Drop Race & Ethnicity question from surveys?

[SachaG]

I'm thinking about dropping the race & ethnicity question from future surveys (with the possible exception of the State of Devs). There are a couple reasons to do so:

1. To this point I have never seen race or ethnicity be strongly correlated with any other variable except for age (non-white respondents skew younger than white respondents). While this insight is interesting, it's pretty stable so I'm not sure it's worth keeping the question survey after survey just to keep confirming it.
2. Unlike gender dynamics, which are consistent geographically, race dynamics are highly dependent on the country. For example, Latin developers may be a minority in the US, but they're the majority in South America. So drawing any conclusions about race in the context of an international survey seems potentially misleading.
3. Racial categories are always tough to establish and very subjective. There are dark-skinned Italians, white Mexicans, etc.

A better solution might be to augment or replace the race & ethnicity question with something along the lines of:

• Are you a racial minority in your country?
• Are you an immigrant in your country? (or ask for country of origin and current country)