Census Controversy
Why does the census differentiate between a “biological son or daughter” and an “adopted son or daughter?”
I thought the idea was that adoption gave your non-biological child the same legal status as your biological child.
Why is it that “parent-in-law” is an option, but instead of “child-in-law” it is “son in law or daughter in law?” Not that I’ve ever heard someone use the term “child-in-law” but who says “parent-in-law?”
And if your parents were from Taiwan are you expected to identify as “Chinese” or “Other Asian?”
Ooh, don’t get me started on this one. As someone who is Brasilian-American, there isn’t even anything for me to mark – I get lumped in with Hispanic because Brasil is part of South America, and apparently “South American” is all one race/ethnicity. And I don’t even know how I’m supposed to distinguish between my race and ethnicity anyway. It’s too intermixed.
And in the end, other than for my friend who is working on her PhD in sociology, does it really matter? Because aren’t we all Americans (whatever that even means racially or ethnically these days)? (Though don’t get me started on the term “American” and why it can only refer to people from the US, when the US isn’t America by itself.)
Ahem. End rant.
The best part for me was that the lumping of everything other than Mexico, PR, and Cuba included Spain? I could sort of understand if they were using the census to track where people are from (not that that actually makes sense if thought out), but it seems silly to distinguish Mexico from Guatemala and then lump Spain in with Colombia.
And I completely agree with the idea that we’re all Americans, so it seems as if the census should either let it go or else be really specific in order to be useful (because Hmong is the same as Pakistani?).
About the adoption part – probably to get an accurate count of the number of adoptees/adoptive families and to get an accurate count of the number of people that have grown in an area.
Parent in law section – I assume its because its more common for a widowed parent in law to live with their child and his/her spouse than for both parents to.
Because if we don’t know how many adopted children we have, how will we know how many adoption agencies we need? Or something like that. Ha. I have no idea.
On top of that, there’s no space for Arab – and my husband refuses to put white… I’m extremely mixed, which would be fine since you can mark more than one… but a good chunk of it is Native American, several diff tribes… and you can only put one and you have to be registered which I’m not.
Oh! I did not think about the Arabs at all. And I know what you mean about being mixed. I also have a chunk of Native American, but it is a few tribes and while there may be enough on my dad’s side to register there was also significant prejudice and lying going on, so I really don’t have enough information and just identify as “white.” Though that makes me wonder why it is only “white” and not “white/Caucasian” when the next option is “black/ African American/negro”?
It’s a difficult question.
My mom is from the Caribbean and someone from her class went to a university in the States with some brothers and sisters. One parent was black and the other was white, so the kids were mixed. The kids that were paler were considered “white” by the university and the darker ones were considered “black”. Biological brothers and sisters.