Quick Rant of The Day

(and quick cuz I'm trying to be productive... you know, applying for jobs and stuff like that.)

Racial Profiling
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I always try to answer either "Other" or "Mixed" when I apply to things, because as I say, I know who the fuck I am and I claim it all.

But lately, I've noticed a disturbing and extremely annoying trend.

  • Black - Not Hispanic/Latino
  • Latino - Not Black/White
  • Native American/Native Hawaiian
  • White
  • Asian/Pacific Islander
If you check off "Black - Not Hispanic" you can't check off anything else.

If you check off Hispanic, you can't check off Black.

And on some job application sites, you can't advance to the next page of the application if you don't check off a fucking race!

Do you know how many people I know who are Black/Hispanic? In particular I think of people from the Dominican Republic, who while there are a bunch who look "traditionally" stereotypically light-skinned Hispanic, New York in particular boasts a large "Morena" population. You know, folks that look like me. (Which is why I get spoken to in Spanish all the time.) And many many many people who's mom is one thing and pops is another. My friend from High School (traditionally "Black" but a real red-toned brother) married a Cuban. What the fuck are his kids?

What the hell is my kid???

Fuckers.

Shit like that really pisses me off.

It ties into the post I intend to write later on... which is, we are who we claim to be. Unless some motherf*cker (ie, the Government) pigeonholes you into a race simply because of the way you look.

Which is always the way it's been. You know one thing that might help stop racism??? Stop MAKING people choose!

I asked my mother recently what it says on her birth certificate--mine doesn't say a race. Because on previous censuses, her family was designated "Mulatto". But at some point that changed, and they became "black". Which is really freakin' funny, since they got lighter in lighter in hue...

Had to add somethin'
In case you don't understand, the reason this pisses me off is because you CAN'T be "Other". You can't be "Mixed". So my kid in particular is going to have a problem...

Comments

Ros said…
They could narrow it back down to two boxes, "automatically privileged" and "not". And for those of us who look like we're descended exclusively from one race -- it's not like most of us really know for sure. It's all about judging by appearance.
aint too many of them down in the dirty, they try to act and kick it with black folks in the south
Carrie said…
Local folks here don't fit into a category either. *Most* folks in Hawaii are Asian/White or Asian/Hawaiian/White. You literally cannot pick a box (just like your Sun), because you don't fit into one.

I can pick a box, which makes me the strange one where I live :-)
The Bear Maiden said…
Ros, you continually crack me up. All-Mi-T, I need to pay a visit down south to observe. "It seems a different world than where I come from" :) But I wonder if the lighter-skinned ones just fade into the Whitework, like my friend Jacqui intimated the other day (she's down your way, btw0>

And Carrie, wow. That must be very very strange... what do people out your way do about that? How do they feel, I wonder?
Carrie said…
I think most local folks here know that they don't fit into the Mainland categories (and a lot of the Mainland 'culture', for lack of a better term). I think most people with even a drop of Hawaiian blood pick Native Hawaiian, but I don't know what box the hapa haole locals pick. I should go take a survey of my coworkers :-)

I know that in the most recent US Census, you actually could pick more than one 'box' and it came out that Hawaii was the most racially diverse State in the US, because of all the intermingling. But AFAIK, that's the only form you can use to select multiple backgrounds.

Again, I completely agree with you that we're all Americans (or, 'West Coast Americans' vs. 'East Coast Americans' -- because there ARE cultural differences there) and that race is really a strange way to categorize people now.

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