The Coronavirus

[Eric the Green]

(09-01-2020, 12:10 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(08-31-2020, 09:40 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(08-30-2020, 01:33 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:

(08-30-2020, 11:34 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: Racism offers the visceral fear that a precious white daughter might have a daughter who looks like this:



(Jasmine Sanders, supermodel. African-American father and a German mother.

Somehow, I can't seem to summon up the proper amount of shock and horror.  

In a hundred years, that may be the predominant 'look' of an American: mutts as we are.

It's even more complicated than that.  There has been a significant Mexican-American population in certain parts of the southwestern quadrant of the US annexed what would become California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and western Colorado. By law such people were treated as white even if they had large amounts of First Peoples' ancestry. About a century ago the US got large numbers of Mexican immigrants as a consequence of the chaos of the Mexican Revolution  that happened during the WWI boom in the American economy. Today, Mexicans and Mexican-Americans are everywhere and in larger numbers in places that had only small Mexican settlement (most of Arizona, California and Texas;  such cities as Sacramento, Fresno, Bakersfield, Reno, Las Vegas, Austin, Fort Worth, and Dallas did not exist in Mexican times; Denver has a large Mexican-American population even though it was never within Mexican territory. Even such cities within Mexico were little more than mission-and-garrison communities, including most California cities named after saints and San Antonio and El Paso, Texas. 

There has never been as much white antipathy toward Mexican-Americans in any part of America than against blacks. Intermarriage between Anglo whites and Mexican-Americans is often an interracial marriage if the Mexican-American spouse has significant ancestry among First Peoples. Note also 
that some Asian-American populations are doing quite well... 

...It is time for white Americans to grow up on 'race'. It matters far less than do character, creativity, rationality, work ethic, and opportunity. The people most proud to be white almost are as a rule people who have the fewest traits worthy of admiration or are simply crazy or deluded. Anyone proud to be whit is proud of nothing.

That's right. And there was a program on PBS a while back by a geneticist who showed that the First Peoples of America that came from Siberia to Alaska about 12-13000 years ago had common ancestors to the white Caucasians that moved west into Europe. So we are not so different physically. Our cultures are different, but these change more rapidly with time as cross-fertilizations occur. And intermarriage between all the races will continue to increase. The host of this program said that sometime soon it will be too hard to trace the movements of different races and people over time, because we will be more blended.

The conspiracy theorists and trumpists are against "globalization," and are nationalists. America First. Germany uber alles. Brexit. Make our country great again. Keep the immigrants out. "They're bringing problems with them. They're bringing crime, they're bringing drugs, they're rapists, etc." No, we don't want our trade and national economy left at the mercy of multi-national corporations and their power, or to have such combines invalidate laws against pollution and unfair labor practices. Fair trade and some tariffs are needed. Local community and national control has its place. But we are a global society, and have been for over a hundred years. We can't hide behind walls from the rest of the world. Resistance to racial, ethnic and cultural mixing is futile. Tradition is worth preserving, but cultural purity creates stagnation rather than creativity and innovation. Our cultural heritage is the whole world. We don't want the USA to be the world policeman and impose our greedy corporate power or our politics on the world by force, or start preventive wars of choice. But we must be multi-lateralists and play our part in the world community, honor and not break our agreements as Trump is doing, support the United Nations and world law and order, and help support democracy, freedom and justice where we can. 

And in the case of Iraq: we broke it; we own it. We need to stay engaged there in our former recent colony more than Trump is doing, as long as they want us to be there.