The race-ethnicity confusion

Definitions of race and/or ethnicity are spectacularly confused and lack any kind of precision whatsoever.

The FDA in its guidance, for example, make a distinction between race and ethnicity, but allow them to be combined in a one step self declaration.

Race refers to 5 categories:
American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, Black or African American, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, White
Ethnicity has 2 categories, either Hispanic/Latino or not Hispanic/Latino

Such definitions do not have any scientific logic and were actually developed by the Office of Manpower and Budget.

The major problem for us is that because this guidance is used by pharmaceutical companies in drug development studies, we cannot hope to have any meaningful ethnicity data that we can use. The only data are those lumped under a generic "Asian" umbrella, which essentially denies the vast ethnic diversity in our communities.

Singapore is not any wiser and contributes to the confusion by ambiguously mixing ideas of race, ethnicity and even language into the definition. We identify 4 major categories from census definitions: Chinese, Malay, Indians and Others. The categories of Chinese, Malays and Indians are defined using fairly circuitous logic about origins which also incorporates language/dialectual characteristics. To make matters worse, race/ethnicity based medical studies often rely heavily on hospital records which for citizens are almost entirely based on recorded information from the National Registration Identification Cards. The information here do not use the same definitions as the census, but are almost completely self declarations according to self perceptions.