I might have a bit of a Hippie Love Child gene running through my body.....a bit of a desire to be color blind. What difference should the color of my skin make? We are all the same, equal, brothers.
These two warring factions collide inside me, but quickly piece out that they both want the same thing: do not answer that question.
So I check "declines to answer" and feel better for it.
As aunt to two sets of "multi-racial" children, I definitely appreciate your feelings on this. When my sister was enrolling her children in Head Start, she asked the worker why that question was asked and was told that it was for "statistical reasons" and to be sure that all races were being served fairly in the program.
ReplyDeleteAs late as the nineties, there were a number of places--including the Head Start program--where if you left the question blank, I believe the interviewer was supposed to make his or her best judgment based on "visual cues." I'm not sure if that's still the case anywhere and it most certainly SHOULDN'T be.
Speaking of visual cues--I was chaperoning a field trip when my oldest son was in second grade and one of his classmates asked me if Son-One was American. I said yes and he said, "I could tell because he's white." There's one who was indoctrinated into the "human sorting" habit early.