The Artificial Honkey
Shaun Mullen calls Clarence Thomas a white man:
"Race" is an artificial idea, biologically. However, it is an ironclad reality in American life, past and present. To pretend it can be changed by a person's statements and political votes is, frankly, one of the ugliest, stupidest things anyone every typed into existence.
We've now gone completely mad in the way Orwell warned. Language has become unmoored from reality. Barack Obama, who has better claim to the literal sense of "African-American" than most modern American blacks, is denied the label. But while racial identity has become something bestowed (or withheld) by some self-appointed sanhedrin of social purists, gender is a personal choice and nobody can call you anything but what you decide to call yourself.
Exaggeration? Not where I work. According to the Associated Press stylebook, the newspaper copy editors' bible:
Thomas, Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito and John Roberts, nominees of Bush père and his son, are all conservatives except when it comes to their judicial activism, the very outrage that conservatives decried when Bill Clinton was president. And with O’Connor, the great equalizer, retired, these four white men (yes, Thomas, too) will be imposing their agenda on all of us for many years to come.
"Race" is an artificial idea, biologically. However, it is an ironclad reality in American life, past and present. To pretend it can be changed by a person's statements and political votes is, frankly, one of the ugliest, stupidest things anyone every typed into existence.
We've now gone completely mad in the way Orwell warned. Language has become unmoored from reality. Barack Obama, who has better claim to the literal sense of "African-American" than most modern American blacks, is denied the label. But while racial identity has become something bestowed (or withheld) by some self-appointed sanhedrin of social purists, gender is a personal choice and nobody can call you anything but what you decide to call yourself.
Exaggeration? Not where I work. According to the Associated Press stylebook, the newspaper copy editors' bible:
transgender Use the pronoun preferred by the individuals who have acquired the physical characteristics of the opposite sex or present themselves in a way that does not correspond with their sex at birth.
If that preference is not expressed, use the pronoun consistent with the way the individuals live publicly.
Labels: Blogging, Clarence Thomas, race
