Obamacare Ethnicity & Race Questionaire

There are no WASPs, Micks, Wops, Hillbillies, Pennsylvania Dutch, or Pollacks, but there are sure a helluva lot of varieties of Hispanic “ethnicity,” including such well know ethnic categories as “Balearic Islander,” “Canal Zone” (!), and “Criollo.”

“Hey! I’m Lithuanian, what are you, man?” “I’m a Canal Zone.”

Neither is one restricted to being merely Mexican. No, no, no, you have the choice of being “Mexican”, “Mexican American,” or “Mexican American Indian,” and if you really want to be in-your-face Mexican, why, you can be ethnically “La Raza.”

As one reads on and on, one begins to wonder how categories like “Don Quixote,” “Zorro,” and “El Cid” came to be overlooked.

There is no ethnicity for those of us in the non-bean-eating component of the population, but we do get taken care of in the next portion of the document. There we are, under Race: “White/Caucasion,” right in there with such other great races as the Chuukese, the Iwo Jimans, the Singaporeans, and the Yapese.

The principles employed to confer specific recognition are obviously mysterious and elusive. The Hong Kong-ese are shit out of luck, while the multi-ethnic residents of Singapore get to leap the boundaries of conventional racial categories to become Singaporean. Can this possibly be based on the sad history of American discrimination in favor of Hong Kong Cantonese cuisine over Singaporean curries?

Every archipelago and lagoon in the South Pacific, including Iwo Jima which lacks native inhabitants, has been awarded individual racial status, while so few categories of Asian “races” are deemed to exist. The Nepalese are there, but not the Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Kirghiz, Mongols, and so on.

What, the inquiring mind wants to know, did we ever do to people from Yap?

Via Dan Greenfield at Front page.