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Aerial ambulance chasing
A lawsuit claims the Alaska Air pilots should have landed instead of trying to figure out what was wrong -- but the doomed men did the right thing.
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"The stakes are a bit higher for us"
The NAACP's Washington bureau chief takes the Census Bureau to task for its new multiracial categories.
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Do the multiracial count?
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[02/15/00]

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All mixed up A Salon special report on multiracial America The last taboo Why won't Hollywood let Denzel and Julia do what comes naturally? By Charles Taylor Do the multiracial count? This year the Census Bureau will finally let mixed-race Americans tell the truth about their backgrounds. So why are civil rights groups upset? By Gregory Rodriguez "The stakes are a bit higher for us" The NAACP's Washington bureau chief takes the Census Bureau to task for its new multiracial categories. By Daryl Lindsey Love strands A white mom on the powerful bonding ritual of braiding her mixed-race daughters' hair. By Susan Straight He loves me, loves me not Race was never an issue in my life -- until I fell in love. By Eleanor Stacy Parker

And I had a few arguments. I remember fighting to include the problems of white kids in a youth initiative that was designed to focus on Asians, Latinos and blacks -- as though white youth are well-served by our bankrupt, sclerotic public bureaucracies and schools. I've defended Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown against charges that his crusade to clean up Oakland is racist: One thing working in Oakland taught me is that black political power doesn't equal black advancement, and I no longer pay much attention to race when voting.

And I'm on the verge of becoming a crackpot when confronted with attempts to invoke a grand "people of color" coalition against whites. Early in my awakening I quarreled with an Asian-American colleague who formed a "people of color caucus" inside a do-gooder group that was white-led, but mainly comprising minorities. Why do that, I asked him -- cautiously, nervously -- why exclude white colleagues and allies, especially when they were the minority? Was there a program goal? He was silent for a moment, then angry. "We've been excluded for so long -- they should know how it feels."

Indeed. Revenge has come to seem like the motive behind a lot of civil rights policy. There's always been a tinge of payback and retribution, for instance, in the way school integration, affirmative action and other civil rights measures were implemented -- mostly at the expense of poor and working-class whites -- and until recently I didn't care. Probably, as a self-hating white person, I liked it. But with hindsight it's easy to understand the racial unraveling of the last 20 years.

Affirmative action, to take one example, was always an imperfect way of distributing opportunity, but it made sense in a time of optimism and perceived abundance. In a time of scarcity and contraction, it became predictably divisive. Likewise, we moved to provide public education to all children -- often forced by the courts to do so -- without hugely expanding education spending, which sometimes meant taking from kids who had and giving to kids who didn't. (There's no room to discuss the idiocy of forced busing, except to say that just like forced anything, it only affected those without other options.) Now that the pie is expanding again, maybe the nation is ready for new remedies, but this time they should be far less about race and more about class and inclusion.

It must be said that my rehabilitation from white self-hatred probably started with the birth of my daughter, a blond Irish-Jewish tomboy who has always been drawn to black kids. Now, being a parent in an urban public school, I see how little public education is working for any ethnic group. In most classrooms, understaffed and oversized, conformity is valued over education, and kids who are different, whatever race, get the shaft. But our advocacy groups are divided into identity and interest subsets, which tend to fight among themselves, and thus the true shame of our cities -- their unforgivably bad public schools -- reach critical mass.

In the end, it's my daughter who's showed me the way out of our zero-sum racial blame game. In preschool, coming out of the December-January holiday season, she described her ethnicity in terms of celebrations: she was Hanukkah and Christmas, Kwanzaa and Martin Luther King Jr. Day. At about 6 she told me if she was part-Jewish, I was part-Jewish, since I was her mother. And instead of lecturing her that no one can be part Jewish (or breaking the bad news that because her mom isn't Jewish, some Orthodox Jews will say she couldn't be Jewish if she chose to be), I agreed with her. I've always felt part Jewish, what the hell; I'm part Jewish. Now we light the menorah at my house, too.

And recently I shared with her my father's story about the black Irish. She broke into a big grin, part mischief, part wonder. "I'm black, too! I'm black! I can't wait to tell Marquice!" She ran off to tell her half-black, half-Mexican friend. But her reaction made me think: When the census form comes to our house next month, what box -- or boxes -- will I check? I've got a subversive urge -- part mischief, part wonder -- to check white and "other." If my tortured journey toward racial understanding has taught me anything, it's that we all need to get out of our boxes.
salon.com | Feb. 18, 2000

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