Friday, March 16, 2012

Hey Rodriguez, where's your green card?

It's amazing what passes for racism these days.

Where's your green card?

When I was a kid the white boys on the north side of the street used to yell "hey Paki, where's your camel?" to the East Indian side of the street.

That all sorted itself out. The white kids went to the factories that closed down twenty years before retirement.

The East Indian kids went to university. They're all tenured professors now.

That's an over-generalization of course. I do know of a couple of white kids who went on to become tenured professors.

And there was a couple of Pakistani kids who actually worked in the hands-on parts of the shops I used to work in. Pakistani welders. Who can even imagine such a thing?

But the racial stereo-types live on. All Jews are rich. Blacks are lazy and prone to addictions. Native American's are lazier than Blacks. Chinese are hard-working and frugal. White males get all the good jobs.

And so on...

There's always the guy who'll prove the stereo-type right of course. But by and large, my observation of a fair bit of life has led me to conclude that people are people.

Doesn't matter if you came here from England or Ireland or Nigeria or Germany or Pakistan. You came to make a better life for yourself and your children.

Get on with it.

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