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Freedom Action of the Week
Email List Archive
Free-Market.Net's F r e e d o m A c t i o n o f t h e W e e k
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Edited by Thomas L. Knapp. To subscribe or unsubscribe to this and
other lists, click to: http://www.free-market.net/features/lists/
----- Featured Action of the Week -----
Third Week of May, 2001:
The race is off
Racism is something I've never quite been able to understand. No one's been
able to satisfactorily explain to me the relevance of my ancestry --
particularly its manifestation as a given type or quantity of pigmentation
in my skin, an epicanthic fold (or lack thereof) at the edge of my eyes,
and so forth -- to my position as their acquaintance, employee, or subject
of their pet public policy.
To be honest, the implication that any of this matters offends me. Whether
my ancestors were goatherds in Gaza, burghers in Berlin, boyars in Belarus
or croppies in Cork shouldn't matter, other than perhaps as a point of
personal pride ... as in the naming of my newborn son, Liam Padraig, after
the brothers Pearse (martyred leaders of Ireland's Easter Rising in 1916).
Which brings me to a side note and an apology. The "Action of the Week"
column you should have seen last Thursday was pre-empted by the arrival of
7 pounds, 4 ounces of pink, wiggly future president. Mom and baby are doing
fine -- they're both home now -- but dad has been a busy guy. It's not that
I don't love you all, but the priorities were clear.
I digress. Back to this week's action, which, not coincidentally, has to do
with little Paddy and his odyssey. As I was saying, race doesn't matter
much to me. On a personal level, I avoid the kind of people to whom it does
matter. Government, however, is omnipresent.
Before the baby could come home, the paperwork had to be done. An
application for a birth certificate, to be precise, and an affidavit of
paternity to make up for the fact that Tamara and I and I haven't filled
out yet another sheaf of paperwork asking the state for permission to live
together and breed (this permission is called a "marriage license." You
don't get ticketed for getting married without one like you do for driving
without a "driver's license" -- yet).
One would think that the purpose of a birth certificate would be to verify
that a baby had, in fact, been born, and perhaps to whom. What was not
relevant, and what should not have been on this application, was a demand
for details concerning the parents' "race." But there it was: I was
instructed to classify myself according to one of several categories, none
of which applied, or to check "other" and specify what I meant.
On my census form last year, I responded to this questioning in the same
way I had responded to all other questions beyond the number of people
residing in my home: "None of your business." This time, I decided to play
the game and comply with the demand for information -- I checked the
"other" box, and specified "human."
We hadn't been home for long when the phone rang. It was a nice lady from
the hospital, explaining that the state "doesn't allow" such an answer --
that if she sent our application and affidavit in to the state, it would be
returned and no certificate issued.
"Doesn't allow?" I recall, from my reading of history, various scenarios of
this sort. A time when a particular state "didn't allow" Jews to go out in
public without a yellow Star of David emblazoned on their clothing, for
example. Or when another used various bogus racial classifications to
segregate "whites" and "blacks" into different living areas, with "blacks"
and "coloreds" (a third group) required to have more of that ubiquitous
paperwork to be "allowed" hold a job in the "white" areas. For that matter,
some American Indians are required to carry "racial identification" cards
in order to attend their traditional worship services!
Please forgive me if I'm disinclined to hand my "racial information" over
to the same posse of brutes who shot Vicki Weaver in the head while she
held her newborn baby, and burned more than 80 men, women and children to
death at Waco ... both crimes having their origin in racial matters.
Weaver, you see, was white and given to racist doctrines herself. The
Branch Davidian congregation was substantially black -- which should tell
us how our government still feels about black people with guns.
I called my state's Department of Records and asked them why they felt the
need to discriminate against people of my race ("human") in the matter of
providing normal service for routine documents. After some confusion -- the
lady was initially under the impression that I wanted to answer this way
because I wasn't sure if I was a South Pacific Islander, a nisei, a Zulu or
a redneck -- we arrived at a compromise:
I'm going to fill out that paperwork again and leave the "race" section
blank. And they're going to issue a birth certificate. It seems their
computer system can't handle "human" as an entry, but that they're not
willing to be caught discriminating against such a large group as us.
But this still leaves a rotten system in place -- one that shouldn't exist
and that is certainly vulnerable to abuse -- and that's where you come in.
Does your state, province or national government think itself entitled to
classify its citizens by race? It should be easy to find out. Call the
government entity in your area that processes birth certificates. Or call a
local hospital, or talk to someone you know who works there. If this is
"standard procedure" then it deserves to have attention called to it.
I'll be writing to my legislators, demanding an end to this last
manifestation of Jim Crow, and my local newspaper will be hearing from me
as well. What about your legislators and your newspapers? Pitch in to help
end government racism, and don't forget to post your letters to the editor
in our forum!
Free-Market.Net Letters to the Editor Forum:
http://www.free-market.net/forums/lte0101/
----- Alternate Actions -----
The Freedom Action of the Week Club: Commit yourself to doing one
action per week. If the action above doesn't appeal to you, consider
one of the alternate actions at:
http://www.free-market.net/features/action/
If you know about another action or organize one of your own, e-mail
Tom at tlknapp@free-market.net so we can tell the rest of the group
next week.
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Thomas L. Knapp | "Your genuine action will explain itself, and will
Managing Editor | explain your other genuine actions. Your con-
Free- Market.Net | formity explains nothing."
| --Ralph Waldo Emerson
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