Checking the Box: A Graduate School Essay on Race and Ethnicity

The question of whether or not I am White is easy for me to answer. All standardized forms with a question about my race and ethnicity have been checked [X] White, [X] Non-Hispanic since I was a child.

Generally, there is never a box that asks:
“Did you grow up in a rural area?”
“Did you ever have health insurance as a child?”
Or, “Have you ever lived in poverty?”. Since I am White, whatever adverse circumstances I might have faced growing up are now irrelevant to how I get treated at the Department of Motor Vehicles or how long I wait at the doctor’s office.

White privilege is real, and how I perceive it is mostly based on the absence of White privilege that my husband faces. Need a title to a car we bought? It is my job to go to the DMV because, “The people at the DMV never suspect White people are trying to get fake titles.”
Need a doctor’s appointment? It is my job to call, make the appointment, and explain our insurance to both the doctor’s office and my husband. “Nobody understand me on the phone, and I don’t understand our health insurance,” my husband states.

My husband never got asked about whether to be White or not growing up in Bolivia. Seventy percent of Bolivians are Indigenous, and three tribes, the Quechua, Aymara, and Guarani account for the majority of the population. The government collects no official statistics on “race” since the underlying assumption is that everyone born in Bolivia is Bolivian and the laws that govern land ownership are associated with tribal law and tribal territory. Hence, if a person resides in a particular geographic area, association with a tribe is established by being born in that particular place. Instead of race, all national identity cards come with a specific drill down on where people are born. Based on where he was born, my husband is presumed to be Guarani or a mix of Guarani and Quechua. As an accountant, he didn’t need farm or grazing lands, it didn’t really matter. The question of my husband’s race was first posed to us as a choice by the U.S. State Department.

“Ponga blanco, ponga Latino” he said, (Put down I’m White, put down I’m Latino).
Later on, when we were living in the United States, and our Census form came, I asked him how he would like to record his race.
“Hay una cajita para mestizo?” (Is there a little box for mixed?)
“There is”, I replied.
“Selecione esa.” (Pick that.)
“Quieres que ponga que sos latino?” (Do you want me to put down that you are Latino?), I asked.
“Si, esta bien.”

The question of what race he felt he was came up again in pregnancy, when the time came to make a choice about genetic screening. We didn’t need screened for whatever genetic problems Ashkenazi Jews have. Did we want to be screened for cystic fibrosis, which is common in peoples of European ancestry? Or did we want to be screened for sickle cell which was more common in people of color? We decided that whatever the genetics between us, the error rate on the tests was too high to end a pregnancy over the results, so we preferred not to have the tests.

On June 9, 2014, our lives changed forever when Carlos was born. Bolivians, in addition to wanting to know where you are born, want to know who the parents are. Bolivia extends citizenship to children born abroad and also mandates that all children shall be given a paternal last name and a maternal last name. So, when it came time to name our son, I put down my name, my husband’s names, and our son’s names.

Following a parallel procedure to fill out the application in the state of Maryland, a huge box appeared on the Maryland Department of Vital Statistics Web site: “WARNING! None of the names on this birth certificate match! Do you wish to continue?”

Yes, I did wish to continue. I had written the names, checked “White” for race, and checked “Latino or Hispanic” for ethnicity.

In 2014, it seemed like this was a perfectly normal and reasonable thing to do, as I lived in my DC metro area bubble, where one in four people are foreign born and I was imagining an America of inclusion and possibility. What did it matter to have ridiculously long sets of names and to check the Latino box?

More difficult to answer than race and ethnicity is the question, “What language is mainly spoken at home?” This is a challenge because we are swimming in a language soup of words that represent our different realities when we are together and when we are apart. When my husband first came to the U.S., he didn’t speak any English, and the first sentence I taught him in English was “I am a legal permanent resident.” It is really hard to learn another language and to practice it all day long. It is hard to lose your independence and your profession and your place in society. And so, in the beginning, because he didn’t understand, and because he was exhausted, we spoke Spanish at home 100% of the time.

As time has gone by, he has learned to speak English, and his English is fluent enough to work in a retail environment. Our son can speak both English and Spanish, but we mainly speak Spanish at home because it feels comfortable, normal and simple. But when it comes time to check the box on forms, I hesitate. Will people think my son is “behind” because of the language we speak at home? Will they assume a level of ability or inability based on his name and the boxes I have checked?

One box we are happy to be able to check is the “U.S. Citizen” box. I’m not sure why, but the recent Executive Action banning immigrants from Muslim majority countries enrages me. Maybe it’s the mountains of visa paperwork I have filled out in my lifetime. Maybe it’s the fact that immigrants, through the processing fees they pay, fund United States Citizen and Immigration Services operations. It feels so unjust, so unfair, that after years of filling out forms and going to interviews and getting your fingerprints taken and getting tax records from sponsors and getting your Tuberculosis titer level checked (I’ll just state a second time that these folks paid for this stuff!!), that someone in power could just arbitrarily decide you don’t qualify because people where you had the luck of being born check the “Muslim” box on a question of religious faith.


The rage I feel about the Muslim ban is something new for me. Maybe it was the images of the drowned toddler being carried by the Turkish soldier. Maybe it’s the fact that no matter which boxes of race, ethnicity, or religion we feel we best fit into, we all want things like good health and safety for our children. The America I thought I knew was better than this. The America I thought I was a part of, was a country where everyone could find a place and no person was illegal. It makes me think that trips to the DMV notwithstanding, I’ve been blind to the injustice that continues to exist in America. The question I ask myself now is, “What do we to change the system,” so that we can move toward a society where any box checked is ok, and all checked boxes are equally valued.