An African-American receptionist at the hospital gave me an appraising look and asked, “So what do we put down for your race? Other?”
“I’m white,” I said, feeling strange. I do look puffy and not my best but not enough for my race to become hard to determine. Or so I thought.
“Really?” the receptionist was incredulous. “Because you have an accent. Are you sure you are white and not Other?”
This was a profound philosophical question I was not prepared to answer.
That sounds strange.
“Other” is a ridiculous racial category for a hospital to use, especially in race-and-ethnically-conscious 2016. I assume that nowadays a modern hospital would have a number of ethnic/racial classifications for a patient to choose from. Is “Other” supposed to include someone who somehow doesn’t fit into any of the more specific categories??
In any case, it wasn’t appropriate for the receptionist to question your self-appraisal.
(Also, unless the rules have changed since I delivered babies as an intern, the race of the baby that’s entered on the birth certificate is the same as that of the birth mother, regardless of who the father is.)
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‘White’ people coming to the USA from, say, Australia or Britain also have ‘an accent’. Does that make them ‘less or more white’? 🙂
Actually, the necessity to belong to a ‘race’ sounds ridiculous to me. Well, it’s not like that in Russia, where ‘other’ and ‘bad’ are synonyms.
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America’s relationship with race will never stop baffling me.
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So much semiotics, so much wow.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
Clarissa's Blog 
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