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Power Femme
How Do You Identify?:
Cinnamon spiced, caramel colored, power-femme
Preferred Pronoun?:
She
Relationship Status:
Married to a wonderful horse girl
Join Date: Oct 2009
Location: Lat: 45.60 Lon: -122.60
Posts: 1,733
Thanks: 1,132
Thanked 6,844 Times in 1,493 Posts
Rep Power: 21474852
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Quote:
Originally Posted by betenoire
It's true. I'll own up to that.
Mind you, the white person who I think of when I heard the word "American" also has huge hair and tapered jeans and a sweatshirt with a really ugly emblem on it and is loud and probably cut in front of me in line somewhere and has a gun in her purse / down the back of his pants and is selfish and inconsiderate and mean and watches too much television. I mean, seriously, it's NEVER an attractive, friendly, and smart white person who comes to mind for me. Ever.
That doesn't make me any less of a jerkface, of course. Probably a bit more of a jerkface.
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And in some ways, it is understandable WHY people think 'white' when they think 'American'. America is now far *more* diverse than it has been since at any point since the late 18th century and, if my math is correct, the United States is still about 80% white. Now, that said, I still find the idea to be disturbing to me *as an American* because--and here my romantic naivete is on full display--I actually bought into this idea that what makes an American is nothing more than buying into a particular set of principles. Americans aren't defined by race, we aren't defined by ethnicity, we aren't defined by religion, we are defined--as the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote--by commitment to an ideal. If you buy into this ideal of individual liberty, freedom of conscience, the rule of law and not of men, equality before the law and some kind of egalitarianism then you are an American. So when Sarah Palin talks about 'real America' and makes it clear that she's not talking about people who either look OR think like me, I have a problem.
Cheers
Aj
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Proud member of the reality-based community.
"People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so, the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn’t that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people. As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn’t measure up." (Terry Pratchett)
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