I recently set up a Facebook account. I was addicted to it for the first month and I have slowly tapered off into a 2 to 3 times a week visitor. One of the cool things about Facebook is that they have these personalized applications that you can integrate into your site and share information about your interests back and forth with others on your friend's list.
One of my girlfriend's sent me a web application for a program called My Heritage. Using this program you can select a flag of your choice to identify your 'ethnic heritage'. While I was looking at it, trying to decide if I was going to add this to my already cluttered page, I looked and noticed that on the main page they had flags for America and other European Countries. Well I sure as heck ain't from Europe...and the American flag(call me unpatriotic) to me, does not describe my ethnic or cultural background. In reading through the F.A.Q's on the page the question was posed, what about Native American flags? The witty answer was you can find them under the American flag in the 'ethnic miniorities' category.
That started me to thinking...how exactly do groups get classified as an ethnic minority? They are ethnic minority to what? People of color make up well over half of the world's population but we are still referred to as 'ethnic minorities?' Why? I think there is a dual cause at work here. Separate the 'ethnic minorities' into so many cultural subsets that they never analyze the fact that they share common interests and goals and could have a much stronger influence if they came together. Two, psychogical warfare in the form of making populations of non-whites feel less than, whites who are deemed to be the 'majority'. However, if one breaks it down populationwise throughout the world one would soon discover that Europeans(so-called whites) are the actual minortities world populationwise. Another feather in the cap for Mike Fisher's GSWS....
