This Post Will Offend You

I was not originally going to cross post this one because it's not really political as much as personal, but C and his wife really seemed to like it, so courtesy Left of Center ...

White Trash, Honky, Skinhead, Redneck, Hick, Okie, Opie, Whitebread, Cracker, Nigger, Spade, Spook, Darkie, Coon, Spic, Wetback, Taco Vender, Border Jumper, Gook, Flip, Jap, Chink, Slant, Jew, Kike, Rag Head, Camel Jockey, Sand Nigger, Frog, Kraut, Dike, Homo, Fag, Fairy, Lesbo...

My family is about as ethnically diverse as it gets. I'm Hawaiian, Japanese, German, and Irish. My wife is first generation Chinese, making my daughter Hawaiian, Japanese, German, Irish, and Chinese. My stepmother is black, and I therefore have two black step brothers, three black step sisters, and one half black, half white half brother. My step father may be white through and through, but thanks to him, my closest cousins on my mom's side of the family are Mexican.

So I'm a little hyper sensitive to bigotry. Any epithet you throw out there probably insults either a member of my family, or a close friend (rounding out the mix starting up, probably my oldest friend, John Scott, is actually Egyptian. We don't see each other very much anymore since he's moved to the Middle East, but we still keep in contact through e-mails. On top of that, my wife and I watched as a close friend of our household struggled with the realization that he is in fact gay. These aren't the only examples, but I'm just giving a couple of names).

We are, none of us, the same. In his infinite wisdom, God has chosen to make us all unique; a happy blend of colors, attributes, beliefs, and orientations. And then, maybe for humor, maybe for drama, he gave us this really neat latent xenophobic tendency wherein we fear anything that isn't like us (hence all those really crappy black and white alien movies where some master race comes down to kill us all, and exploit our planet. And ID4 and Signs).

But I grew up differently, as you can see. I've never really grasped how the way someone is born can make them any less or more in the eyes of neither God nor a free society, and yet there are so many people that do see things that way. We are all people.

Still, those words at the top don't bother me as much as you might expect. They are just words, sounds that are given meaning only through their usage, and their intent. It is emotion and motive that lends them their power to hurt and attack. But they are still words.

So I understand that these words can be used without the intent to do harm. When you truly understand where the power of words lie, the usage of these words can be used to mock how ineffectual they truly are. Sometimes my step brothers and sisters would call me nigger, and I'd call them all crackers. To us, we were making fun of the ridiculous situation that we were in; siblings of obviously differing ethnic backgrounds that loved each other as though we were blood, though living in a world where we may be looked down upon for our racially mixed transgressions.

But, reading the paper the other day, I did find a couple of terms that I did not like. Each time my eyes scanned over them, I cringed. The terms were "whites," and "blacks."

Now I did not loathe the terms because they were trying to highlight the differences between the two groups because that was the point of the story which was reporting on a study that was looking at graduation rates between ethnicity and gender.

No, what bothered me was the intent behind the words. What bothered me was that the usage of those words intended to reflect statistics did the same thing that all those terms at the beginning of this article do. What bothered me was that when they had wrote "whites," and "blacks," they left out the people.

Mr. M