Originally posted by Sardaukar:
Minorities feel a hidden resentment,simple as that.
For ...'s sake,I am Chinese-Indian-Portueguese mix and I have to
put simply Chinese on my IC simply because I have to follow my
dad's line.I want to be able to proudly say that I am of multiple
heritage!
eh... how? by putting chinese-indian-portuguese on your IC ?
where got space? 
u are what u are... u're not solely what your IC says u are. not
that i'm being frivolous with your identity, but knowing the
historical context of such things changes your perspective a
little...
such categorizations happens everywhere... they are legacies of the
colonial state... if u want a category that does justice to your
mixed heritage, u might try mestizo since part of your ancestry
does hail from the iberian peninsula...
but the connotations are much worse than chinese since the term was used to
distinguish between these (if u'll forgive the terminology)
half-breeds, from the pure blooded peninsulares and the inferior
indios...
specifically, u would be a chinese-mestizo if u lived in the
philippines before 1870... one of the most apt apparently, but not
a good category either...
corozon aquino wouldn't tell u that part of her heritage too... and
try telling your philippino maid that jose rizal is a chinese-mestizo guaranteed to provoke a reaction... they'll rather
just call him an illustrado, which really means "rich
kid who had money to study in europe " ... talk about the myth of a
national hero
and as a historical footnote, the portuguese really did not care
for such categories... its mostly a spanish thing... the generic
term here is "eurasian " even though the term was not always used
in a neutral manner, especially when it addresses
portuguese-eurasians... (words like "indolence" , "lazy" , and
"drunken" are usually prefixes to "portuguese-eurasian" if the
writer was a brit... )
the brits really weren't very politically correct in the bad old
days... its something our history books don't address in enough
details
and since identity here is patri-lineal, let's not split hair...
there are no categories that would please u completely if u only
knew what they REALLY meant...
even in the States, the have a rather narrow categorization system
as well...
are you:
1) hispanic
2) african american
3) caucasian
4) native american
5) asian
and several sub-categories that doesn't do justice to the big,
messy, genetic mix of modern life... so how?
well, not having it made explicit isn't always a bad thing...it
makes for good conversation topics at parties
