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May 16, 2003
Whatever to That
Race relations is the art of making serious the retarded choices white people make about people they call nonwhite. The more seriously you take race relations, the more seriously you have to take whitefolks' opinion. The good thing about being my kind of black man is that you don't have to take anyone seriously, except the wife and that tax man. Neither of them are white. So there.
Nevertheless everyone is not my kind of black man and well, it's often interesting to hear what the rest of the world has to offer. On today's menu is the ascendency of the Hispanic. Mind you that all I need to do is learn Spanish and I am as Hispanic as anyone. I've already got the accent down. I did grow up here in California. Since it doesn't take much, bear in mind that I don't take this ascendency very seriously. Why should I? This is all about race relations, after all.
Over at the Village Voice, race relations is a seminal subject if not a department unto itself. And so they have proclaimed:
For African Americans, the Latino explosion has no particular significance, except that the mere suggestion of a black-Latino rivalry deflects attention from the most entrenched conflict in American history—the one between blacks and whites. Better yet, Anglos prefer that blacks and Latinos fight it out, allowing them to sidestep race, and black people, altogether.
I agree, sorta. Guessing what whitefolks prefer is a task for junior race man. I'm even bored of the metadiscussion.
How about some Tim Wise on asians instead?
According to the Census Bureau, in 1996, median household income was about $35,500. But in states with disproportionate shares of Asians (NY and Hawaii, for example), median household income was $39,000 and $42,000 respectively. This means that APA median income will be skewed upward, relative to the rest of the country, but given cost of living differences, actual disposable income and living standards will be no better and often worse.More importantly, claims of Asian success obscure the fact that the Asian American child poverty rate is nearly double the white rate, and according to a New York Times report in May of 1996, Southeast Asians as a whole have the highest rates of welfare dependence of any racial or ethnic group in the United States.
Nearly half of all Southeast Asian immigrants and refugees in the U.S. live in poverty, with annual incomes in 1990 of less than $10,000 per year. Amazingly, even those Southeast Asians with college degrees face obstacles. Two-thirds of Lao and Hmong-American college grads live below the poverty level, as do nearly half of Cambodian Americans and over a third of Vietnamese Americans with degrees.
That feels better.
Posted by mbowen at May 16, 2003 08:33 PM
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Comments
WOW! I enjoy IT!
Posted by: Captain Stabbin at July 12, 2004 02:01 PM