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The only thing that bugs me is that some people insist on racially categorizing everybody, as if everybody had to be pigeonholed into a little box based on their skin color and a few other superficialities.
My daughter goes to a school on whose website it says that 90% of the students are "black" and 10% are "hispanic". When I visit her school what I see is that about 90% of the kids are clearly of mixed ancestry. There is no way in hell that I would presume to guess which pigeon hole to stick them in. As far as I'm concerned, they're all human beings.
I've lived in racially mixed neighborhoods all my life (Hawaii, Vancouver, Miami). In Hawaii it is not uncommon for a high school kid to have four grandparents from four different continents. On my block here in a Miami suburb there are 5 different languages spoken by parents (english, spanish, creole, french, german, chinese), but all the kids speak english, watch the same TV shows, go to the same school, play on the same sports teams, play in the same bands, want the same stuff for christmas. One of my daughter's best friends has a Chinese mother and a Haitian father.
The whole concept of "race" in the U.S. is becoming increasingly arbitrary. Where do you draw the line?
I'd rather not draw it at all. For me it's totally a non-issue.
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