I got a thing in the mail from the US Census Bureau today, that wasn’t the next official US Census, but something called the American Community Survey. My address was “randomly selected,” and it’s claiming to be collecting information to decide where important services are needed:
• Improving roads and reducing traffic
• Building schools
• Planning for the health care needs of the elderly
As a dutiful American, I took the time to fill out the survey in regards to my household, but I couldn’t help but notice just how tremendously thorough the survey seemed to be at gathering the specific racial breakdown of my household. Mythical wife and I often joke about how we would conveniently tweak our children’s ethnic checkboxes to give them the most advantage in various situations, and considering the state of our nation as it is today, I had half a mind to just put my kids in as just “white” because there seems to be little benefit to being anything other than such, and it’s not like I’m completely lying, seeing as how my little girls are 50% white.
However, it’s apparent that “white” isn’t sufficient enough on the ACS, because there’s not only just a checkbox for white, but a text field asking for specificity on what kind of white; English, Irish, German, etc, and naturally the survey makes it a mandatory field where you cannot continue without some sort of clarity. For once in my life, white people have it harder than I do, whereas all I had to do was check Korean, and that’s it.
It’s like they’re trying to filter out the people who can pass for as white, and make sure that the light-skinned Spaniards, Middle Eastern, Western Asia, and South Americans, who might be Latinos or Muslims or any other un-‘Murican category can’t be existing the country in plain sight.
I played it straight, and entered both of my kids as Korean as well as white + whatever specificity mythical wife could surmise was her background, because I have this paranoia that the US Government already knows the answers to the questions they’re asking, and this whole thing is a gigantic government-sanctioned phishing quest to find out what Americans are liars, and then target them for some sort of federal retribution.
However, by the time I got to the point of the survey where I was down to the final screen where my final buttons were “review” and “submit,” I couldn’t help but notice that about 85% of the survey was entering in racial information to an uncomfortably granular degree, and there were a few sections dedicated to asking about cars in the household, and level of education of the residents of the home.
Considering there are basically concentration camps being not-so-silently built throughout the country to capture and detain and worse, minorities, ICE raids and acts of murder, the timing of the ACS is extremely unnerving and gives me an overwhelming feeling of distrust that this isn’t being done for the altruistic purposes it claims to be gathering information for.
But it’s got to be legit, it’s from the US Government!
Yes I am aware, and frankly that’s precisely why I don’t trust it, because that’s where I’m at with my trust in the country, to where I’m scared to be compliant and submit my information, for fear that my response gets filtered into a bucket of people and households that aren’t the preferred pool of just white people, and puts me on the radar for a future ICE raid or federal scrutiny, because I’m not white. There’s little to reason to believe that my spouse being white, and my kids being half-white would give them any more protection, and I don’t want them to be categorized as future targets, especially at this stage of their lives.
Needless to say, I did not hit submit on my survey, and short of being strong-armed in the future through some strongly-worded follow-up snail mail or actual communicative contact, I’m in no rush to do so. Because I do not trust the United States government at all these days, more than ever, and the ACS just reeks of racial information gathering, and I have zero faith that this information won’t be used for anything that isn’t nefarious or malicious towards minorities.
It is sad and pathetic that I feel this way, and it sucks knowing that no matter how good of an American I try to be, I’m always going to be looked at as a second-rate human being by the people who run the country, because I’m not white. Yes it’s not lost on me that Asians are among the more tolerated minorities in the country, but when white people can’t seem to figure out how to eliminate more black people, and they feel that Hispanics are too lofty a goal to try to eliminate, they’re going to target Asians, if they already aren’t, just to feel like they’re getting some traction somewhere.
It’s like playing a really hard video game, getting frustrated by it, and dropping the difficulty down just to feel good about yourself. ‘Murican government probably doesn’t operate much differently, and as a result, I have no faith in them at all, nor am I in any rush to be complicit with submitting my ACS survey information.
