A while back I was talking about my home, the Dominican Republic, to a class I was teaching. In response to some questions about economics, I (rightly, I feel) portrayed the Dominican Republic as a poor country with serious challenges.

I should have stopped right there.

Instead, I continued to talk and observed that Haiti, next door, was even worse off. I may have been a little over-enthusiastic in my descriptions, because shortly afterwards, a student raised his hand and informed me that he was Haitian. He wasn't offended and, in fact, agreed with me. However, that lecture underscored to me once again the possibilities of mis-reading others' ethnicities by personal "eyeball tests".

As the United States gets more and more diverse and as intermarriages increase (yes, even including one-drop-locked-into-place African Americans) a general social landscape is evolving in which I, personally, feel privileged to be living: Eyeballing will become more and more bogus as a strategy for choosing words in conversations. More importantly, even if one's ethnicity is known what will not, necessarily, be known will be connections any person has with persons of other ethnic or "racial" groups. Imagine a conversation between two "Anglos" free from the cloying presence of "minorities". One Anglo says to the other that she feels that multi-racial kids are misguided zebras. The other Anglo reveals to her friend that her brother is married to an Asian woman.

Presently, the anglo "white" population is less than 75 percent.

(1) Subract from that total those who are intermarried with Asians (who out-marry over 35%), Latinos (who out-marry in some cases over 35%) and African Americans (who are beginning to explore more and more non-"black" marriage partners). [I'm not even including those "whites" who are married to Native Americans because the Native American population is so small]

(2) Take what remains from the above and further subtract siblings and close relatives who are out-married.

What you get is a percentage sufficiently small to endanger more and more the kinds of social milieus in which racist and exclusionary conversations thrive.

Yesterday, at my job, I was summoned to translate for a customer who was unable to communicate his needs in English to the staff serving him. As I entered the workstation, I asked, "Where is the guy?"

"There," the agent-in-charge replied, pointing to a guy who looked like Opie Taylor's uncle. I walked up to the man and said, "Soy dominicano." He smiled broadly and answered, "Un placer. Soy colombiano."

Well, we got everything straightened out and communication was restored. But as I was heading back to my own workstation, I couldn't help but wonder what would have happened if that Colombian had understood English--and would have been in the company of anti-Latino bigots thinking that he was really Opie's uncle.

William Javier Nelson, Ph.D.

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