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Let's stop pigeonholing people by race
I've spent a good part of my life taking pride in being a liberal. I
thought being a liberal meant, in part, being for equality, for equal
opportunity to get ahead. I felt a bit more fair than those immigrants from
Mexico in the 1880's who wrote letters back home to Mexico about those
terrible "foreigners", the Chinese, who were taking jobs that should have
gone to Californians. When the army flew me to Washington, D.C. with a
stopover at Dallas Airport in 1951, I was shocked to see the "Whites Only"
drinking fountains. I had heard of such things, but actually seeing one was
distressing. I haven't been back to Texas to check out the drinking
fountains since.
It's not always easy to know who is White and who is not. If your
great-grandfather was a General in the Mexican Army under Santa Anna, you
might plausibly guess that he was a descendant of both the Spanish and of
native Indian tribes. You wouldn't know for sure. Which fountain would the
Texas folk of 1951 have allowed you to drink from? If your grandfather was
a descendant of a Cherokee woman and a White man, which fountain would you
drink from? If your grandfather was a Portuguese immigrant, presumably you
would be allowed to drink from the White fountain in 1951, but in 1935 if
you were a trained college professor of economics in California and your
grandfather was a Portuguese immigrant, you wouldn't have been allowed to
teach at the University of California, because you were Catholic and Masons
were the predominant class allowed to teach in UC academic situations.
I have been admirer of the work of the American Civil Liberties Union for
most of my life. I recently sent in my membership, in fact. Even when they
defended the right of Nazis to march in Skokie, Illinois, I thought they
were probably justified. Skokie cost the ACLU a great deal, including many
membership cancellations, but it was a matter of principle. So I thought
that the ACLU, and others of my fellow liberals, would be at the forefront
in the campaign to stop pigeonholing Californians by the color of their
skins and their ancestral genes. As Martin Luther King suggested, judge
people instead by the content of their characters.
I was shocked to get a mailing from the ACLU the other day, rallying the
troops. Instead of suggesting that the state of California stop
pigeonholing by race, they are arguing just the opposite. Prop. 54, which
would make it impossible to know just how many White, Black, Filipino,
Japanese, Chinese, and Hispanic drinking fountains we need, would instead
treat us all alike. The state MUST subdivide us, I'm told by the ACLU. The
blonde descendants of Mexican Indians, descendants of Cherokee chiefs,
descendants of Azorean whalers, descendants of Thomas Jefferson in the
Sally Hemings line, descendants of Kanaka goldminers, descendants of
Frederick Douglass and Frederick the Great, all of us must be categorized
and, each of us, put into the proper census category, each of us to be
treated differently based on our ancestry. The Nazis did the same thing to
the Jews. Ostensibly the outcome will be different. Ostensibly persons of
African ancestry must be treated a little more equally than the rest of us,
to make up for past injustice. I fail to see how you can do that. I prefer
to be judged by the content of my character. I hope you do as well. I plan
to vote Yes on Prop. 54.
E mail The Reactor at Paul@thereactor.net.
Check The Reactor's website at www.thereactor.net.
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