I felt a lot of pressure the other day while filling out an application for classes, to state what race I am.
I feel a lot of pressure to explain to my kids why being Mexican, especially an illegal, is a much better position from which to be selected for college, and to get a scholarship, instead of being white like they are.
They just don’t feel the urge to hate themselves because people in some stupid economic decision making hundreds of years ago went with the asinine trend to use slave labor and to push for its legality, nor because idiots acted on racial prejudice rampantly, 50 years ago.
They would rather feel encouraged that they can do whatever they want to do in life, like their great grandparents who built New York City as bricklayers and elevator constructors who put their kids through college, the military academies, engineering programs to help lead corporations like Motorola and Coca Cola and Schering Plough, regardless of the street fighting and snobby (perhaps somewhat deserved) stigma against their Irish nationality.
So, there’s pressure there to hate themselves for being white that they’re also bombarded with in classes who hammer this stuff in with months of study of the Holocaust, slavery etc, and that’s just in eighth grade. Oh, and, of course with no mention of the holocaust occurring under their noses, of their friends, brothers and sisters, 55 million killed in this country since 1973, which, if we ever climb out of this morass, will pale Hitler’s killing of a mere 6 million.
Of course now they’re in a good school learning what they should be learning - the classics, chemistry, language western civ. But there’s pressure coming for them to feel bad about all of this when they get out into college, and the workworld.
They don’t buy the lie that it’s not racist for the country to hate white people.
Young people are much more logical than they get credit for, and much more logical than adults whose work and college environments have corrupted them into being.
But it’s pressure for a parent to make sense out of this for them. Why the Mexican (non white Latina) who roars off in her mother’s new Escalade gets no questions asked scholarship money while they happily tumble into the old military salary bought Camry.
Coffees ready.
Waffles for us
S
This sort of thing annoys me as well, since "white" is not a race. It is a conglomeration of people in America who were Angles, Saxons, Celts, Gauls, Frisians, Basques, Teutons, Nordics, Franks, Flemish, Etruscans, Romans, Greeks, Lapps, Caucasians, Slavs, Turks, Semites, Baltids, etc etc etc... Many of us whose ancestors have been here for a long time are also mixed with various kinds of Native Americans.
This racist crap has to stop. People are stereotyped by their behavior much more than their skin color.