Fitting into categories or falling between them? Rethinking ethnic classification

The collection of ethnic and racial statistics has become common in a growi ng number of institutional settings. Yet contemporary approaches to race an d ethnicity suggest that the very process of compelling people to assign th emselves to one of a small number of racial or ethnic 'boxes' is, at best, essentialist and, at worst, racist. This article will explore this problema tic terrain, and venture a pathway through it, with the aid of findings fro m a study of ethnic minority English and Welsh student teachers' attitudes to ethnic classification. The discussion comprises three parts. The first s ets out to provide a brief theoretical analysis of the genesis of ethnic mo nitoring within the modern state. It is concluded that,ethnic monitoring ma y usefully be regarded as a problematic necessity, a process that itself ne eds constant monitoring. With this agenda in place, we move on to assess th e implications of our findings on student teachers' attitudes to ethnic mon itoring, Their pointers for reform are discussed in the third and final sec tion of the paper, where the policy implications of research are outlined.