Race & Identity

There has to be an Imus event every once in a while. Ethnicity being the volatile thing it is, gratuitously inflammatory remarks have to be discouraged, so bounds of acceptable speech have to be clarified. Clarity comes when, inevitably, someone oversteps and gets slapped down.

Maybe this particular boundary could have been clarified with less punishment, given how abjectly Don Imus has apologized. Still, there had to be a price, and, compared with the prices paid in some multiethnic societies (remember… more

Have you ever wondered why phrases such as "sectarian violence," "ethnic cleansing" and "genocide" are heard so often around the world -- but not in the United States?

Why do people in so many other countries systematically slaughter their countrymen? And why is America a happy exception?

There are "killing fields" around the world, in Africa, the Middle East and Asia. But not here. One reason we are no longer cursed with civil strife is that Martin Luther King Jr. helped lift… more

Move over St. Louis -- El Paso is the true gateway to the modern American West. Lewis and Clark may have been the first Anglo Americans to explore the vast area between the Mississippi and the Pacific, but two centuries earlier, Juan de Onate, born in New Spain, forded the Rio Grande at El Paso on his way north to establish the first Hispanic settlement in what is today the Western United States.

Last Saturday afternoon, St. Patrick’s Day, I found… more

Don’t be fooled by its name: The 204th Street gang, two of whose members have been arrested in connection with last month’s racially motivated slaying of 14-year-old Cheryl Green, is what you could call a commuter gang.

Of its 100 documented members, only about 20 live in the 12-block sliver of the Harbor Gateway district they claim as their own. Neither of the two men who agreed to speak for the gang -- 32-year-old Jonathan O’Gorman (yes, his father is Irish)… more

Sunflower County, MS -- “Are Lebanese white people?" we asked 71-year-old Ned Holder, a former sheriff here. "Yes," he said, "although they’re real dark." How about Italian Catholics; are they white? Sure. And Jews? Yes. What about the Chinese? "Yes," he said, "they go to the white schools." And Mexicans? "They’re becoming more white. More of them are getting an education."

Then what’s a white person, we asked? After some confusion over the meaning of the question, he concluded that it… more

I don’t know what was more disturbing, the lame attempt to suppress immigrant voter turnout in California’s 47th Congressional District or the breathless reporting and hyper-indignation that followed it.

Editorialists called the incident "despicable." Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger labeled it "racist" and a "hate crime." The chairman of the Orange County Republican Party called it "grotesque and obnoxious." You’d think they were all talking about a lynching, or at least a cross-burning. But no, it was a rather pedantic letter sent… more

RIO DE JANEIRO -- Even as U.S. society struggles to move beyond its confining binary view of race -- white versus black with nothing in between -- Brazil, a country where the celebration of racial mixture has long been a central part of the national self-image, may be heading in the opposite direction.

Between the 16th and 19th centuries, this South American nation received more African slaves than any country in the Americas. But the shortage of white women, and… more

Berlin -- If U.S. culture is an unusual mix of chauvinism and innocence, then German culture can best be described as an odd combination of sturdiness and self-doubt.

"Selbstzweifel," one German novelist told me.

"I want you to write down the German word for self-doubt," he said. "S-E-L-B... . We do think a lot about who we are, that's what I love about Germans. But then we have serious doubts."

This week, more… more

BERLIN -- If language learning and vacation destinations are any indication, then Germans are among the world's most cosmopolitan people. No one travels around the globe more than they do; few are more multilingual.

But even as Germans eagerly embrace the planet's ethnic and cultural diversity, they are struggling with it back home. There have been no recent incidents of home-grown Islamic terrorism in Germany (as there have been in Britain) and no rioting by minority youth (as in France),… more

I came to France to see how the country is responding to November's violent suburban riots and the increasing social diversity they symbolized. What I found was a nation that has been forced to acknowledge the existence of its alienated minorities yet stubbornly refuses to concede that the French model of integration has failed.

It's not easy to talk about race or ethnicity in France. For one thing, it is against the law for the government and private firms to… more