Monday - November 24, 2003
Who's a Minority?
The government forces many kinds of institutions,
some more against their will than others, to recognize some of us as
"minorities." Only some of these minorities are granted special privileges over
the others, with little reason or rhyme as to why some are chosen over
others.
The US government has decided
that those who are from or descended from the Iberian peninsula of Europe are
Hispanic. Oh, wait, no, they include all those people who come from Central and
South America, no matter if their ancestors are European or not, they can be
African or Native American, or perhaps even Asian. No, wait again, they only
include those from countries in Europe or Central or South America that speak
Spanish. Belize, French Guyana, and Brazil don't count. Neither does Portugal.
Why does that make sense?
I don't like this inherently racist way of
treating people differently simply because of their ancestry. In fact, I would
like to see someone challenge it in court someday by claiming that it violates
the Constitution's proscription against "corruption of the blood." Why am I, of
Portuguese descent, denied the protected status that someone gets whose
ancestors are from a few miles across a border on the Iberian Peninsula in
Spain? Of course the reason is because the Spanish speaking people are a bigger
minority than the Portuguese speaking people. More people grant them more
political muscle. Isn't it odd that being a minority is only good if it's a
majority minority?
It's not like
Portuguese people aren't discriminated against. If you live in many parts of
the South West, being Hispanic is a distinct advantage. But being Portuguese in
some parts of Massachussetts is very rough. So the argument of
disadvantageousness doesn't apply.
How
does one prove one's ancestry? If I claimed to be descended from people from
Spain or Mexico whose progeny briefly lived in the Azores and Lisbon, how could
anyone prove otherwise? As a matter of fact, if I claimed to be black how could
anyone prove me not? Maybe I am. Many Africans invaded Spain and Portugal.
There's probably some Moor in my ancestry. How far back can we go in
calculating race or politically protected
ethnicity?
I know a family who escaped
from Czechoslavakia after World War II and moved to Argentina. Their son moved
to California. If he wanted to, he could claim to be Hispanic, even though he's
Czech, has a Czech name, and can speak Czech among his family. He has a strong
Argentinian accent, and since the Spaniards that settled there before his Czech
family did were of Germanic ancestry (I don't have access to my sources right
now, I think they were Vandals or Alemanni), he doesn't look any different from
anyone else from Argentina. What makes him
hispanic?
The idea of favoring some
people based on their ancestry is bad enough, but it's even worse when you
realize that it's impossible to clearly define who does or doesn't belong to
each protected group.
We need to end
racism. The politics of socialism won't let that happen any time soon,
though.
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