We’ve all had to do it, fill in the little bubble or place a check mark next to the box which best describes where our ancestors were born. Maybe you were getting a drivers license, taking the SAT’s or applying for a home or auto loan. It seems like a minor thing, but it’s spawned such controversy. Full disclosure here, I’m of European descent.

Growing up through the high school years, I felt uneasy filling in the race portion of the various forms which came my way as life required. It didn’t feel right, as if filling in the box was only perpetuating the “race myth” that has initiated so many wars and disputes through the ages. It brought to mind the horrible genocides and ethnic cleansings from both distant and recent pasts such as the Chinese hunting down Tibetans, Hitler’s attempt to eradicate the Jews or the Hutus trying to wipe out the Tutsis in Rwanda. You may be asking “You thought of all of this before filling out a bubble with a #2 pencil?” Yes.

It may be naive, but I don’t get race. I don’t understand why there must an “us vs them” mentality any more. Sure it was useful when we were living as small bands of tribes trying to survive, but those are no longer modern day realities. One of the most powerful attributes humanity has is it’s capacity to work together. Example after example can be provided where individuals of disparate or even rival races have come together in co-operation for one purpose or another, thus making any ethnic division pointless.

At one point as a young 20 something, I realized that it was optional whether or not to disclose my ethnicity and in protest I chose to not answer. I felt I was doing good! I felt I was making a silent statement to the world that I would not accept race as a concept or as a dividing line between people. I felt that if everyone did that we’d be that much closer to erasing the color lines for good.

But of course that’s not how life really is, it’s much more complicated than simply not checking a box. I began to understand that humankind does not know everything yet, there is no instruction booklet to refer to (no matter what the roughly 4,200 different religions worldwide tell you) , but that instead we are discovering it as we go. The more I learned the more I understood there really is a significant gap between races (and genders, but that’s for another post), especially in this melting pot of a country. More importantly I began to learn about the people who are trying to find out where exactly the issues lie and where the definition is, the economists. I began to understand that the most powerful tool they had was statistics and they were using that tool on huge sets of data where individuals had indicated their race. It all came back to those silly little bubbles and boxes.

I realized that my silent protest was actually hindering the process of discovering how to solve the issue. When I declined to fill out that section of the form, test, application, etc, the available data set for a study to draw from shrinks. If, as my 20 something self had wished for, no one filled out those bubbles, there would be no data set to draw from and it would be exponentially more difficult to discover what’s keeping the races separate and to ultimately find a solution.

So now, as you can guess, the feeling of uneasiness is no longer there when I come to that ethnic identity section as I’m filling out the forms in a doctors office, but instead I feel I’m contributing in my own small way to rubbing out that racial gap between fellow humans.