My latest nightmare begins
on one of those cattle car flights
from Tokyo to San Francisco.
By William Wetherall
I'm with my two kids, and we're on our way to their grandfolks' home in the Sierras. The plane goes down in the bay, and the three of us end up on autopsy tables to be IDed.
A medical examiner looks at my daughter and writes "Asian" in the race box. My son's post mortem officer decides he's "White". I'm declared "African American" by a coroner who thinks I look like Ed Bradley.
As I'm gurneyed back to the fridge, I smile. What would they have said about Tiger Woods? Then I laugh at the thought of a panel of government demographers, educators, criminologists, and health officials defending the accuracy of race statistics.
A few years back, a Seattle couple actually called one of their racially mixed children "Asian" and the other "Caucasian", in order to satisfy race quotas at the schools of their choice. "Situational identity" I call it. But what else are racially ambiguous people to do when faced with the rigidities of identity politics?
Two years back, a man at San Francisco International Airport did, in fact, do a double take on me and ask, "Aren't you on sixty minutes?" His grammar puzzled me, but he seemed sober, so I smiled and said, "The Sacramento flight's been delayed an hour." His face flushed as he said, "I'm sorry, I thought you were someone I saw on TV."
When I told my folks about this encounter my dad laughed and said, "You do look like Ed Bradley." "Ed who?" I said. Cultural literacy is the first thing to go when you live abroad as long as I have. My dad told me about "60 Minutes" and we watched it that night. I felt honored.
"So we've been passing?" I said. "Not that I know of," my dad said. "You played Pocahontas once," my mom interjected. It was long ago when I was a boy. Everyone thought I looked the part.
Much later in life, I happened to remark to a professor of Asian American Studies that my mother was born and raised on Nez Perce lands in Idaho. "Are you a Native American?", she asked, her face lighting up. "They were homesteaders," I said. Her smile vanished.
The absurdities of racializing human beings, past or present, are not always funny. In the end, one has to question the moral sanity of a government that has become increasing obsessed with racial compartmentalization and labels.
The "white"/"non-white" dichotomy of yesteryear was bad enough. The elaboration of "colored" into half a dozen or more other arbitrary categories has added trendy insult to historical injury.
My problem with race stems from the debates I have had defending the need for racial and ethnic data in medical research. I am, after all, a social scientist of sorts, with an impulse to quantify the human condition. I recognize the genetic and cultural diversity of the human species, and I acknowledge the role that genes and even culture can play in disease.
Yet I keenly feel the moral dilemma of racializing individuals as a matter of public policy. I was glad to see the religion boxes go before I left the United States. And I have come to appreciate not seeing a single race box in nearly thirty years of life in Japan.
Though I grew up taking race boxes for granted, now I find myself disgusted by the sort of questions my children have to face when in the United States. Beyond voluntary participation in research that requires disclosure of family ancestry, I can find no justification for differentiating people on the basis of their genes or culture.
The race box choices are "so weird" as my daughter once put it.
"What's this, Dad?" she asked on a visit to California, tapping her pen on the "Race and Ethnicity" section of an application form.
"Just cross it out," I said, not wanting to talk about it.
"But what's it mean?" my son, beside her, persisted.
"They want to know what you are. Your race, your culture, things like that."
"I'm half."
"That's what some people call you, yes. But what are you? Really?"
"In Japan I'm Japanese. Here I'm an American."
"Because you're a citizen of both. What else are you?"
My daughter thought a moment and said, "I'm just me."
"Do you see a 'Just me' on the form?"
"No."
"Then cross it out."
"Can you do that?"
"Watch" I said. I drew a big X through the whole section and smiled when my son went "Wow!"
My kids get a kick out of some of my antics, but they worry. They've been well trained in Japan to follow bureaucratic instructions -- whereas their old man has a history of civil disobedience on both Pacific shores.
The next time they see a race box, though, I'm betting they'll make me proud.
As submitted to the San Francisco Chronicle for its "Guest Forum" column, and acknowledged, on 7 June 2002. It was not published.
15 July 2009
