Ethnicities

There's an awful lot of racial/ethnic diversity around here. Three different stories about that.

At work, we do a lot of surveys, which involve asking people what ethnic/racial group they are. First, we ask if they are Hispanic or not. Then we ask them if they are: white, African-American, Asian, Pacific Islander, Native American, or Other.

All the Hispanics tick other. Because they don't know that they are supposed to tick white. Someone, somewhere decided that being Hispanic is an ethnic group, not a racial group (or maybe that's the other way around) and so Hispanic people are white. Which is all very politically correct, if only the Hispanic people knew that they were white. But they don't. None of them. They never tick white, they always tick other. I asked if we could add Hispanic as a category, but we can't.



A friend of Susanne lives a couple of miles from us, and was applying to get her offspring into a school, but not the nearby school. The LA Unified School District has a complicated system of points for deciding what school you get into, if you don't want to get into the default school. One of the things you can get points for is for being an ethnic (or racial?) minority. He gets extra points for this, because he's white.


The boys school is quite a different mixture of ethnicities (and a reasonable number of children have parents of different ethnicities). But in that stereotyped way, the boys are not very good at telling black people apart. So whenever we are out, they are constantly seeing their friends. They don't think it's strange that the only friends they see are the black ones.