I read the book, Not a Geninuine Black Man by Brian Copeland. Then I start talkin to my wife about the book and she says "Why are you hung up about ethnicity issues?" She says she wishes everyone would get beyond the ethnicity issue and just see people as people. Fair enough. In a perfect world sure, but that's not the planet we live on. I can see why one wouldn't want to talk about ethnicity differences at work because it can be a touchy issue, but at home what's the big deal?
Ethnicity Stastics
A. What does the government actually do with this ethnicity data that they collect? (They use it for immigration quotas.)
B. What is to make us believe that the government has our best interest in mind when we're offering our data? Does the city, county or state leaders gather around for the annual ethnicity stastics round table meeting? I've never heard about it on the news? What is done behind closed doors with this information?
C. When my daughter started kindergarten I found out that if you don't specify what ethnicity your child is the teacher is obligated to guess their ethnicity and report it.
The problems with being white in the USA.
1. You're not cool or interesting if you're white. You're the plain, bland, and the boring majority without color. By default everyone thinks they know your story because it's in all the american history books (and half of white american history is downright shameful). Most people don't ask what your ethnicity is because either they have already got you figured out or you're so common that it's not going to be interesting to ask.
2. What's worse is that people may think that my great grandparents where slave holders. It's interesting that I've never been accused of that, nor accused of success due to white privilege. I met a black man with the last name of Robinson and he never made me feel guilty about being white.
I've been refereed to as Caucasian a couple times in my life - both times by non-whites. I don't like being called caucasian because the word is a controversial race clasification that I don't agree with. There is one race. The human species. Caucasian means that from the caucus mountain area. I was born in the United States. My ancient ancestors were from Africa but no one calls me African-American. The word Caucasian is often mis-used. Below is the history of the word "race" and the mis-classifications as well.
Race:
"The notion of race is nearly as problematic from a scientific point of view as it is from a social one. European physical anthropologists of the 17th and 18th centuries proposed various systems of racial classifications based on such observable characteristics as skin color, hair type, body proportions, and skull measurements, essentially codifying the perceived differences among broad geographic populations of humans. The traditional terms for these populationsCaucasoid (or Caucasian), Mongoloid, Negroid, and in some systems Australoidare now controversial in both technical and nontechnical usage, and in some cases they may well be considered offensive. (Caucasian does retain a certain currency in American English, but it is used almost exclusively to mean "white" or "European" rather than "belonging to the Caucasian race," a group that includes a variety of peoples generally categorized as nonwhite.) The biological aspect of race is described today not in observable physical features but rather in such genetic characteristics as blood groups and metabolic processes, and the groupings indicated by these factors seldom coincide very neatly with those put forward by earlier physical anthropologists. Citing this and other points such as the fact that a person who is considered black in one society might be nonblack in another many cultural anthropologists now consider race to be more a social or mental construct than an objective biological fact."
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