Boxes, Part 2

Now that I have a son, those boxes seem even more absurd and useless to me. Even though my son is only 4, he has already experienced his first racial teasing. While playing at a birthday party, a 6 or 7 year old boy came up to him and said, "Chinese," while he put his fingers in the corners of his eyes. Talk about an instant flashback to my own childhood--that happened to me all the time on the playground at school, as I'm sure it has happened to a lot of people like me. I went to a predominantly Caucasian school, where I was one of three Asian kids in my class. Kids have a universal way of teasing other kids of different ethnicities, except they always assume if you are an Asian, you must be Chinese or Japanese. No one ever teased me about being Korean, because most kids don't know about Korean, Cambodian, Vietnamese, Thai, Laotian or other Asian cultures. As a child, I was so indignant to their teasing because they got it all wrong! Even when I corrected them and told them I was Korean, they didn't seem to care about the precision of their teasing, they just said, "That's the same thing."

Today, especially in the San Francisco Bay area and other large metropolitan areas, there are a lot of kids that come from ethnically mixed couples. Look at Tiger Woods, Derek Jeter, Halle Berry, Alicia Keys, Ben Harper, Bob Marley or Barack Obama! My son, Josh, is 50% Korean, 25% Caucasian, and 25% Afro-Trinidadian. I guess at that birthday party, he looked Asian to the kids, or at least Asian enough to be called, "Chinese."

Now, this makes me wonder if Josh will be considered, "Other." Or, will society apply the "One Drop Rule," (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-drop_rule) and pronounce him "Black/African American"?