Thursday, July 02, 2009

Welcome to ‘White’   [Jay Nordlinger]

I’ve been getting some interesting mail on race and ethnicity, America’s perpetual and vexing topic. Is there any subject on which we’re screwier than race and ethnicity? Sotomayormania has only served to highlight this. Anyway, the mail I speak of stems from a couple of items in Impromptus today.

 

There is mail in that column, too. And I so like one letter I publish, I’m going to talk about it again, here in the Corner. The letter comes from an Italian-American friend of ours — reader, cruiser, etc. (I’m not implying anything by “cruiser” — it’s just that he has come on at least one of National Review’s cruises.) He was thinking about the Ricci case. And he says that, when he was growing up in Kansas City, Italians weren’t considered white — far from it. Now they’re lily, it seems.

 

“I can’t figure out if we got a promotion or a demotion. I mean, just as it’s time to line up for minority benefits, we get bumped to the back of the line for being white.”

 

And I especially loved this: “Heck, here in Los Angeles” — where our cruiser now lives — “people refer to me as Anglo. Imagine that, in the very place where Rudolph Valentino was the original Latin Lover.”

 

Valentino would not be a “Latin lover” today — Sonia would definitely say no. He would be an unwise non-Latino, with a poverty of experience. America has always been screwy about race and ethnicity, of course. But you’ll agree that that screwiness moves.

07/02 11:14 AMShare