'White' People

I talked in my Ben Franklin reflection paper about the annoyance some white people feel (myself included, I confess) when they have to check the 'white' box on race and ethnicity forms. I know we don't really have space to complain in the face of the extreme white privilege being evidenced virtually every night on national television, but all the same there's no denying the fact that the 'white' box does erase the ethnic diversity within whiteness. Worse still is the moniker 'Caucasian', which, taken literally, is an demonym referring to people who live in/hail from the Caucasus Mountains, which straddle the Europe-Asia continental divide. I'm not Caucasian; I'm half  'American mutt', admittedly, but I'm also a quarter Czechslovak and a quarter German. I speak German at home and bake koláče for Easter, and those sorts of cultural differences used to be more acknowledged when they were the biggest differences between immigrants. Now with something as insurmountable as skin color and visible 'race' in the way, they are being forgotten. That's a tragedy, I think. We're lumping in Chinese, Tibetans, and Japanese under the banner of 'Asian' when those groups have had enmity for years. We're losing sight of the differences between Argentinian and Bolivian, losing languages and foods and cultural traditions that once made life so much more colorful. But we can't forget that we're also losing dirndles and Tyrolian hats and presents opened by candle-light on Christmas Eve. Its sad what we're doing to diversity by recognizing only 'all the colors of the world': red, yellow, black, white, as in the song, and also brown, and Middle Eastern and Latinx? Seven little categories, one for each billion of us.

The article below isn't much more than we've been talking about in class, really, I just thought it was an excellent graphical representation of that discussion. It shows the transition from a nation made up of white immigrants from different places to a nation made up of white 'natives' and PoC 'interlopers' rather well. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if the change in views I've been thinking about matched up with that sudden shift from Germany to Mexico.

A Shift From Germany to Mexico