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TALES OF AN ORANGEPEELER

an archive of pleasures, wounds, sublimations
& other curiosities :: profile


06.18.02

"In this day and age, when a vast majority of Californians are ready to move beyond race, why are we still tracking and sorting people for jobs, contracts, college admissions, and other government benefits and services by something as artificially constructed and inconsistently applied as 'race'? How are we every going to be 'one nation indivisible' if an obsessively nosy government continually asks, sorts and separates us by race as if we were all of pure blood and fit in one of 5 major groups? Is this California in 2002 or the Deep South in 1902?"--Kevin T. Nguyen, proponent of the Racial Privacy Initiative, in a San Francisco Chronicle editorial a few days back

...

Um, yes. Let's ignore job & housing discrimination, health care inequities, hate crimes and other economic and social iniquities. Nevermind that--although people like Nguyen may describe its artificiality and simply leave it at that--race (and its bedfellow, class) are at the roots of these ills and that some parts of California circa 2002 look like the Deep South of 1902. History is a f**ken bloody ghost, out to haunt despite all attempts to whitewash or hide it behind smoke and mirrors.






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