Pick one!

This morning I received a call from the Denver Public School that my children will be attending this year. It seems that I made a mistake when filling out their registration paperwork. The mistake? I apparently had the audacity to list them as more than one ethnicity in the absence of an “other” category, so could I please choose just one. So, how exactly am I supposed to respond to this? I have instilled in my children that they are a variety of ethnicities and they should be proud of them all, so how can I, in good conscious, pick only one? I’m fairly angry that I’m having to make this decision in the year 2005. Why is this even still an issue? How is it that the city of Denver still finds it necessary to categorize people into ONE ethnicity? I don’t know, but I’m going to find out. And then I’m going to push until the form is changed. A form that is supposed to report ethnic statistics that doesn’t have more than 4 distinct categories is hardly accurate and as far as I can see fairly discriminatory. Funny how this was never a problem when I lived in the South.
To be continued…