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Is “Lee” a White, Black, or Asian Surname? Facebook Finds Out

By Jeff | Saturday, December 19, 2009 | View Comments



When you see the surname Lee, you don’t know the ethnicity of the person with that name.  Robert E., Spike, and Bruce – they are all Lees .   There is even a Facebook group called “My surname is Lee but I am not Asian.”  While we might not know the race behind the Lee name, Facebook has a pretty good idea.  In a recent note about diversity of its users, Facebook said that according to their statistics, about 50% of US Lees are Asian, while about 35% are white, and about 15% are black.   Compared to US Census statistics on the race of people with the last name Lee, a bigger proportion of US Facebook users named Lee are Asian, as are Asian-Americans in general on Facebook .  Facebook then uses such surname data to show that the diversity of its users is starting to approach that of the US in general, becoming proportionally less white and Asian.

That’s a lot of effort that Facebook is making to figure out the ethnicity of its users.  What will it do this data?   Some say that Facebook will use it for advertising and marketing purposes.  If they do, I hope that keep it relatively tasteful.   I’d rather not see ads for the “I love skin whiteners group” or for eyelid surgery.

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  • robert559
    Of course there are more Asian's named 'Lee'. 'Lee' could be the same surname from Mandarin as 'Li' or the Cantonese variant written out as 'Lee', or it could be the Korean surname 'Lee' which is completely different in it's native language and writting than the two Chinese variants. Therefore, you have 3 Asian variants of Lee, and only 1 non Asian variant which is shared by Blacks and Whites.

    So um, yeah. There are more Asians named Lee. No surprise. There would be even more if you counted people named 'Li' as that is exactly the same, just romanized differently.
  • I actually find the last graph on that Facebook blog post fascinating:

    "Since 2005, Asian/Pacific Islanders have been much more likely to be on Facebook than Whites, and that has remained so. While Hispanics were once 40 percent as likely as Whites to be on the site, this number has been steadily climbing since early 2007 and currently is at 80 percent. This graph also shows that Black users are now about as likely to be on the site as White users."

    In other words, stuff we already know. Now everyone can resume posting to each others Facebook walls.
  • terrilee2830
    My last name is Lee and I'm a caucasian female, of English, Irish, and German decent.
  • facebook. scary.
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