yesterday
i was thinking about some of what i typed here yesterday. in my mind i was seeing a woman and her family, 4 of them, arab, i walked behind them for about 10 minutes, inconveniently unable to pass them on the sidewalk, the beautiful one of them looked toward me, but not at me. 70s-style sunglasses. bright orange and yellow and red garments. beautiful. all of it. beautiful woman, beautiful attire, beautiful day. the sunglasses seemed distinct in their way. she chose those? i think about being in that part of town,feeling like i should be elsewhere, in the white part of town, at one of the irish bars where racism simmers, mostly huddling inside the minds of drunken chuckleheads. i lived on the upper east side for a while and when friends from the lower east side came to visit once they looked around the area and marvelled at “all the white people!“ i responded that the upper east side is “just another ethnic neighborhood,“ and my visitors looked at me with bafflement, mouths gaping. they said nothing articulate but i interpreted their shock to mean that white people are not ethnic, they are just…. white. i would disagree. all races are ethnic. all music is ethnic music. all food is ethnic food. practical histories of the races are written by the judges and winners of the times in question. until recently i have felt that i was blind to race. now i begin to feel its power. its dark power. i am reading through definitions of the word ethnic and i find it more interesting than expected. the word used to mean pagan, heathen. in modern usage it refers to any characteristic of a distinct people. but i sense that usage of the word has an internal conflict, or compromise. among white people i think that ethnic means anything that is not white. ethnic food excludes cheeseburgers and budweiser, but includes mojitos and tacos, even though i consider none of the above any less culturally distinctive than the other. when a brazilian beer or pizza-in-a-cone reaches the americas it is greeted as vaguely quaint exo
tica, but the products themselves differ little if at all from american products. there is no american ethnic group, though. america is too much a country of countries, comprising regions and values too vast and varied for to tag it with singular labels. america‘s greatest export? the word “OK“
