Racism

NYC cabbie: "There are two things I hate--prejudice and Puerto Ricans!"

I guess that being white and all, I'm not in much of a position to talk about racism.  I remember that in Grade 2 one of my classmates was a brown-skinned Indonesian boy that a local minister had adopted as a missionary.  At that stage of my development, I didn't yet think of him as non-white.  I guess that racial identity emerges at a later age, at least for people like me.

I'm lucky to be living in Canada instead of the United States, where racism is very tangible.  And some politicians there exploit racist feelings in subtle ways.  I remember when President Clinton introduced a crime bill and Republicans attacked the provision funding midnight basketball games to prevent crime. (They were clearly playing the race card.)

If the USA's dirty secret is class identity, France's dirty secret is racism.  Government policy there is officially colour-blind:  official statistics never include ethnic categories.  But as often happens in France, there's a big gap between theory and practice.  What it effectively means is that unofficial racial discrimination is widespread but the problem doesn't get acknowledged because they can't get the statistics to prove it!