@hightor,
hightor wrote:
I'd love to see racial categories assume less importance but we seem to have a fixation on this stuff — look at Elizabeth Warren.
Once as a young Midshipman I was walking through the main Philadelphia library (open stack in those days), and I came upon a fairly slim volume entitled "An Anthology of 11th century Islamic Literature", which I found irresistible. As I thumbed through it I came upon a series of short selections that caught my attention. They were a collection of "Frank" jokes reminiscent of all the WASP, Irish, Polish, Italian, Jewish and Black jokes that salted many of the conversations I had heard growing up. Indeed many were exactly the same jokes, with only the substitution of the category of people involved.
It was a sudden shock to see, so vividly portrayed, this common element of human nature ( what I afterwards called "us - them" jokes), and the remarkably similar ways different groups of people around the world coped with the differences around them.
A memorable, and instructive, experience.
A little more attention to the humor and a little less to the outrage might benefit us all.
