AzN is the new black

So this was pretty predictable:

"I understand what happened recently at Virginia Tech," said the teen's father, Albert Lee, referring to last week's massacre of 32 students by gunman Seung-Hui Cho. "I understand the situation."

But he added: "I don't see how somebody can get charged by writing in their homework. The teacher asked them to express themselves, and he followed instructions."

Allen Lee, an 18-year-old straight-A student at Cary-Grove High School, was arrested Tuesday near his home and charged with disorderly conduct for an essay police described as violently disturbing but not directed toward any specific person or location.

So, it seems clear that Lee was pretty dumb to have written this so soon after Virginia Tech, but, even so:

Unless somebody is holding back some important fact, this young man is getting a raw deal. He doesn't belong in the criminal justice system. And the main reason he was treated this way is that people are on edge because another young Asian-American student killed 32 people two weeks earlier in Virginia.

(I sure am glad my high school days are far behind me. If being a socially inept Asian student inclined towards dark and disturbing imagery had been the profile of a rampage-killer-in-the-making back then, I'd have been screwed. Actually, now that I think about it, I still fit that profile. Ooh, look out!)

I don' blame his teacher for alerting her supervisor at the school. I can see where she might have been worried.

By all means, pull him out of class the next day and try to figure out what's going on. Haul in his parents to find out what they know. Huddle with the rest of his teachers. Get him to a shrink for a psychiatric evaluation. Interview his friends, if it seems necessary.

Hell, call in the police if they honestly believe the young man poses some kind of a real danger and ask them to look into it.

But to have him arrested and criminally charged as the starting point of their response, based solely on what he wrote for a class assignment that instructed him not to censor himself, that's just outrageous.

Judging by the e-mails to the newspaper, I'd guess that at least half of you disagree with me. Lucky for me, you can't have me arrested.

Many of you are from the better safe than sorry school of thought.

Similarly, whenever I see a black man walking in my direction on the sidewalk, I always cross to the other side of the street. Better safe than sorry, I always say. (Crap, when I started writing this, I told myself I wouldn't turn it into some race thing. Oh, well.)

Unique, frozen, and...

So Bush trots out his presidential veto as a gaggle of snowflake babies looks on.

Of course Bush's stated rationale for using the veto is pathetically stupid. That goes without saying.

But I thought I knew what it meant to call a person a "snowflake". It has at least one well-established slang meaning with which I am familiar, according to which it is typically used by a black man to refer to a passing white woman, intimating a charming cocktail of racism and sexual predation.

But the Christian Right is shockingly ignorant of black urban slang. Now, apparently, "snowflake" also refers to adopted babies originating as unwanted frozen embryos that would otherwise have been destined for destruction. (Such embryos are still destined for destruction, but at least they won't be doomed to use in stem cell research--evidently a distinction that concerns the baby Jesus deeply.)

Why "snowflake"?

Perhaps because each snowflake baby is unique--though that hardly distinguishes them from babies of other sorts.

Perhaps because snowflake babies started out as frozen--that seems fair enough.

On the other hand, perhaps this use of the term also has a racial connotation, as a visual survey of the snowflake babies in question suggests.

The colors of a rainbow, so pretty in the sky

Some classmates took a trip into Toronto not too long ago, and I was interested to hear them remark on how they perceived the quality of ethnic diversity there: more integration in the neighbourhoods, less of a sense of underlying racial tensions.

I've been here in Chicago for almost a year, so I'm used to the place. I guess I've forgotten what it was like the first time around. When I visited as a prospective student last spring, I apparently felt some culture shock.

One of my first acts in the city was to catch a cab at O'Hare. They have a pretty nice set-up for cab-catching, complete with a shelter, place for a line up, and friendly attendants. When I joined the line, it was pretty short, consisting of two people (including me). So I stood there with an Asian businessman, and two attendants, one black and one middle eastern. It turns out some white guy wasn't familiar with the procedure at O'Hare, and had gone up the lane trying to catch a cab without standing in line. As they called him back, the black attendant made a joke something along the lines of "Isn't that the way, white guys always act like they run the place."

And that's when I realized I was in America.

Of course, that's comparing Chicago to Vancouver. As a good Vancouverite, I've never been able to imagine any reason why I'd ever want to visit Toronto, so I can't speak from personal experience as to how things work out there. But I guess it's an all right place, too.

(I grudgingly note that Toronto is statistically more ethnically diverse than Vancouver. Or so claim Torontonian websites.)

Forget anecdotes, though. It's been decades since segregation got kicked out of the law books, but according to the stats Chicago hasn't done a very good job of figuring out how else to organize itself.

Now, that's Chicago as a whole. I live in Hyde Park, and here in Hyde Park, we're all integrated.

...in a city that's among the most segregated in the U.S., the crowd here is incredibly diverse -- African American, white, Asian and Latino. Well-off and poor. Jewish, Muslim, Christian. According to the 2000 U.S. Census, Hyde Park is about 46 percent white, 38 percent African American, 11 percent Asian and 4 percent Latino, making it one of the truly integrated communities in the city.

And it is indeed an integrated community, if by "integrated" you mean: people of different races living on the same block.

Because people of different races do live on the same block here. Hell, yeah.

Not only do people of different races live on the same block, they also pass each other on the street.

And sometimes they even have conversations with each other. For example, sometimes a non-black customer will exchange small talk with the black clerk while paying for groceries.

You can't trust stats sometimes. As far as I can tell, the population in this neighbourhood is split into the University Community (students, faculty, in some cases staff, and those living with the above), and Everyone Else. The University Community is pretty diverse. The vast majority of Everyone Else is black. Members of the University Community interact with each other, and race is not as much of an issue here. But there is vanishingly little genuine social interaction between the University Community and Everyone Else.

Though they do often live together on the same block.

(Full disclosure: unlike Stephen Colbert, I do not have a black friend. I came close once, but I wasn't properly focused on establishing my liberal bonafides at the time, and I let that chance pass me by.)