Juxtaposition
Earlier this evening, I sent email in which I passed along a pointer to an AlterNet article about a 51-year-old black guy (at least, he'd always considered himself black) who took a DNA test that shows where your ancestry comes from. The test told him that he had no African ancestry at all. The article doesn't provide details about the test—about how it makes its determination, how accurate it is, what it means to be "57 percent Indo-European," etc. But the article is still an interesting study in culture and race in the US, especially the part about the guy's grandparents in Louisiana (who may've been part Native American, the article's a little unclear about that) having made a conscious decision not to label themselves as white.
At any rate, then I went and read a bit more of Le Guin's Four Ways to Forgiveness, which besides being an excellent book (I used to waffle when asked who my favorite author was; these days I can pretty firmly say it's her) is Le Guin's closest approach to dealing with issues of race and slavery (and, incidentally, the question of how the Ekumen handles membership applications from morally problematic societies).
And then I watched the movie that I'd previously picked out for tonight, without realizing that it was part of a theme: Spike Lee's Bamboozled.
I don't have any particularly coherent or summarizable thoughts on all this, and it's past time for me to go to sleep. But plenty of food for thought in each of those items, and the juxtaposition of all of them makes them even more interesting to me.
