Othanical

A lowly undergraduate climbing toward the light.

Thursday, July 20, 2006

Cream like

In the United States, if you're of mixed heritage, you are seen as black. The question of whether this is a good thing or bad thing is a dumb one.

Everyday that I see a book about race relations, or some soft scientific study about racial "tendencies" I tense up a little bit. I hope with all of my heart that the field of sociology that discusses race goes the way of phrenology, or of alchemy. Like everyone, I want everyone to be 100% color blind, but it's difficult in a society that has and still does place such a tremendous importance on it.

Since 1967, when LBJ mandated affirmative action, he propagated a lame ideology -- the ideology that something has to do anything with race. Now that we've flipped racism over on its backside and punish people with light skin for their past with racist policies, it is difficult to let it go. Why do newscasters feel it important to include race when reporting the identity of juveniles who were arrested for vandalism? Why do we as a society feel obligated to point out who the first latino, first black, or first asian to do something was? I am sure it was a much more difficult accomplishment then than it would be now, but it's bad for us. We need to stop focusing so much on race, and look more at poverty.

It seems like the only way for us to forget about race will to take the words out of the dictionary, we need lose the ability to articulate race, we will only become more intelligent from doing that. Even if those are impossibly drastic measures, I'd like everyone to try a little bit harder to look at their everyday life, start stereotyping less, and do more to try and find out about the people around you more. I've kind of already broken my code by writing this whole post. Forget about it if you don't know what race is, you're doing a good job.

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