Minorities

Columns of paramilitary police are now keeping a tenuous peace in Urumqi, the western Chinese city where more than 1,000 Uighurs rioted ten days ago in the bloodiest clash in decades between the authorities and the Turkic-speaking Muslim minority group.

On Sunday, more than 1,000 Uighurs clashed with police in the western Chinese city of Urumqi -- marking one of the country's bloodiest ethnic conflicts in recent years.

President Obama's nomination of Sonia Sotomayor for Supreme Court justice has been widely hailed as a triumph for Latinos. But it could just as likely spell the end of the very idea that there is such a thing as Latino America at all.

What does a Mexican-hating right-wing radio shock jock named Jay Severin have in common with President Obama's yet-to-be-named Supreme Court nominee? The former already is, and the latter will likely turn out to be, a signifier of a new political calculus that is lowering the profile of the burgeoning Latino electorate, two-thirds of which is Mexican American.

I wonder what the late historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. would have made of Texas Gov. Rick Perry's pandering to Lone Star secessionists on April 15. I'd love to hear what he'd say about Sarah Palin's flirtation with the Alaskan Independence Party and its disdain for the rest of the United States.

How much is your ethnicity worth? In hard cash. Dollars and cents. How much do you think you can get for it?

When we talk about race in America, we speak in terms of power and strife. When we bring up ethnicity, we focus on the gushy stuff -- pride and the sense of belonging that strong cultural identities create. Think of those quaint, exotics-on-display "isn't diversity great?" stories on National Public Radio.

For the record, "Yes we can" emerged as a slogan later and less deliberately than one might think. The year was 1972, three years after César Chávez had appeared on the cover of Time magazine and two years after he had led farmworkers to a major victory against grape producers in California. Chávez was in Arizona trying to reverse a law prohibiting strikes by farmworkers during harvest time. Supporters of Chávez told him the law couldn’t be repealed. "No se puede," they said. Dolores Huerta, a

Last year, I had the great pleasure of seeing The Order of Myths, Margaret Brown's brilliant documentary film on Mobile, Alabama's storied, and segregated, Mardi Gras celebrations. Even now, long after the end of Jim Crow, the city's leading white families put together an elaborate series of Mardi Gras balls and parades under the auspices of the Mobile Carnival Association, and they name a royal court to preside over the festivities. Starting in 1938, a number of black families formed the Mobile Area Mardi Gras Association (MAMGA)… more