Swirling lid of Ice Cream offends Moslem...

[Triggerfish]

. Now we have Afro-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, Japanese-Americans, do dah do dah. I guess I would be a Welsh-English-French-Italian-American or Euro-American. Nonsense.

BTW there are very few people that consider themselves as Japanese Americans. The reason behind this is that the Japanese unlike the Chinese assimilate fully into the mainstream white America a lot quicker. Unless you're in Hawaii where ethnic Japanese make up 1/4 to 1/3 of the population Japanese usually marry whites so with in very few generations they are fully integrated. Japanese are a lot more likely to marry whites rather than other Asians. I have a feeling it's because Japanese thought of the other Asians as backwards barbarians until recently. However it's primary because of how the immigrate to the U.S. Japanese immigrants are usually middle to upper class who immigrate to the U.S. legally and they move into the predominantly white neighborhoods. Also not too many Japanese emigrate recently. As for Chinese, there are many that also are fairly wealthy and immigrate legally but a large number of them are poor and come into the country illegally. They end up in Chinatowns and end up working in sweat shops and many women end up being forced into prostitution to pay off their "debts."

 

[Triggerfish]

If people come here to live permanently, then they should adopt the language and mores of this country. They certainly could retain their heritage, but if you come here, be one of us. The is no such place as Afro-America, or Asia-America, or Euro-America. This is the United States of America. Be one part of the country or get out. (I am not addressing this to you specifically Trigg.)

Personally I tend to get annoyed by African-American, Mexican-American, etc labels. If someone asks for ethnic background I can see them being used as meaning American of African or Mexican decent, especially when traveling abroad but it can't get cumbersome when you have multiple ethnic background.....my daughter would be a Dutch, English, Polish, Scotch, Japanese-American.

I speak English a lot more fluently than Japanese. My reading of Japanese is fairly limited eventhough I was able to get about 14 colleg semester hours of foreign language credit some upper level. I love Japanese food and prefer it but that doesn't mean I exclusively eat just that. I love biscuits and gravy, pasta, borcht, gyros, chicken tandori, curries, pancakes, etc. HHHmmmm.....now that I mentioned that I haven't had Japanese food in weeks. Sometimes the wife tells me I'm acting very Japanese but in general I'm more American than Japanese. I know most people in Japan wouldn't consider me Japanese since to be considered Japanese must be Japanese, speak Japanese, born in Japan, grow up in Japan, and live in Japan and have never lived outside of Japan. I'm in the U.S. navy and I'm not too far off from retirement. The only thing that I lack is getting U.S. citizenship and that subject is actually complicated and I couldn't tell you why even if I wanted to. Plus I do not want to just because someone tells me I should. That's more likely to make me resist it just because someone is being pushy. My MOL comes to mind.

 

[Tonio]

I do not care if some whack calls me a racist or bigot. I'm not a person who cares what the irrational and mentally ill among us thinks of me.

Vrai, you might like this column:

http://www.freep.com/sports/albom/mitch25e_20050925.htm

If you open microphones in this country, you are going to hear stupidity. Trust me. I host a radio talk show five days a week. If we put every screaming fool who called in on the air, you would hang your head and weep for humanity.

So it didn't surprise me that a few dopes expressed dumb fears about black people. But just because they spoke into a microphone doesn't mean they speak for their town.

Our reaction should have been, "Hey, there's fools in every community. Ignore them." Instead, we had the typical media hand-wringing over the state of race today, and Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, fresh off his suggestion that suburban white kids were drug addicts, said in a statement that people should be "outraged."

Over what? Stupidity? Sorry. But if we're going to get outraged at every dumb remark by every head-in-the-sand redneck, we're going to burst a blood vessel.

Were these elected officials? Did someone get shot at that meeting? Did anyone use the n-word? Why should this spawn front-page stories about race relations today?

All that we heard in Livonia were the same prejudiced remarks made over dinner tables every day. If you think no one in Birmingham has ever expressed fear about too many blacks moving in, wake up.

And if anyone thinks no blacks in Detroit have ever expressed racist thoughts about Mexicans in their town, or Mexicans about Arabs, or Arabs about Jews, wake up, too.