* What always amazes me is how the Mestizos and Indios eagerly wear the “Hispanic” or “Latino” persona. It’s analog would be “African-Americans” cheering for their Anglo-Saxon identity. The Spaniards and Portuguese *brutally* subjugated the Indios and Negros throughout the Americas. The Indians and Africans who were born in or shipped to the United States really hit the lottery, yet their descendents are filled with hate and jealousy while those born or sent South pretend to be of the oppressor class even while they’re currently oppressed. The psychology of this is fascinating.
* NYT now has some very high standards for whiteness, I notice. Have the Nordic-centric types taken over? Are they going to kick the Italians and Greeks out of the club next?
* Tom Flores won 2 Super Bowls a coach of the Raiders and was backup QB on the Chiefs’ Super Bowl 4 (to hell with Roman numerals!) and is in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Ron Rivera could have been since he was also a member of the 1985 Bears.
But in neither case was anyone making a big deal about it as with Tony Dungy. And Dungy had a very good team in Tamps that never got over the top because he had some backward ideas about offense. He was brought into Indy to “coach” the Colts only to make the defense decent enough to give Peyton Manning and Tom Moore, who ran the offense,a shot. Dungy had nothing to do with the offense at all. And his old Tampa team under Jon Gruden quickly won a title.
Shaun King has gotten himself in the soup with many sports media types who usually line up with PC cause by dredging up a settled lawsuit vs Peyton Manning and the University of Tennessee. Manning claimed he was mooning another player, female trainer says he was quite a bit more obnoxious, but either way settled out of court several decades ago. But such luminaries as Mike Lupica and Jason Whitlock have taken King to task. Would appear the New York Daily News is desperate for attention and is using the lightning rod that is King for quick empty attention.
* What intrigues me more than someone’s biological ancestry is the fact that socio-economic class tends to be rather well conserved from generation to generation. How many RCA salesman from the Canary Islands were there in Cuba in 1939?
I’ve always been keenly conscious of this, having been rather base-born myself. Wealth and status have to be built up from one generation to the next. I think the hardest thing any family lineage has to accomplish is completing the transition from wage-slavery to petite bourgeoisie, i.e. the middle class. It is the most difficult step on the whole spectrum, as it involves a fundamental shift in one’s basic notions of money, property, honor, and a host of other things. The gap between the middle class and the variously described poorer classes beneath them is the widest gap in the world.
However, once that step is taken, it’s relatively easy to see how a child who begins his life in a middle class milieu has a reasonable chance at climbing into the professional class—e.g. the MBAs, doctors, lawyers, accountants, FIRE trades, and other credentialed professions—provided that his own talents and intelligence are worthy of the the task. But if you start out in the lower class, it sometimes doesn’t matter how hardworking and intelligent you are. The barriers to entry really are quite high. Your early formative experiences will not condition you to function in the middle class world, exemplars will be lacking, and family support will be nonexistent. The best a man can do is hope to make enough money to shield his children from the harsher realities, and to send them to a school were children from the next higher rung up the ladder go, in the hopes that new milieu will take over in them, and it’s a very hard task. It presupposes a great deal of patience and long-term thinking which the daily realities of a lower class life are constantly attempting to subvert. It requires the choice of a good and sympathetic woman as a wife, and such women are hard to find anywhere, especially among the lower classes. It also requires a strong Church to serve as the moral governance of the community. If I didn’t already think Ted Cruz to be a truly nasty individual, I would disqualify him from further consideration solely on the ground that his father apostatized from the Catholic faith.
Anyone who feels at home in the middle class needs to recognize that he is in possession of a great inheritance that was dearly bought with the labors, tears, and humiliations of an earlier generation. If you’ve never been without it, you will never realize what a sweet thing it is to grow up with that background, that culture, and those opportunities. I know this sounds a lot like the “White Privilege” argument, but it I am not intending to tear anyone else down or advocating for any kind of redistribution. I’m just saying that, considered in the broad sweep of human history, a middle class lifestyle is a rare thing indeed and it ought to be cherished.
* Speaking of racio-political chicanery, the ADL is surely the best in the game. They did their usual “you must disavow this straw man” schtick against Trump (with David Duke as the straw man) and both Rubio and Cruz have run with the ADL’s ball.
