Let's take President Obama's new Supreme Court nominee. She's Hispanic (or Dominican, or Puerto Rican, or something South of American). It really doesn't matter in the context of this story.
I guess this woman made a comment a couple years ago that actually made sense in the context of what she was talking about, but perhaps it wasn't said in the most 'PC' of ways. Whatever. It was years ago. Let it be.
Oh wait, she's a new appointee and we need dirt and gossip. So Rush Limbaugh gets on the golden mic and calls her a racist. Then uses the term "reverse racist". CNN of course jumps on this because they need to fill hours. Next thing you know, we have "experts" throwing out terms like "new racism" vs. "old racism".
First of all, the chick isn't a racist. She's a high profile Latina which gives the media a target. Terms related to race are naturally coming up because there wouldn't be a story if they didn't.
Second, am I wrong, or is racism just racism? Seems to me that if you're seriously demoralizing any specific ethnic group, you are a racist. You're not a reverse racist, a new racist, an old racist...you're just a plain ol' racist.
If there are any racists in this whole picture, I would think it's the media. They are the ones that perpetuate these stories and terms, and they're the ones that create cases of racism where there are none by magnifying things and blowing them way out of proportion. And suddenly you have the idiot public blindly crying "racist" because the media told them to. It's careless and dumb.
I guess the only way to eliminate this kind of thing is to wipe out the use of words that define groups of people (i.e. black, white, hispanic, asian, gay, blah blah blah) and, I don't know, use the word "people" instead. Pretty simple stuff that will never happen, but can you imagine the difference if it did? The "news" would almost disappear...and that would be awesome.
Anyhoo, this distracts from my usual happy-go-luckyness, so here's something a little more 'me'...
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