CVK
Great article on Alternet by Maria Luisa Tucker, a writer of mixed Ecuadorian and white descent:

I had no language to talk about these divides of difference. “Race” meant white or black. “Ethnicity” meant … well, most people weren’t exactly sure what it meant, but ethnic food was anything spicy, and ethnic clothes were folksy costumes. To actually discuss prejudice or discrimination, its causes and consequences and daily realities — that was as distasteful as talking about sex at the dinner table. Even when James Byrd, Jr., was murdered in Jasper, Texas — he was chained by his ankles and dragged behind a pickup truck — and the murderers were tried and convicted in my hometown, people didn’t talk about it…

And there, right in the center of middle class, middle America, is the root of this nation’s difficulty in talking about race and ethnicity. My mother’s generation was bullied into fitting in. In a post-civil rights world, my generation grew up obeying a polite colorblindness, a denial of difference. For decades, we quietly ignored race, which meant we ignored discrimination, and we shrank from talking about racial or ethnic tensions. Today, primarily because of Hurricane Katrina, Americans have finally acknowledged that, actually, we do have to talk about race. We’re just having trouble finding the right words.

What’s needed are a million personal conversations between ordinary Americans. The complexities and nuances of color and culture, the disparities of wealth and education are best understood by learning the stories of each others’ lives. Ordinary people are the true experts in cross-racial, cross-ethnic dialogue, if only we would start talking.