schools and race

Some of you may have seen my note on facebook recently about selecting a race for my children on an application form for magnet schools through our public school system. Though in a previous post I had more or less discarded the idea of public schools, I started talking to people and actually doing research about them and found a few school that are of interest. Getting into them is a different story... Magnet schools in Chicago are a crapshoot -- you put your name into their computerized lottery which somehow accounts for their race, as the CPS website states:

The goal for magnet schools is a racial/ethnic balance of 15-35% white and 65-85% minority.

It also states that:

9. Do I have to select a racial/ethnic category for my child on the application?
Yes. If you do not select a racial/ethnic category, your child cannot be considered for enrollment. The category you select is your decision. Select only one category.

So, you pick a race for your child, send your application in and hope for the best. I have to believe that race plays into it somehow and if you can work the system just right, that you can get an advantage. My childrens' advantage is that they can claim my Korean background and thus be classified into the minority status vs. claiming their father's whiteness.

My kids are multi-racial. As was pointed out several times in my facebook note, race is an artificial construct used by people to create division and to gain authority over people. It's been pretty effective for the last 6,000 years, I'd say. I want my kids to embrace both of their ethnicities.

Anyhow, so lately Ben has been saying to me: "Jarius is brown. Lanisha is brown. John is not brown. Sally is not brown." (kids from his preschool, not their real names) "I don't know what color I am." How does a mother respond to that? I tell him that yes, they are brown and the other ones aren't, but it doesn't matter what color we are, we are all made in God's image and are equal. Still, he'll continue to say "I don't know what color I am." He doesn't mean this in a philosophical, identity-yearning way. He just means that he doesn't know have the vocabulary to describe his skin color. I don't remember noticing race at his age. I knew that I was different by virtue of being a different race than my parents. But, I don't remember really being aware that it made a difference to society until I was in middle school.

I wonder what Barack Obama's mom would have filled out for his CPS application, had he grew up in Chicago. It's interesting to me that he's widely deemed the first African-American president, yet he's culturally much more white than black, his father was a Kenyan immigrant, which is a very different experience than most African-Americans in this country. Similarly, my children have a Korean mom, but they have very little Korean heritage as I am not familiar with it and was raised very much in an American culture. We are friends with a couple in which the husband is half-Japanese, half-white and the wife is white, but he is much more ethnically Japanese and has passed that down to his kids. Even though their kids are one-quarter Asian, they're much more ethnically Asian than my kids.

I'm pretty comfortable with being Korean, especially at this point in my life. I want to make sure that my kids are comfortable being half-Korean and half-white and can embrace that when they are older. And, perhaps, I want to check the right box to get my kids into a CPS magnet school :)