re: #132 Alouette

Am I the only one who gets a chill when I have to fill out a form and they insist I check a box labeled “White” for “Race”?

1. To me, “race”= “species”. My “race” is defined as “Human”, scientifically speaking.

2. If they’re talking about “ethnicity”, I’m a mixture of half the “ethnicities” in Europe, plus Native American. To fully describe my “ancestry” would take about a page and a half, not one little box. (Yes, I’m a mutt, and rather proud of that fact. We make the best dogs, you know. Arf.)

3. As for “complexion”, I’m between a khaki (dirt color- kahaki is Hindi for “dust”) and a sort of dirty pink. How that got called “white” I’ll never know. My definition of “white” is between Michael Moorcock’s Elric of Melnibone and the comic character, Lady Death. And I don’t look like either of them.

I think a lot of the obsession with “race”, on all sides, comes from the compulsion bureaucracies seem to have to categorize everything into neat little boxes. And sooner or later, people who don’t exercise common sense think that everything should be in neat, little boxes, and stacked up just one way, so to speak.

The trouble with this is, reality is never neat. Period.

cheers

eon