Updating My Ethnicity

We received an e-mail at work a few weeks ago asking us to go online and "update our ethnicity." The Department of Education, the federal one, is collecting data on the race and ethnicity of college employees and students. I suspect it might have something to do with our having received a couple of grants as a Hispanic-Serving Institution over the past dozen years or so.

I dutifully went to the page online that I was supposed to use and answered the two questions. The first simply wanted to know if I was Hispanic or Latino. Since I'm not Hispanic or Latino, I then had to choose from a series of lists to identify more accurately what my ethnicity is. Well, to be more accurate, there were five categories--American Indian or Alaskan Native, Asian, Black or African American, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, or White. The Asian category had nine subcategories based upon national ancestry (Cambodia, China, India, Japan, Korea, Laos, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Other), and the Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander had four subcategories, again based upon national ancestry (Guam, Hawaii, Samoa, or Other). The other three had only the one item per category. Before you start to ask, yes, I could check more than one box; we weren't restricted to only one ethnicity, which is good to know.

I don't object to reporting my ethnicity. I have only a vague sense of my family's ancestry anyway, so it's only speculative on my part. We're supposedly Scotch-Irish on my grandfather's side, and my grandmother always claimed that we had a Dutch background as well. Of course, she also claimed that one of her ancestors (a word she would never have used, for the record) was a "Hindi." I asked her once if she meant Hindu, but she'd never heard of that. I can't imagine that anyone in my family is truly of Hindu background, but who knows? There's also a strong Native American influence in my genetics, probably either Chickasaw or Choctaw in nature. Anything else is completely unknown to me.

My issue has to do with the way it was presented to us: "updating" our ethnicity. I can update my contact information when I change my cell phone number or when I move to a new address. I can change my emergency contact person if I decide I want someone else to make decisions for me, so that's an update. How exactly, though, do I "update" my ethnicity? I can report it, certainly, but updating it seems a bit far-fetched. Have I changed my ethnicity since the last time I was asked? Perhaps I should contact my mother to see if we are now of Guamanian descent. Or perhaps we actually are Hispanic or Latino, but I wasn't at the family reunion this year to listen to the deliberations.

I know this all seems rather silly, but I am an English teacher, after all. Language matters, and the words we use should be chosen carefully. You'd think that someone at the offices of a school district would have thought about the implications or the connotations of the word "update" before using that to describe the process we're undergoing. Or perhaps they just wanted us to have a chance to reconsider who we are. Knowing that we might have to do this on a regular basis, I'm going to start thinking about what ethnicity I want to be the next time I'm asked for an update.