Counted

I’m all for making statements.  Heck, that’s the reason why I blog, to make statement, let my voice be heard, yada, yada, yada.

And for those who want to state that they are X race along with Y, I’m down for that to.  As a mom to a biracial teen I want him to feel comfortable with who he and where he comes from.

So, why do I have a problem with his?

Public schools in the Washington region and elsewhere are abandoning their check-one-box approach to gathering information about race and ethnicity in an effort to develop a more accurate portrait of classrooms transformed by immigration and interracial marriage. Next year, they will begin a separate count of students who are of more than one race.

Washington Post 23 Mar 09

Maybe it’s because of this:

Many civil rights advocates agree that it’s necessary to document the growing number of multiracial students, but they say these categories will mask valuable information about race that could be used to analyze educational challenges some groups face. They say it would be more accurate to report the data in detail, with racial and ethnic combinations.

“If we don’t know that some multiracial, Hispanic and black students are doing worse,” said Melissa Herman, a sociologist at Dartmouth College, “we can conveniently ignore that they are doing worse.”

Washington Post 23 March 09

Which reminds me a whole lot of this:

There are some bad adolescent behaviors that whites do more than blacks (like drinking and smoking), and there are other bad adolescent behaviors that blacks do more than whites (watching TV, fighting, getting sexually transmitted diseases). Mixed-race kids manage to be as bad as whites on the white behaviors and as bad as blacks on the black behaviors. Mixed-race kids act out in almost every way measured in the data set.

New York Times, Freakonomics Column, 12 Aug 08

When we start to loudly proclaim who we are to the world we also need to be aware what other people do with that information.

Do I think that African American children have a hard time learning in school compared to Asian Americans or white Americans?  Yes.  But then I also know that African Americans don’t do as well as children who are of African descent (Nigerian, Ugandan, Kenya).  So I guess my worry is, when children are multiracial, will they be looking at other factors, too, or will they automatically assume that a child who is Eurasian will have less problems although that might not be the case with a child whose Asian parent is first Gen and didn’t graduate from high school.  Or will they assume that a child who is Black and Native American might have a better time in less challenging classes than his/her classmates?

I guess my problem is, I don’t have a problem with telling what race a child is, I just worry that someone might infer who the child is because of their race.