Visible Minorities

Twenty years ago, from what I could gather by watching CBC on my satellite dish, Canadians regularly showed their awareness of the realities of the ethnic situation in their country by referring to the darker-skinned elements of their population as "visible minorities."  I don't know if they still do.  Probably not.  Probably they have shifted closer to the more retarded proclivities of their southern neighbor, as shown by the Canadians' recent tendencies to betray themselves by too often choosing conservative prime ministers.   (More than once is too often.)   But in the U.S. the term "visible minority" has never been used, as far as I know.  That would have given too much dignity, if only a little, to the subject group.

I was reminded of this while I was thinking about two people in who have won Democratic nominations in two chronically blighted southern states for high public office that would carry them to Washington.  The sharper of the two is a lady in Texas who apparently had an operation in which she had her normal brain functions replaced with a concentrate of LaRouche-style libertarianism, while the other is a raging male inarticulate in South Carolina.

I notice that usually the news reports on these two carefully do not mention that both seem to have African ancestry dating from the slave days.   But the media posts pictures that strongly suggest just that, that they are members of a minority group, and the most visible one at that.

So is it wrong of me, while on my way to making my main point here, also to mention them as being Rainbows?   (Or "black" to those of you with less command of the language as used to express the real realities.)   Am I going against the conceit that the rightists try to use, about "race" no longer mattering in "post-racial" American, when the truth is that there is no such thing as an America without racism, and quite possibly can never be, as long as it contains groups all contending with each other for respect of one kind or another, and in some cases even for supremacy.

Very well, I will go against this conceit, because it seems all too obvious that the male South Carolinian is a plant by the Republican party, with the clear intention of using his oafishness to embarrass the Democrats in particular and Rainbows in general, because this guy looks even more inept than all the other Rainbow Judas goats who have thrown in their lot with the Republicans in the past, while the Texas woman, though also ostensibly running as a Democrat, has positions that are much closer to the deadly right-wing end of things than those of any Democrat worthy of the name, and whoever is backing her hopes to use her ethnicity to win the post and then to put in policies that are anathema to the aspirations of a visible minority that has long struggled to come out of the darkness and take its rightful, equally favored spot in the sun.