Doug Henwood wrote:
> I was at a high school graduation in East
> Lansing, Michigan, over the weekend. EL is right next to a major
> university, so this confounds things a bit, but it's also a small
> Midwestern city. Judging from the names, the HS class was full of
> kids of Indian, Latin American, Vietnamese, and African origin. Just
> what would we be "protecting"?
>
I grew up in an even more typical midwestern township in the fifties. There was a village, a suburban area, and many farms. At the time people in the township thought it was awfully tolerant to concede that people with Italian names should enjoy the rights and privileges of white people.
Now the website for my old high school says the surname of the principal is "Barone." I initiated an e-mail correspondence with her and she mentioned, without my having mentioned the issue that of course the place is a lot more diverse than it was. The valedictorian a year or two ago had an Indian surname. And this in a deindustrialized area without so much in-migration.
Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema