Comments | persians: "Check it right, you ain't white!"

wiped in persians

"Check it right, you ain't white!"

Mar 17, 2010 00:50

Attention all U.S. residents of Iranian origin or ancestry: when you get the U.S. Census, under Race make sure to check OTHER and write in "IRANIAN" or "IRANIAN-AMERICAN"! The census will determine how hundreds of millions of dollars of government money will be allocated. The opportunity to be counted correctly only comes once every 10 years, so ( Read more... )

Comments 6

killerangel March 17 2010, 08:10:43 UTC

don't you mean italian? lol

penguinfairy March 17 2010, 20:12:05 UTC

What I don't understand is why they have different boxes for "Chinese", "Japanese", "Korean"... those aren't races... those are ethnicities.

philippos42 March 17 2010, 22:22:00 UTC

They're "races" in the minds of the Chinese & Japanese, I think.

Actually, it would be interesting to subdivide "white" according to ethnicity, but of course there's a "general white mutt" ethnicity that would give you weird statistical results.

outofthedust March 18 2010, 04:08:22 UTC

Some people were talking about doing away with those race boxes and just writing "American", which I kind of like, but I think it's important for the government to realize how many Iranians are in the US.

wiped March 18 2010, 04:43:25 UTC

well, that doesn't help at all with getting benefits to minority communities that need them. for instance, the government allocates money to sizable ethnic groups for things like language services, so if iranians are recognized as a large enough group, we can get things like persian-speaking nurses in hospitals, persian-language ballots for voting, etc.

secretsix March 24 2010, 01:41:55 UTC

My mom filled it out without me knowing and wrote "white." Ugh!