Coloured bar none

It is census time again. Governments opportunity to pry into the habits of its citizens. Having benefited from access to census returns from the past I am there in spirit, if not in detail. What riles me, yet again the government asks its citizens to judge the colour of their skin. I found it offensive when the South African government ran their country on that basis and I find it as offensive that my government should ask me to judge my degree of drift from olive to well beyond doubt brown, or should I really consider myself black?

If they were sincere then they would issue a colour strips that you could place against your skin and compare your actual colour with the colour our government decries it to be. But of course you may have just returned from a sunny holiday all tanned out. So there would need to be a lightening factor strip to compare with depending on how many weeks since your return from a trip of more than four days from further south than Birmingham. What is wrong is that colour is so subjective and is totally foundered on a highly racial premise. Black people come from Africa, brown people come from Asia and so on into the more indefinables.

I cannot deny that I come from a mixed racial background. It is factual on the record for all to see and arrive at their own conclusion. That I come from a mixed background tells no one anything significant other than to raise racial expectations and prejudices. It enshrines racial stereotyping and that is why it is offensive. We are a mongrel nation and have absorbed peoples from all over the world for hundreds of years. They have mixed with us and strengthen our Nation.

The only test the government should be legitimately interested in is which of its citizens regard it as their mother country and which have bonds or allegiances with another country. Which citizens have the ambition to adopt and reflect the British culture as a way of life and which citizens look elsewhere for their models.
That is the only real test but so hard to arrive at through questions and answers. That is no excuse for going for the knee-jerk reaction and revert to offensive racial questions of skin colour. When comnpared to a sheet of white paper, how white, really white are you?