I sincerely apologize for having neglected to consort with you and your compatriots for the past several days. However, I feel obliged to register my concern at your lack of compassion for my plight. I’d have thought you, of all people, would be the first to comment on it; I must say, your failure to do so was very disappointing. Y’see, whenever I’m with you and your lot, I’m in the minority in every possible sense. Seeing as you constantly declare that society is always harping on minorities, I reasoned that you would recognize my predicament almost immediately. To put it bluntly, I don’t feel comfortable in that situation, and I’m really not sure I’ll be able to overcome my apprehension enough to ever voluntarily immerse myself in it again. I’ll miss you all, naturally, but I’m sure you understand where I’m coming from.

Let me put this into a broader perspective: I’m anal, obviously, but I’m not idealistic. The term minority is subjective, indeterminable, and obsolete. But no one’s ever going to be happy with that. The idea of forgetting every ill everyone who ever lived has ever been suffered—way too utopian, that, etc; can’t have the peoples of the world mingling into one big happy phartry, can we? Still, it might be nice to start over that way. Eh bien. We’ll deal, though we haven’t been doing a very good job of it so far.

By the way, what’d you think of the assembly? Susannah’s good, isn’t she? I don’t know anyone else who can sing like that. She pulled the whole gospel choir together, too, her and a few other members of the “’bridge clan” (that’s what she calls us, the leftover transfer students from that area). Anyway, I thought she did well, especially on “I Am God”. The speaker was pretty good too, neh? Except when she read that poem of hers, that is. It wasn’t bad, and I certainly couldn’t write anything as worthy, but I have to agree with whoever it was that said reading one’s own poems out loud is a sort of incest. She brought up the whole trite “we all bleed red” pitch, too, and the matter of ethnicity going both ways. Hee.

You profess your “mixedness,” don’t you? And you joke about how you’re discriminated against because your ancestors worked in tropical cane fields, hm? Just out of curiosity, what else went into the mix? Who were the ancestors of your ancestors? What are the origins of humankind and all its faults? And why haven’t you been devoting your spare time to contemplating the validity of it all, or at least the validity of your opinions? Let me know when you plan to start; I ought to do some, too.

I don’t know where my ancestors came from either. I know of some of them, and only a few, like the Confederate ones. My brother did some tracing and nosing about a few years ago; turns out one of them served under J.E.B. Stuart and another one was an old man who was a supplier because he was too old to fight. And my father says we’ve got a lot from Scotland, and from Glencoe, where the soup-people…made a name for themselves by hacking up the burger-people. And there was someone from England who headed for Ireland and suffered quite a bit, though I don’t know what the circumstances were. And one French lady somewhere back there, too; I’ve no idea who she was, but I blame a lot of things on her. And there’s the bunch from Norway; that’s the only branch that’s actually been documented. Oh, and a Jewish man. D’you know how long his people were enslaved? I don’t either, not that its important. I’m not big on genealogy, so all I really know is that I’m descended from people who came from various places in Europe, who were descended from people who came from heaven knows where, and so on. Its terribly confusing once you get that far back; much easier to invoke what you know and ignore the rest. And its even easier to concentrate on hacking each other to bits instead of on other pacifistic, wishy-washy, unachievable things that reek of amnesty, ethnocide, and general idiocy.

Drat. I’ve digressed. So sorry.

Hey, did you know the physical features that determine different races formed while homo sapiens was still evolving? That’s what one theory says, anyway, that human variation was achieved through adaptation. Take flat and pointed noses, for example, or slanted eyes. The latter developed among the homo sapiens who settled in colder climates and gradually dispersed from there and settled in other additional areas, and the former was a result of different altitudes and climates. The theory goes on to redefine the term “race” practically out of existence. It then concludes that these phenotypical differences, which developed as a result of various gradual adaptations, are what oftentimes lead to socialization and stereotyping.

We all bleed red, so says the adage, and aren’t we all homo sapiens too? Or does that not count for anything?

Sincerely,

Me, white girl, bona fide “for-the-time” European mutt, clan of the soup-people, ’bridge dweller, red-blooded, homo sapiens, and so on.