Checking the "Asian box"

Many of you have seen the forms, but obviously have never had to go deeper....but this is about checking off the box on application forms which describe your race.

You know the boxes:

• White
• African-American
• Asian-Pacific Islander
• Other....

The "Asian Pacific Islander" always seems to chap my ass (what we all look alike to you? So we're all one big box that encompasses half the world?). But then again, I guess "White" does it too (for y'all).

[An aside]
When I first meet people, after a while, they (sometimes) offered a guess rather than a query:

So, are you....ummm, Hawaiian?
OR
So, are you....ummm, from Alaska?

Yeah, from Alaska, that's right. I think the main thing that annoys me and goes through my head at just that instant is:

They're asking this question because they can't comprehend that I could possibly be born here. Now, it happens to be true I'm an immigrant. But what "fumes" do I give off that say I can't have been born in Texas?

Why is it that they have to name a state where the majority population is not White?

Are they asking because I don't speak with an Asian accent? Why does it bother them that someone "of color" can speak English better than they can?

At least they didn't ask if "I know Kung Fu"

Sigh

Anyway, back to this post. In college, I made friends with black guys from East Texas. They ranged from "militant" to "easy going". The militant guys called us (everyone on the dorm floor who wasn't black) "boozshe". Hunh? What the hell does boozshe mean? They replied, "It's our short name for you, the bourgeois." Hunh? What they hell did I ever do to you? Anyway, they were taking the tack that the best defense is to have an immediate offense. They were three friends from East Texas and they were getting mixed up in a dorm floor with guys from all over the state. They didn't know who was going to be redneck and who was going to be "okay" so they decided to paint us all with a big brush and sort it out later. And one guy, decided to give me the nickname "Curve Killer". Hey Curve Killer, who'd you screw over today? It didn't really bother me too much because:

a) He was full of crap
b) He didn't see my grades
c) I could sense he was only half serious

But it made me think......

Why is it unfair and totally racist for me to make assumptions about blacks...but it's "ha-ha" for you to make jokes about "us"?

We were on the same dorm floor for 3 years. It turns out that one of the militant boozshe callers was fairly well-to-do who's dad was a slum landlord. When I asked him if they (apartments) were beat up, he said yeah, busted lights and poor plumbing. When I asked why his dad didn't fix it up, his reply was:

Those people are just gonna bust it up again, it's not worth it.

What got me thinking about this was that some of those guys were on scholarship because of their race. When I asked them a few years later, after they'd calmed down and weren't quite as defensive and militant, we were chatting about quotas and scholarships and advantages given or perceived amongst schools and institutions.

I asked why it was fair for them to have a checkoff box that said "Black" and it led to (potential) scholarships, etc....

Whereas if I checked off "Asian Pacific Islander", it meant absolutely nothing except to a statistician. In other words, the next semester the University president would not call a news conference to discuss the disturbing decline in the number of Asians getting accepted into the undergraduate program.

So, this line of questioning made them a bit defensive. Once I got them calmed down, they said the following reasons entitled Blacks to have an opportunity over other races such as Asians:

• America has a long history of oppression or exclusion of blacks. From slavery through Jim Crow to today, there are many injustices. Scholarships are a method to level the playing field.
• Asians have a history and social expectation of education and family pressures to exceed in school, whereas many blacks grew up with NO expectations or a whole family unit to support such expectations.

[For full disclosure, I paraphrased the conversations into those two points]

THIS FINALLY, is the point of this posting. Based on these reasons, is it unfair then for an adopted Asian kid to check off the "Asian box" if they were adopted by a white or black couple? (by the way, I do know of a black couple who adopted a Chinese baby - former professional football player who heard a religious calling to help babies in need).

If we say that the child deserves certain opportunities or is denied those same opportunities because of the race of their parents....what does that say about adopted kids?

[And you thought Monday was going to be just the warp core]