In Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro is staging an election. Why do they bother, these dictators? Some like a fig leaf, I suppose, however skimpy. I lead my Impromptus today with this, and go on to sundry other subjects, including a democratic South American, Javier Milei, and the price of college (insane).
Among my subjects in yesterday’s column was racial and ethnic box-checking. “For the first time in 27 years,” a news article told us, “the U.S. government is changing how it categorizes people by race and ethnicity.” There will be more boxes, apparently. I wrote,
My distaste for this is strong. I am a dinosaur, clinging to a certain ethos from the previous century. I would rather people thought of themselves as Americans, as human beings, as individuals, as — other things.
But we are a race- and ethnicity-soaked society. And we seem to cut it ever finer, don’t we?
A reader writes,
Hello, Jay,
I, too, hope that one day people will stop thinking of themselves as hyphenated Americans. Having spent my childhood in Trinidad and being of a very mixed heritage, from European to Asian to African, I was never taught to identify myself in racial terms. I was just me. Mixed. It wasn’t until I immigrated to the U.S. in the late ’80s that I was confronted with the idea of being boxed in, having to identify with one race or the other. Well, I couldn’t and I never do. I usually just tick off “Other.”
In high school, an African American said to me, “You aren’t white enough to be white or black enough to be black. What are you?” I said, “I’m me.”
There are times I’m mistaken for Hispanic, and am told I should speak Spanish. There are times I am mistaken for Middle Eastern or southern European. I just ignore it all.
The race industry in this country won’t die, because there are too many hucksters on all sides who want to make a living off it.
Bracingly put. A phrase our reader used — “the idea of being boxed in” — gave me a memory. Back in 2001, we published an article by Ward Connerly, which I titled “Don’t Box Me In.” (The subtitle was “An end to racial checkoffs.”) Ward was very pleased. We both knew an old Cole Porter song: “Don’t Fence Me In.”
You want to hear Bing Crosby sing it, along with the Andrews Sisters? Here. How about Ella Fitzgerald? Here. One could go on — but Ella’s kind of a mic drop.