Tuesday’s (March 31) LATimes had some well hidden good news.
It seems that UCLA’s Middle Eastern students, including Armenia’s, have embarked on a campaign to add more specific national identifiers than “Other” or “White” or “African” or “Asian” to the list of “ethnic” (how I despise this term) categories that are on various forms and applications.
This is good news! I have long been adding my own box and marking it “Armenian”. But with the disappearance of hard-copy forms and their replacement with electronic versions, this has effectively become impossible. At best, the “Other” category might allow the person to write in their nationality.
I hope the result is not the ridiculous “Middle Eastern” category. If the Hmong and Pakistanis and Samoans can be specified, so should Armenia’s, Arabs, Assyrians, Azeris, Jews, Kurds, Persians, Turkmens, Turks, etc.
What a great way this would be to truly develop a picture of the diversity that flowers in the U.S. instead of straight-jacketing everyone. It would also allow better tracking of health and other demographic trends.
I really hope the students succeed. We should support them in any way possible, including through supportive legislators.
Do your part.
BTW, anybody notice it was April? Are we all counting down to Obama’s Armenian Genocide debut?