Racial Printmaker

Did you know that Richard Nixon and his administration in large part constructed the way we conceive of race? It was during Nixon’s administration that the small boxes on application forms that say Caucasian (white); Hispanic; Asian/Pacific Islander; Black/African American; Native American other, were conceived. We sorted humans into taxonomic folders. For some scientific construct of mind the Pacific Islanders were grouped with the Asians and not the Hispanics, and the people of the America’s were lumped together as Hispanics, whatever the hell that means, because the word American was already taken, and the Native Americans were separated from the Hispanics as those we had segregated out and not allowed to assimilate; and the Caucasians are always first on the list, I suppose because they are the most common but I don’t think any white people I know have roots in the Caucasus. Nixon began sorting people and the construct of race rather than ethnicity became entrenched more deeply in our psyche as it it were reality. As if there was a single ancestor for all these people who speak Spanish in the Americas, as if there was a single ancestor for Black Americans, or Red Americans or Yellow Americans. And I find myself liking these color words better than the racial terms because they are more honest about the way we construct race in our mind and also exposing the brutality and ugliness of the racial construct. And that is the point to see that the construct of race as brutal and ugly. We are human variations on a theme. As if the creator were a print maker, copying over and over again, the same print, changing the features slightly, changing the colors softly from one hue to another. The variation can be beautiful, like an Andy Warhol Triptych or ugly as a humans sort themselves into folders.