The Write-In Race
New census demands new categories
by Emil Guillermo

It happened again. My wife was coming back from enrolling my daughter in a new school. And she was livid. She was waving one of those forms they give you. And she was going amok. All it took was that one question, the one that asks about your child’s race. All you have to do is check the box.

Easier said than done. A simple question in a monochromatic era of the past, but we’re practically to the next century. Genes know no borders.

With all the mixing and criss-crossing, which box do you check, especially if you’re half-Asian and half-something else? And what if the “something else” has it’s own derivations?

There isn’t a box big enough for just my side of the family, let alone my wife’s. There aren’t enough boxes for the entire world.

U.S. Census officials like to put everyone in a little box: white, black, American Indian and Alaskan native, Asian and Pacific Islander, Hispanic or Spanish.

This, of course, is a threat to any interracial family harmony. Huge family arguments have erupted over whose side gets to designate the box on the form.

My daughter, for example, is half-Filipino. She’s also a quarter-Irish. A little bit of Scotch (not on the rocks). But trying to make the answer Census-ready is enough to put a marriage on the rocks.

“She’s Filipino,” I say to my wife proudly. “Mark the box.”

“No she’s not,” she says, a sudden stickler for accuracy and a new devotee of identity politics. “What about me?”

She was unconvinced that, with whites still a majority in the nation, we should give my daughter to the Filipinos to “help them out.” So we compromised. She got to mark down whatever she wanted -- just as long as she gave all three of our dogs a much needed bath.

But this is not the best way to settle this matter. Still, the dogs were, as they say, “so clean you could eat off them.” And the school district got its form.

And my daughter? My wife marked the box “other.”

Have you been gripped by similar negotiations?

Well, my friends, relief is on its way. Now these little dramas need not take place anytime some busy-body bureaucrat asks you to mark some damn box.

The Census Bureau has finally become sensitive to these family squabbles. Starting with the 2000 Census, for the first time, officials have created an unprecedented new category.

Welcome all those of “some other race.”

The Census folks have exploded the box, and given us some room to see if our descriptive power matches our procreative ingenuity.

The new Census form, unveiled in Los Angeles, will now allow people to write in their own ethnicity.

That’s right. Now you can write-in your ethnicity. Census 2000 is a totally different animal.

But this poses its own problems.

First, we’ll need an acronym for “some other race.” “SOR” raises a homonym that plays too much into the right-wing folks who denounce “grievance politics.” We shouldn’t be sore about anything, though we’ve waited a long time to be recognized.

I like the term “SOMOR,” as in “I really hated the choices the Census Bureau gave me, so here are SOMOR to consider.”

And this is a major problem. Consider the bureaucrats, wherever they are, back in their tiny offices, trying to read your chicken-scratched comments. This is like going from a multiple choice to an essay exam. As for my race, they better give me the better half of a page. Not a few lines.

I figure the Census folks hired a bunch of immigrants to count up the responses in Census sweatshops. Or they got some fancy new software to make sure all the answers are recorded properly. Whatever they did, it will still be a nightmare to count.

It’s estimated that there are 5 million people potentially affected by the multi-race change. Maybe more. That’s just it. We don’t know.

Some don’t want to know. There are those who are threatened with knowing how many mixed race people are out there. Oddly enough, some civil rights folks claim that this new category will take away from Asian, black, and Latino numbers. In other words, we lose our fair share of the political pie if we take a stand on pride and heritage -- and truth. If we create smaller minorities, we lose. It’s a new version of divide and conquer.

I don’t see it that way. I’d rather we see a more accurate picture of the new America.

But to help out the folks at the Census, and to make sure we’re not overly creative, here are some new write-in categories for people to use.

For example, I’ve long believed that Filipinos are really Asian Hispanics. We’re in the vicinity of China, but we genuflect to the pope, thanks to those damn Spanish explorers. The country is named after King Philip of Spain, after all. I say Filipinos should write down “Aspanic.”

Some others in Emil shorthand:

Asian-white: Assites.

Black-white: Blites.

Hispanic-white: Hispites.

Japanese-white: Nippites.

Chinese-black: Chigroes.

Hispanic-black: Blaspanics.

What about my daughter? We borrowed a term coined by our friend at the University of Connecticut’s, Angela Rolla, herself the mother of two beautiful mixed-race Filipino-Caucasian kids. What does Rolla call them? Cauca-pinos.