American Elephants

The Census Bureau released a set of estimates on Thursday May 17 showing that 50.4 percent of our nation’s population younger than age 1 were minorities as of July 1, 2011. This is up from 49.5 percent from the 2010 Census taken in April 1, 2020.  What? The White Race is no longer in the majority, now the Minority Race is in the majority.  Wait — “the Minority Race?”

Well, yes. That’s how silly this whole race thing is. Last time I went in for a routine mammogram, the forms insisted that I fill out a lengthy form listing my race — to see if I had cancer? I went for the “refuses to answer” designation. Damn government is just too intrusive.

Race doesn’t mean anything anyway.  There is no such thing as a “minority race.” Barack Obama is half-white and half-black, but he has settled for black. People from South of the border are “Hispanic”, even if they are Indian. People from Spain, even with names like Garcia or Fernandez, are not Hispanic, but white — because Spain is in Europe.

The “Minority Race” is composed of everyone who is not of European heritage: folks from south of the border, from Asia, the Pacific Islands (but not Australia, unless Aborigine), Africa (unless Moslem) from North Africa, or white from South Africa, and so on. Members of the minority race may have nothing in common, and certainly cannot be classified together.  And what do you do when people start intermarrying — which they do.

There was a time when Scots and English loathed each other and fought constant wars. So some Scots went to live in Ireland where they became Scots-Irish, from whence they emigrated to America where they were roundly despised until it was discovered that they were good with guns and crack shots, and useful in war.  In turn, the Irish were despised and called shanty Iris, or lace-curtain Irish. The Italians, Greeks, Albanians and Turks were despised for being darker skinned with funny accents.The Poles— are you old enough to remember Polish jokes?

And then we have Elizabeth Warren, Harvard Law professor, running for Congress as a minority because she has high cheekbones which she inherited from her great, great grandmother who was possibly or definitely not (depending on who you listen to) Cherokee and thus native American.

People have all sorts of different shades of skin. Those who are pasty-white like me spend scads of money to darken it in tanning booths, with tan in a bottle stuff, or preferably at expensive sunny resorts. Being white, we are assumed to be deeply prejudiced against those who have the darker skin that we are trying so hard to acquire.

People of mixed racial heritage, and intermarriage is so common these days that there are many, are still asked to declare their race. ‘Many’ is not acceptable, you have to pick.  George Zimmerman was accused of a racially based hate crime until the media finally discovered that he was part Hispanic and part black as well as the white part.

The Democrat party has long found it profitable to divide their potential voters up into victim groups. Blacks, Hispanics, Jews, and Women are assumed to be incompetent without massive federal help with housing, food, transportation, health care and preferential laws to make their lives worth living. Campaigns are organized to pander to those areas where the group may feel most vulnerable. See the fabled “War on Women.” Republicans talk some about the Hispanic vote or the Black vote, but they’re not any good at it because they don’t really believe in it.

America has had a difficult history with slavery, but far more slaves were transported to the sugar islands and to South America than to this country. It is deemed a far greater evil for America because we talk about it. We fought a horrendous war over it, and we have fought to get rid of its vestiges, step by step, very publicly. With a history of a free press, we have washed our dirty linen in public, and the world knows every step we have taken. But who knows the history of slavery in the Caribbean and South America — hardly anyone, though it lasted much longer and was in many cases more difficult.

Americans come in all shades and sizes, and we are coming much closer to simply recognizing all of us as “Americans”— an eventuality much to be desired. But the government schools keep teaching our children that their race is the most important thing about them, and that some races are victims. And the government insists on counting how proportions of races within a school, a business, a class compare to the proportion in society, as if that is important.   And the Census Bureau keeps dividing us up by categories that just don’t matter at all.  Resist.