I was about the turn the television off at that point because it looked as
though his team was about to lose the game and we had guests over for dinner
who didn't get into sports. But then I delayed, because his presence on the
screen pointed to something that we are going to have to get used to a heck
of a lot more:
People Who Are More Difficult To Eyeball.
What "race" was that guy? For that matter, what was his ethnicity?
More and more we are going to encounter people who will make the eyeballers
cringe, because more and more we are producing folks who are the products of
intermixtures. This, coupled with the tremendous influx of folks who are
coming to this country from Abunowe (Anywhere-But-North-West-Europe), is
bursting through the brain-cells of dichotomous-thinking North Americans
raised on "black"/"white"/One Drop.
So far, of course, there are vast (and I mean VAST) areas of the U.S. where
the population is still a haven for eyeballers who like to guess rightly
one's "race":
Large areas of the rural Midwest
However, in other parts of the country, there is a creeping progression of
more and more people who are more difficult to eyeball. People that it might
be prudent to "hold tight" before putting one's foot in one's mouth and
making the wrong assumption about what they are.
It's making me positively gleeful.
I mean, the ambiguity is everywhere!
Just last fall, I was on a Southwest Airlines flight sitting alongside a guy
with low-riding trousers and dark-brown-skinned/kinky-haired features. About
200 miles from our destination, we somehow struck up a conversation and I
discovered that he was a Jamaican. The rest of the time we talked about
Caribbean stuff: regional politics, recent hurricane damages and the price of
plantains and bauxite. On another instance, my cousin and I were taking his
sister to the airport for her flight to Miami and a woman who looked like
Florence Henderson heard us speaking Spanish and before long we were in a
Spanish-language conversation talking about the problems of guerillas in Peru
(which is where she was from) and what it may mean for the Dominican
Republic. On yet another a Puerto Rican mechanic (well, he looked Puerto
Rican, didn't he?) came up to me and asked me if I could tell him where the
"brothers" hang out.
And who (and what???) was that lady in the latest "Mission Impossible" movie
starring opposite Tom Cruise?
It's gotten so bad (good, really) that I have begun to feel a certain amount
of pity for those whose every waking hour is spent trying to eyeball people
and place them in convenient categories before getting to know what's inside
their souls.
I mean, it was different in the past. In the middle of the last century,
there was a myth (loosely corresponding to reality) which had a population
which was 85+% "white" confronting a 10% "black" population. The rest of the
people -- a tiny "Hispanic" group, a minuscule "Indian" group and a microscopic
"Asian" group -- were bystanders to the "big dance": the slugfest between
"black" and "white".
Oh, alas! Eyeballing was so much simpler then!
William Javier Nelson, Ph.D.
This past March, while I was watching the NCAA tournament, I saw a young man
playing gracefully and effortlessly in the paint. The back of his jersey had
a Jewish name on it, and the player himself had hair whose curls were a bit
tighter than mine. To complete the picture, the guy was a little bit darker
than olive in complexion.
Huge tracts in the South
Also of interest by William Javier Nelson:
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