A Few Thoughts on Race

Hi. I am French-Canadian-Italian American. I live in the melting pot, where every color blends to enrich the collective tapestry. But color still seems to stain the individual.

Barack Obama is a living example of American color-sensitivity. We always believed that someday a black man would be elected President and that that occurrence would enforce our lauded ideals of equality. That black man just had to be one of the brightest men in his generation with a top-notch campaign team, following on the administration of one who may be easily be one of the farthest below average intellects to be found among the white elite class with the irony found only in real life. Oh, and Obama's blackness is first-generation African American, not the blackness of the descendants of people who carried the shame of slavery. That stain will remain through centuries, it seems. (Sorry, Jesse Jackson.)

French-Canadians and Italians, among emigrants of many other nationalities, flooded into America in the early 20th century. They lived in cultural enclaves which nurtured their entry into a new society. Many of them did jobs that native-borns didn't want; they were poorly paid. Though they probably did not suffer the inequalities of being black in America, neither were they white. This country has been ruled by Anglo-Americans for most of its existence, and those of Mediterranean complexion or the Catholic faith were not accepted to that strata of seraphim. I am off-white.

There are so many colors of American (something the producers of American cheese don't seem to have realized). These past few years I have listened to American accents fall from the lips of brown-skinned people from countries new to American emigration, and felt a tiny thrill that these people are American, new threads in a fading tapestry. Their blood will invigorate a breed which has seen many generations of close intermingling.