This little kurfuffle has been brewing for a couple of days. Apparently Democratic Officials in South Carolina are questioning the fact that Governor Nikki Haley checked the "White" block on her voting enrollment form. What should she have checked? Black or African-American? I don't think so. Asian? We think of Cambodians as Asian, but should they be grouped with folks from the sub-continent and besides,
as this link suggests, today many Asians just blend in with the "Whites". Even back during the Watts Riots Korean shopkeepers suffered at the hands of the rioters, thus not being seen as people of Color, but as part of the "White" crowd. And, I doubt she is Hispanic.
Yesterday Law Professor Ann Althouse
posted on this and gave us Ms Haley's options:
Her options were "white, black/African-American, Asian, Hispanic, Native American or other."
Well, actually,
that was a quote from The Post and Courier, out of Charleston.
As this subsequent blog post from Law Professor Ann Althouse shows,
even the courts have gone back and forth.
In a comment on one of the
Althouse blog posts Mrs Whatsit said:
A century from now, our descendants will think we were all completely insane on the subject of race—and they'll be right.
I think she is about right.
Regards — Cliff
3 comments:
Maybe its the summer heat in SC. Having been a frequent visitor to SC mostly on business, I think that they have many more urgent problems than whether she checked the correct block on her application. This is a new low in political mudslinging.
I recall getting a letter of reprimand from my squadron commander for entering "human" in the block reserved for race. He just didn't see the wisdom....or the arcane humor. But then, most commanders never did have much humor.
"A century from now, our descendants will think we were all completely insane on the subject of race—and they'll be right." is absolutely the right answer.
I have a good friend from Honduras whose native ancestry prompted him once to check "American Indian" on an employment form, since, being from a country in the Americas, and being an Indian, it only seemed logical. He had no way to know how much BS gets read into such things here, and how much blowback there would be from others' mistaken perceptions. He always chooses "Other" now, because he's not of Latin ancestry, and resents and rejects the the "Hispanic" label for reasons that can never be understood from our jingoistic perspective. I always think of him whenever I am stuck checking "Caucasian" and feeling my personal preference to count myself simply as "American".
America is an idea, and we were founded in defiance of the entire rest of the world's insistence to categorize and define people by racial, religious and other equally meaningless means. That we can't figure that out about ourselves after all these centuries shows how far the idea still needs to come.
AMEN!!!
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