I'll Race Ya

I firmly believe that we (Americans) have taken political correctness to a level where all it says is that we (Americans) take everything too personally. Even so, we walk around on our tiptoes half afraid to say anything out loud for fear of inadvertently saying something offensive. And by "we" I mean white Americans. There. I said it out loud. This is where I have some objections.

First of all, do you know the root of the word "Caucasian"? The word Caucasian derives from Caucasus which is 440,000 square kilometers of land separating the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. Anthropologists classify 50 different races as Caucasian. (The word is beginning to lose all meaning to me and now looks weird because I've typed it and read it so much writing this, heheh.) Furthermore, Caucasian is related to the Atlantic slave trade where the white slave was known to be a woman, oftentimes even blonde, from Caucasus. I have oversimplified this, but I think it makes clear my point.

So, we, Caucasians, allow ourselves to be called such, and without complaint, even though the root of the word is steeped in the very thing that first caused race names and race classification to be born, slavery. We have African Americans, not blacks, and Native Americans, not Indians (unless you're referring to peoples from India), but we still have whites in this country and white people are lumped into the Caucasian group like a herd of indiscriminate cattle. This is very much a dramatic take on this topic and deliberately so because I believe that the constant worry to offend which has led to all these politically correct terms is overly dramatic.

A few months back I began researching my family's roots on Ancestry.com. I have been able to verify, with the help of my uncle and my dad, that at least one branch of my family tree has only been growing in the United States since 1889 or 1892 (I found conflicting "arrival documents" from Germany. A part of Germany, in case you're interested, that was Germany, then Poland, then Germany. Or something to that effect.) Either way, this branch of my family has only been in America for six generations with my children and their first cousins being the sixth generation. These immigrants weren't here when African slaves were being traded and they definitely weren't here when Native Americans were pushed off their lands. But white Americans are supposed to make reparations for these historical events. Hmm.

I realize that I still have three other branches to research but I am going to take the liberty to take a stand. I hereby declare myself as European American. Take that. Better start fixing all those bureaucratic forms. I'm going to start a trend. My next step will be to start a scholarship program for European Americans.