to hate it when people refer to their duel heritage children as.....

[Parachute2011]

1/3 of this, 1/4 of that, 3/4 of the other. People are people and I hate to hear them being referred to like slices of pizza. If someone is going to be racist to you, they would ask if your grandfather was Swiss before insulting you.

I do think that the many cultures that are part of the child's life should be celebrated. But IMO referring to a child or adult as anything less than a whole person is insulting.

my family are Heinz 57 and proud.

My personal experience - I tend to find that the people who agonise over all this, what is the 'right' term, mustn't offend, this word is now offensive, now this one too, and this one, must get it right... are almost always white through and through. So much so that if you cut them in half, they'd have the word White written through them like Blackpool through a stick of rock. I wonder why that is?

OpenMouthInsertFoot my nanny used to call me a Heinz baked bean :)

i agree, tend to be middle class too and love to make a fuss about the nice asian family that attend the same school as their children and love to tell everyone about their nigerian friends. often are first to feel offended by racisim they carry the pain and anger of the coloured people. i have also been told i should not sterotype when talking about my own family

@Garlicnutty that is really interesting what you say about Brazil.

And I hope that things are changing fast.

Thanks All

I'm of dual fuel heritage. My Dad farts a lot.

When people describe themselves as half / quarter / whatever, they are referring to descent. It's a straightforward statement of what their family tree looks like two or three generations ago. How you get from there to thinking that they are being described as less than a whole person baffles me.
Heritage is a lot more vague. On the one hand, if you know very little about the customs or language of one part of your ancestry, can you really claim that heritage? On the other, you can perfectly well acquire the heritage of a country which is not the native country of either of your parents.
I'm 1/2 Welsh and 1/2 German: I think of myself as mixed, but would feel very pretentious if I claimed to be dual heritage.
DH is 100% Moroccan, but having grown up in a country with strong French influence, and studying in France, he could justifiably claim to have acquired at least some French "heritage".
Our DCs have very little contact with Germany, and cannot speak German: on the other hand they lived for some years in France, are fluent in French, have studied in the French education system: and generally feel at home in a French environment. So their "ancestral" German heritage is a lot weaker than their "acquired" French heritage.

I have fuel heritage.

My dad was a coal miner.

I was told as a child that I'm two halves Scottish and one half English! This makes me one and a half people. I rather liked this and still use it to this day.

To my child's mind having one Scottish parent made you half Scottish and I had two. I couldn't have one of my parents counting for less than the other, or both of my parents counting for less than everyone else's, but being schooled in England I have a decidedly BBC accent. The 1 and a half thing is my Grandad's thing. I never thought of it as being offensive, why would I? It provokes discussion and correction but I think that's it.

Tangerine

DH is very proud of his Welsh nationality and was furious to see that DS1 had written for French homework, "Je suis Anglais" (not furious enough to work out how to say "I'm half Welsh and half English though ...)

Je suis moitié gallois et moitié anglais.
Not too difficult, and may be worth learning for future reference :) .
Mind you, I once tried explaining to a French woman that I was moitié galloise and she replied that if it weren't for rugby no-one would ever have heard of le Pays de Galles... which was a bit mean, I thought.
I am quite proud here that although people can tell that I'm not a native French speaker, at least they don't usually think that I have an English accent.

Long Way Round - hadn't she heard of Tom Jones then?!

I tell DS that he is "part" Kazakh and "part" british. If anyone asks, the part that is Kazkah is the biological part!

I'm mixed (race) and way back when it was normal to say you're half this and that etc. It felt odd answering that way as don't consider myself to be a bit of anything but rather wholly all my backgrounds all mixed up.

These days I just say what I am if asked without fractions. Ds more mixed so again, if asked, I just rattle off the lot - no big deal.