Race is self-identified, self-determined, and subject to change

Question: What is "race"?
Position‹2 of 3›: Race is a social construct
Argument‹2 of 3›: Race is self-identified, self-determined, and subject to change

Race is a part of one's identity that only the individual has the full potential to discover, expand, and determine. As people transition through different phases of life, understand aspects of their culture, and develop new meanings of race, they can also identify their race differently.

The argument

The only way countries or institutions can gather statistics on race is for people to identify themselves racially. Census data and racial statistics are always based on self-identification. Sometimes, people do not know how to identify themselves on the census because the census categories do not contain a person's self-identification. People are free to identify with any racial group. A person can identify as different races throughout their lifetime. A person's self-identified race may change due to several reasons, such as learning more about their heritage or understanding race differently. Furthermore, other people cannot always identify another person's race. Many experience being identified by outsiders as a race that they themselves do not identify, such as acclaimed golfer Tiger Woods or Hispanic people of lighter complexions. Other racial minorities say people's perceptions of their race change as they move to different places. People's personal experiences with understanding their own race over time demonstrate that race is self-identified, self-determined, and subject to change.

Premises

[P1]All racial statistics rely on self-identification — census data is always based on how people identify themselves, and a person may identify as different races over their lifetime as they learn about their heritage or come to understand race differently. [P2] Outsiders cannot reliably identify another person's race either, as figures like Tiger Woods and lighter-complexioned Hispanic people are often perceived as races they do not claim, with those perceptions shifting from place to place. [C] Because race is self-identified, self-determined, and subject to change rather than a fixed biological fact, race is a social construct.

Counter-arguments

The argument's own second premise contradicts its first. If Tiger Woods is repeatedly classified by others as a race he does not claim, and if people report being read differently as they move between places, then race is not self-determined — it is also, and often decisively, ascribed. Those examples are among the strongest evidence that racial classification is imposed from outside, which is precisely why they undercut a thesis of self-determination. That matters because the imposed half is where the consequences live. Someone stopped by police, refused a tenancy or passed over for an interview is not classified by their own account of themselves. If race were genuinely self-determined and freely revisable, discrimination would be untrackable and largely unintelligible, since the perpetrator would have no category to act on — which is a conclusion the position defending social construction should not want. The census evidence also proves less than claimed. Self-identification is a methodological choice made because asking is more accurate and less intrusive than having enumerators assign categories; it reflects how the data is collected rather than what race is. Sex, religion, disability and occupation are all self-reported on the same forms without anyone concluding that they are therefore self-determined. The deeper problem is that this argument reaches the right position by the wrong route, and in doing so weakens it. Social construction is the claim that racial categories are made by societies — through law, history, and practices of classification — not that individuals make their own. Making it a matter of personal self-definition converts a structural claim into a voluntarist one, and the third position in this question, that race is a social reality with material consequences, is what the argument's own examples support.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P2] An individual's self-determination is not always valued or viable in all societies.