No bloated speech this time, nope. I'm keepin' it simple for everybody.
If we are really going to have a color blind, race blind, creed blind, religion blind, gender blind, venetian blind, blah blah blah society, then we have to eliminate the prefixes that POINT to those very things, no? I mean look, I'm not a white guy so I have no Dog in this fight, but why do we have "Black History Month" and not "White History Month"? Why is there a Congressional Black, Asian and Latin Caucasses but not a Congressional White Caucass?.... Did caucasian people just show up in Copenhagen in the year of our Lord whatever and just take over the world without some semblance of cultural path? Why is no White history taught in schools? (I know, I know, the usual raping and pillaging of the Vikings and Anglo-Saxons don't make for good bed time stories.) Is it because it is the default of our conciousness that most history is "white" and therefore it would be redundant to have a history of its race in a cultural context? I've not heard one, ONE thing that can make a caucasian person go "yes I am proud to be white" (why does that have such a negative undertone?). Why are white people so scared of their God-given race? guilt? political correctness? When in history did pride in the caucasian race dowspiral into denoting a supremacist ethos?...
I was in a party a year ago, where some of my latin friends and I were bantering back and forth and we all toasted to the "good life of latinos"... whoopee!.... everybody cheered and toasted like good little politically correct girls and boys... even my white friends. Then I (being who I am..) asked one of them, "C'mon, make a toast!, doesn't your caucasian butt have anything cultural to celebrate?"...... Silence. Its as if the Temple Curtain had been torn. A few nervous laughs here and there... but you get the picture. The horror in my friend's face of trying to say something,... (yes dangit, we are still buddies.)
I said this story to make a point. These pre-fixes and suffixes are going to get us all torn to pieces. African-American, Latin-American, Dixie-Americans, Franco-American (sorry, couldn't help it)..... its as if just saying "American" by its deviled lonesome lacks some cultural authority that compels us to add something in it for further identification.My parents are Puerto Rican, so is most of my family, with a good dose of French, Italian, Jewish, and Spanish,.. you name it. We are mutt central. Make no mistake, I am proud of my heritage, but I don't feel the need to wave it like a standard in anyones face. I am an American. Pure and simple. No pre-fix on my citizenry. I was born here, served here and I proudly buy into the American Ideal of "One nation under God, Indivisible". How in the hell are we supposed to keep bying this "lets all work together" crap when we add a diferentiating pro-noun at every turn?
Lets take a moment and really think about what is it that we really do when we surround "American" with this and that. Pride is great. Feeling good and honoring your ancestors and the world and culture of your parents / family is a tradition no one should forget or discard. Just put a fore-thought to it the next time you say with pride, I'm "Mexican American" or "Italian American" or "Canadian American" (ok, forget that last one...). What are you really saying?, that being just "American" is not good enough?
Having said that, If we cant beat them? join 'em. If we are not going to be blind to the pro-nouns and racial divisions, then let's extrapolate political correctness to its full logical conclusion (Liberals can exit right about now, your feelings are about to get pulverized). I want every NBA team to have 2 token white guys (hey, affirmative action, right?). I want White people to feel free to wear "the Race" t-shirts, just as latinos wear "La Raza" ones. I want the bad cowbows on TV to wear "white hats" sometimes (why should black hats have all the fun?) Cinco de Mayo? Asian pride day? Gay pride parades? Cool, no problem. I want 5th Avenue White Boy pride day!. I want....... (ok, my point has been made ad-nauseum I think).
I'm done (I guess I was kidding about the bloated speech part), back to your regularly scheduled programming. Let the Truth-Pain bashing begin. Don't hate me because I'm beautiful :)
(want to read an interesting article on white guilt? click below)http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110008318
6 comments:
Pretty cool Ed. This has been a huge thorn in my side for years and it is good to see it in print! I'm circulating a petition that I'd like you to sign, asking the president for a "White Supremecy Month". Ouch! Really though, whenever I hear about all the special race specific clubs that exclude me, the white boy, I put it in the same filing cabinet with the KKK and Hitlers favorite bedtime stories.
Remember Ross Perot? In a speach pushing his bid for the presidency, he refered to the blacks as "you people". He got booed ferociously. All he did was refer to them the way they did to themselves at the time.
As a white guy, there is no right way to deal with race. Everything is the wrong way. I'm pretty frickin tired of it.
Thanks for the neat-o blog Ed :)
-Ron
Youre welcome Ron, .. thanks for the bounce-back opinions and sounding board. I can always trust your judgement and calibration of my thoughts! :)
Great post! I've wondered the same things - but we can't say that out loud, we'll be accused of being racists.
I'll tell you a secret .... my forefathers came over on the Mayflower. I'm eligible to be a member of the DAR. Shameful, I know.
It gets worse.
They then migrated down the Scot-Irish highway and ended up in the Southern US - you know what that means.
So here I sit, with ancestors who lived in the context of their times. They were not bad people (for the most part - there were a few that got hung). They did some bad things. They did some things that they knew weren't right, but were the norm at the time (slavery). But do I dare say who they were?
They paid a heavy price for their sins - as did their descendants. But we are still under the heavy label as mistreaters of other peoples, Indians, Africans and pretty much anyone else that got in our ancesters way.
There, I feel better, I said it. My ancesters did bad things.
Here's how I look at it. If the Spanish had beat the English and taken over the area that became the US - the Hispanics would be the bad guys now.
If the Indians (I know they are 'Natives', but most Indians I know prefer to be called Indians), had beat the Anglos that came over - they'd be the bad guys.
Anglo-Saxons are the bad guys cause our ancesters won and beat the slop out of anybody that got in their way. Now we are supposed to feel guilty about it.
I kinda like the Vikings myself :)
PS - thanks for visiting my blog.
Beth, your comments have cemented my faith in logical thought and I am glad to have expressed what I said. Although it was said in a quasi tongue-in-cheek mode, I know a lot of people that feel like you do...
Thank you for the insight of your own experiences and thank you for taking the time to build such a great blog yourself.
I hope to be reading more in your neighborhood! Go on White Girl!!1
Well, I like to keep things light on the tone and heavy on the subject... Rednecks welcomed!
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