a terrible infectious disease has crossed our border! it's the plague of dumb-ass!

[lolaraincoat]

So of course I am greatly enjoying the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the US Supreme Court. But I was also, unkindly, entertained by the NY Times retraction of the wording of a May 19 article about her: they had called her Puerto Rican parents "immigrants." Although it is true that PR remains a colony, not a state, Puerto Ricans are still US citizens (duh.) So calling people who were born there but live in the Bronx "immigrants" makes just precisely as much sense as referring to my Connecticut-dwelling parents as "immigrants" from Michigan, in case you didn't know. I am kind of shocked it took the Times a full week to print the retraction - unless they did it earlier and I missed it?

Well, anyhow, it was entertaining until I noticed that the 6:00 newscast on CBC radio also referred to Sotomayor as the "daughter of immigrant Puerto Ricans." Argh! CBC people, I know they just fired like 800 of you, but could the rest of you please buy a map? It wouldn't have to be a map of the whole world, mind you. Just North America would do.

Comments

[fledgist]

Swarthy people from offshore islands have to be "immigrants". They can't be citizens or the discourse collapses and you have to start counting them as human beings. I was struck by this during coverage of the 1998 World Cup when antillais players on the French football team were described as immigrants by American commentators. How you immigrate into your own country, I want to know.

[fledgist]

North Americans may be short of maps. I just finished reading an article in Newsweek, in which the writer described her feelings on visting Elmina Castle. I found them pretty conventional. Horrors of slavery. Ancestors passing through Door of No Return. Tears at the thought of what they must have suffered. Looking out over the Indian Ocean (in fact, the Indian Ocean was mentioned twice in the piece).

I phoned a colleague in my department who's led two faculty-student expeditions to Ghana, and told him the above. When he stopped laughing, he wondered if Newsweek had fired all its fact-checkers. I wondered if Ghana had been moved when I wasn't looking.

[kaiz]

Didn't you realize that "...some, people out there in our nation don't have maps and, uh, I believe that our, uh, education like such as, uh, South Africa and, uh, the Iraq, everywhere like such as, and, I believe that they should, our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S., uh, or, uh, should help South Africa and should help the Iraq and the Asian countries, so we will be able to build up our future, for our [children]"[source]? *eg*

[winterthunder]

I love the title to this. :D

[laughingrat]

But they're not white! And they speak Spanish! They can't be Americans!

Argh, never have our prejudices and preconceptions been so lucidly, if inadvertently, displayed. OK, there's probably been other instances, but this is a good one.