Demographics Dilemma
You know, I really, really hate it when some form asks me to describe my kids' ethnicity.
Today I filled out J's kindergarten application. It has to be in by next Friday, and since the state of AZ requires specific demographic information so that they can constantly complain about how under served the minorities are in this state, I have to answer this question. And I can only choose one answer.
So are my kids black or are they white? According to old racial standards, one drop of black blood makes you black, but that's not exactly the case now. I found some newer standards from Social Security that said that the race of the child is the same as the race of the mother. That would make my kids white, but then again, that would mean that we really didn't just elect the first black president, because Obama's mother was white, wasn't she? (On a side note, just consider the silliness of Obama being identified so firmly as "African-American." If Terence had left me when J was two, and J had spent nearly all of his childhood being raised by me and my very white parents, and later some time with an Indonesian stepfather, how "African-American" do you think he would be?)
Most benevolent bureaucracies let me bypass the whole dilemma by choosing as many races for my kids as I please. Not the school, unfortunately.
My kids don't consider themselves one race or the other. M, when asked to describe herself, will say she's light brown, lighter than Daddy and darker than J or Mommy. You think they'll let me choose "light brown" as an ethnicity?
Today I filled out J's kindergarten application. It has to be in by next Friday, and since the state of AZ requires specific demographic information so that they can constantly complain about how under served the minorities are in this state, I have to answer this question. And I can only choose one answer.
So are my kids black or are they white? According to old racial standards, one drop of black blood makes you black, but that's not exactly the case now. I found some newer standards from Social Security that said that the race of the child is the same as the race of the mother. That would make my kids white, but then again, that would mean that we really didn't just elect the first black president, because Obama's mother was white, wasn't she? (On a side note, just consider the silliness of Obama being identified so firmly as "African-American." If Terence had left me when J was two, and J had spent nearly all of his childhood being raised by me and my very white parents, and later some time with an Indonesian stepfather, how "African-American" do you think he would be?)
Most benevolent bureaucracies let me bypass the whole dilemma by choosing as many races for my kids as I please. Not the school, unfortunately.
My kids don't consider themselves one race or the other. M, when asked to describe herself, will say she's light brown, lighter than Daddy and darker than J or Mommy. You think they'll let me choose "light brown" as an ethnicity?
Comments
Hahaha!