Due to unusual circumstances that I won’t even get into, I found myself at a ritzy event, surrounded by wealthy individuals. I happened to be standing near the door, and I saw members of the one percent walk in.
For the most part, they were polite and just like you and me. However, the exceptions were numerous enough to notice.
Once again, I’m happy to announce that I’ve collaborated on a post with the very insightful Louis Pagan. Our second joint effort can be found at HuffPo Latino. You can click here to see it.
Perhaps you officially need three instances to call something a trend or tradition, but I think two times is sufficient to say that we’re on a roll.
Twenty years ago, I had my only direct experience with racial set-asides. I won a hundred dollars in an essay contest for Hispanic teens. Of course, kids of any race could enter, but it was clearly aimed at Latinos. I can’t recall ever being part of another program that was, whether stated or implied, just for Hispanics.
As such, I’m still waiting for those affirmative action quotas that will rocket me to the top of any employer’s wish list. Supposedly, all I have to do is show up in an HR office, mention my last name, and sit back while all the qualified white candidates are shoved out windows to make way for me.
Perhaps you didn’t notice when a national political leader said that America was entering the “Decade of the Hispanic.”
You can be forgiven, because the speaker was Henry Cisneros, and he wasn’t talking about our current decade. He was talking about the 1980s.
I have been remiss. Some time ago, I was interviewed by Derrick Witherspoon for the internet radio show Reckless 2.0. We talked about ethnicity in America, racial categorization, and of course, the Wisconsin State Fair (really, it all related).
But as well as the interview went (which is not to say that Mr. Witherspoon and I agreed on everything), I haven’t promoted it on this site until now. Sorry about that — I apparently suffered a Rick Perry-level brain freeze… well certainly not that bad, but you get the picture.
To listen to the interview, which means that you will actually hear the sound of my voice (freaky!), just click here.
Depending on whom you ask, the housing crisis is over, still going on, or entering a new and far more sinister phase.
Regardless of what happens to the housing market in the near future, we Latinos are doing our part to bolster this crucial component of the U.S. economy. In fact, Hispanics “are thriving during a record low housing market. In the past decade Latino homeownership has risen 2%.”
In America, you can be anything you want to be, and everybody has unlimited potential…
Well, if that were really true, the entire population would be nothing but rock stars, senators, Oscar-winning actresses, and NFL quarterbacks.
Apparently, a bunch of sluts were running around my city recently.
I’m talking, of course, about the SlutWalk movement, which began earlier this year when a Toronto cop implied that women who dressed like “sluts” deserved to get raped. Outraged at the cop’s statement, women all over North America hit the streets both to protest the Neanderthal mindset that afflicts so many males, and to repurpose the word “slut.”
“The U.S. Census Bureau expects racial minorities / people of color to make up a majority of the U.S. population in the next thirty to forty years. Do you feel concerned or hopeful about that?”
The question comes from a survey conducted by the Applied Research Center, which asked Americans their opinions about a well-publicized fact: By 2050, if not sooner, the nation’s combined population of racial and ethnic minorities will outnumber white Americans.
My old neighborhood in New York City has become a bit of a yuppie den. My current neighborhood in Los Angeles is apparently being overrun by hipsters.
Can any of us escape gentrification?
As I wrote recently, Latino neighborhoods have increasingly become gentrified as white people move into what used to be called the barrio. This process is either a solution to urban blight or a desecration of Hispanic culture, depending on whether you’re the gentrifier or the gentrifee (yes, I made those words up, don’t bother to comment on them).
