Here are the top 10 most comically ludicrous practices and statements in public health research, as exposed by the Critical Race Framework, ranked for their sheer absurdity.

What is Said (in the BRFSS survey): First, you are asked, "Which one or more of the following would you say is your race?" Then, if you pick more than one, you are immediately asked, "Which one of these groups would you say best represents your race?"
Why it's Ludicrous: This is a masterpiece of bureaucratic absurdity. The system first acknowledges that its categories are insufficient and that people are complex ("select all that apply"). It then immediately panics at the complexity it has just unleashed and forces you to cram yourself back into one of the original, insufficient boxes. It's the scientific equivalent of saying, "You are free to be anything you want! Now, pick one from this list of five options and pretend the first question never happened."

What is Said (by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget): "Black or African American – A person having origins in any of the Black racial groups of Africa."
Why it's Ludicrous: This is a dictionary definition written by M.C. Escher. It defines a word by using the word itself. What is a "Black racial group"? Presumably, one made up of Black people. It provides zero new information and has the intellectual rigor of a toddler explaining, "It's a car because it's a car." This is the official, government-sanctioned, scientific definition used for billions of dollars in funding and policy.

What is Said (in historical U.S. Census categories): Census takers were required to distinguish between "Black," "Mulatto" (one-half Black), "Quadroon" (one-quarter Black), and "Octoroon" (one-eighth Black).
Why it's Ludicrous: This is a government agency engaging in the kind of magical, pseudo-mathematical racism you'd expect from a fantasy novel's bizarre eugenics program. The idea that a census taker could, by looking at a person, accurately determine if their ancestry was 1/2, 1/4, or 1/8 "Black" is beyond absurd. It's a comically serious attempt to apply scientific-sounding precision to pure bigotry.

What is Said (on the 2020 U.S. Census form): The main race category is "Black or African American." Then, as an example of a possible "origin" you can write in under that same category, it lists "African American."
Why it's Ludicrous: "African American" cannot simultaneously be the category and an example within the category. It's a category that contains itself. This is a level of circular, self-referential nonsense that breaks the basic rules of logic, all on the country's most important demographic survey.

What is Said: "Race is one of the most common variables in public health surveillance and research. Yet, studies involving racial measures show poor conceptual clarity and inconsistent operational definitions."
Why it's Ludicrous: Imagine building thousands of houses with a tool you can't describe, don't know the purpose of, and that changes shape every time you pick it up. That is what this statement accuses the entire field of public health of doing. The sheer scale of using a variable so frequently while having absolutely no consistent definition for it is an act of collective scientific malpractice so vast it becomes comical.

What is Said: Researchers frequently "collapse the diverse analytic sample into White v. non-White."
Why it's Ludicrous: This practice is a festival of absurdity. It scientifically equates a Korean immigrant, a Nigerian doctor, a Peruvian farmer, and a Native American tribal leader into a single, monolithic blob of "non-White." It's a category whose only defining feature is what it's not. This is less a scientific variable and more a punchline about the crudeness of data analysis.

What is Said: A core principle of epidemiology is that factors studied as causes "cannot include fixed attributes such as race." Yet, the entire field of racial disparities research does exactly that.
Why it's Ludicrous: This is like a league of professional swimmers who all agree that the first rule of swimming is "Don't get wet." An entire sub-discipline of science is operating in direct, open violation of one of its own foundational principles, and has been for decades.

What is Said: Researchers use a "counterfactual framework" to analyze things like "the outcome distribution for Whites, had they been Black."
Why it's Ludicrous: This treats the vast, complex, historical, and lived experience of "race" as a simple toggle switch in a statistical program. The idea that you can scientifically model what would happen to one group if you just flipped their "race" variable—as if it were a light switch, with no other changes to history, culture, or context—is a level of simplification so extreme it becomes science fiction.

What is Said: The author critiques the unstated assumption that a "true value" for race exists, noting, "The statistician does not consider a third option: that a member’s true race is not the race she reports herself to be on any survey."
Why it's Ludicrous: Even as society acknowledges identity is fluid and personal, the statistical models being used are often built on a rigid, Platonic ideal of a "true race" that exists somewhere out in the ether, independent of what a person actually says. It's a ghost in the machine—a comically rigid assumption for a concept that is demonstrably unstable.

What is Said (describing the CARMeL tool): A potential conclusion a researcher can reach is, "Race is used as a sociopolitical construct with appropriate methods and no significant threats to internal or external validity."
Why it's Ludicrous: The idea that a study could use a variable as messy, undefined, unstable, and historically fraught as "race" and conclude that there are "no significant threats" to its validity is the height of wishful thinking. It's a scientifically laughable best-case scenario that the author presents as a genuine possibility in a competing framework, highlighting its lack of critical rigor.