Naiveté

In response to my post about Barack Obama’s birth certificate, an anonymous commenter wrote:

C’mon Steve! New zealand is not on another planet where nobody knows the history of the US of A, where some kind of “community gaps” had and still have some importance to lots of people, to say it mildly!
The election of Obama does not erase USA’s not so far racist past.

To an American my surprise may seem naive. But I’ve lived in four countries – New Zealand, Australia, UK, Germany – and have never seen an official form asking for my race. That’s not to say that those countries have no race issues. But some effort is made to pretend they don’t exist.

Anyways, now I’m curious to see New Zealand birth certificates from previous generations, to see if race used to be recorded.