A New Vocabulary

Hallelujah! The festival march begins (fingers are still crossed). I heard yesterday from the Urban Suburban Film Festival (www.urbansuburbanfilmfestival.com) and we're in. It's located in Philly and so, alot of people who are very important to me and to Liz and to Bill are going to be able to see it. The festival is from June 17-20 and I will be there, doing a Q&A and appearing on a panel. I couldn't be happier. Of course, I will be if I get into the other two festivals that I'm still waiting to hear from in Philly. But we'll take it as it comes. Please join the Fifth Form group on Facebook. It's a much more reliable place to get updates on things like screening times without having to suffer through the rest of my rambling.

Second, I haven't written in a bit and I've been thinking about words. My question is what's going to take the place of the word "minority"? It doesn't work anymore. I understand the purpose of agreeing on a selected few terms for the purposes of census taking and to try and help enact the first wave of civil rights legislation but we're way past black, asian and hispanic. Percentages change from city to city. The word minority itself is demeaning unless you microcategorize groups to a place where you're no longer getting any value out of the category. We know that what we would simply call Arabic here would include Sunnis and Shiites who hate each over there. We know that we're lumping together Dominicans, Puerto Ricans and Argentines and Mexicans, etc. who don't have the same political agendas or needs when they are living here. And, this all came up, because the smallest minority of them all, worldwide, are the Jews. Just not an ethnic minority (depending on who you talk to, of course).

It's a complicated question and I think there's more to it than just a word. It has to do with how you want to be treated as an individual and/or as a group. And this will spark the topic of my next mini-thought, tomorrow (I hope) - my nephew's multicultural elementary education, which I know next to nothing about but I'm going to write about anyway.

So, please your suggestions. If not minority, what?