of other races?

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Maybe I'm not understanding, Sharon, but it seems that we'll connect those of other races in whatever ways they actually connect, since we all seem to agree that if we go far enough back, we are all connected.  By the way, what exactly is "other races"? Are we pre-supposing that all WikiTree members are of the same race?????

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Good heavens Sharon, of course we'll connect with other races. And I'ld like to know your definition of race. We aren't all the same race here by any means.

Answer 3

Gosh, I cannot even imagine thinking about how to go about what you are asking me to do...I don't think about my family as different races, albeit I have asked for help with ancestors from other countries.

Answer 4

If your thought is including a notation re race in the hopes of making those of a particular race more comfortable on WikiTree or to increase the membership of a particular race, I would say no unless the individuals choose to add a comment in their own bio about themselves.

I try not to ask a WikiTreer's nationality or religion. I would certainly never ask their sexual preference, if they have a medical disability, if their parents were married, or what race or age they are.  These are things that are none of my business. To forget that is to pry and possibly hurt or annoy a WikiTree cousin.

If someone wants to share these personal details about themselves, they certainly can in their bio, but we need to be very careful not to post information about our relatives or ancestors that they would not want posted or have not posted themselves. 

Answer 5

If some researchers want to focus on adding relatives from communities that have been traditionally underrepresented in genealogy in their area, I think that will certainly connect more people to our global family tree.

If a friend responds to our enthusiasm by saying "genealogy is only for X kind of people," we can show them the great work being done on WikiTree in the Y project. It's great that we have so many members with a diverse set of interests.

We can see that it is still easier to connect a new member to the 6.7 million connected WikiTree profiles by looking for their connection to colonial New England or Quėbec. And some of us do occasionally joke about making marriages into remote communities for the explicit purpose of growing the tree into new areas. For each of us a different place sounds exotic and foreign, and by all of us working to grow our tree I believe we are creating global ties.

Comments

Nicely said, Karen.

Answer 6

I choose to believe that Sharon has very good intentions behind her question. And oh, gee, Wikitree's honor code recommends we all choose to believe she has good intentions.

Sharon, if you'd like to improve the diversity of profiles, and attract a more diverse demographic to wikitree, and you have such diversity in your family, but all means, add those profiles. 

What I'm hearing from other responses here, though, is a concern about how you do it.  You didn't mention categories in your original post, but I know you love categories, and perhaps others here do too (know that you love categories). I'm hearing that the use of categories for drawing attention to mixed-race connections or even to the race of someone profiled is not considered appropriate. I'd agree.

Did you have other ideas about improving the diversity of wikitree?

 

Comments

I was not talking about categories. But I did see some press about Wikitree being run by whilte people. I happen to be white, but I wonder if folks who do not consider themselves white feel left out.

Sometimes as a German-Irish American married to an Italian-Slovak-American, I feel left out when the best way to connect to the Global Tree is through English or Quebec ancestors, which I do not have in our direct lines.

I think the question is how can we be more inclusive, not how can we label people.

Instead of concentrating on cousins who married English people, I have spent a lot of time trying to add my remote rural farmers from obscure little villages in Europe. I want their genealogy to be remembered as much as that of the royal houses of Europe.

So maybe it all boils down to how we define the Global Family Tree. Do we really want everyone that ever lived since the Year One? Do we want to make genealogy a hobby so broad it includes people of all creeds and colors? Is my new friend from Africa my cousin? I hope so. Are those killed inthe Nepal earthquakes or the Malasian plane crashes or the Boer War or the Crusades my cousins? If we are truly all one family, one race, then the answer is YES!

Then the question becomes, how do we find them?

Sharon

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Sharon, as an example of how to respond when encountering statements about any group following a stereotype I think of this.

I am an Amateur Radio operator and that group is generaly thought of as a bunch of "Old White Men", which would fit me, but I know that at the World Trade Center Disaster on 9/11 there was a newly licensed 8 year old Girl passing emergency communications for many hours so stereotyps don't apply anymore.

Answer 7

While researching relatives sometimes we only have a neme to go by.  Along that line I have found graves with names that I am researching and on doing further research I found that they could not be the one that I was looking for and were even a "different race".  I still created profiles for the family and added as much as I had discovered in hopes that others may someday find the information useful but I have never even thought about stating their "race" anywhere on the profile because we are all human.

Answer 8

I am going to change my answer a bit.  

I still think it is important to honor an individual's self-identification.  But if you have a source for the information such as a census record that identifies an individual's color, then I think you can safely enter the information as obtained from the census sheet (i.e. color that they hopefully accept/ed as true about themselves):  http://www.ancestry.com/wiki/index.php?title=1870_U.S._Census#Comparison_of_Census_Information.2C_1790-1940  

I would not enter great-grandma's claim that her grandfather was Cherokee without some documentation source to support her claim. I would not assume that my sister-in-law's kids were Latino just because their surname is Gonzales. I think there has to be some documented source to identify how our ancestors self-identified before it is added to a profile. 

Answer 9

It seems like a lot of folks have weighed in here...but I wanted to add an additional thought.

We are often faced with the difficulty of adding folks based on documentation. We must, afterall, ensure that we are able to prove with references the names and associated details of folks to wikitree.

This leads to the dilema...what of all the folks that are not documented, or that have no surviving documentation. Case in point, my wife's paternal side includes immigrants from China. It is IMPOSSIBLE to find documentation of her branch from there. That is what many of our diverse and sometimes local ancestors will face as barriers to being connected to the tree.

Regardless of race, we should do our best to connect those we can to help grow our shared tree.

Comments

BINGO! This is the problem with us super-duty 'mixed' folk... especially for those of us with *tribal* relations. The written record is biased towards certain cultures, so genealogy in the 'traditional record sourcing' sense tends to ban those with a heavy blood line of oral tradition... Which makes me very glad for DNA, but again... it's too early in the game, and it seems to be biased towards the US .... since it's the US who has proven (with numbers) that they are the ones who are crazy for genealogy.