Can we talk race without being racist?

A) The President of the United States remains personally popular despite repeated polls showing that the majority of voters disagree with several of his policies and priorities.

B) Democrats love him, Republicans hate him.

C) Now that Catholics have gone 50-50, Democrat-Republican, only Jews and Blacks remain solidly Democratic, at 80-90%.

D) Independents (generally described as White and middle class) have turned against his policies but share in admiring the man.

The common thread in all this is race.
Even those who disagree with or detest this President's policies admire him because he has not allowed being Black to prevent him from becoming President. Frankly, though, his re-election has made it more comfortable than before to criticize Black inner city behavior and to name cities which have gone downhill after becoming Black-dominated.

And, another thing:
All this concern about what to call brown- or black-skinned people:
We have: the United Negro College Fund . . . the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People . . .  the National Association of Black Social Workers -- to which I add the Congressional Black Caucus. Are all those terms, comfortably used by dark-skinned people themselves, made inappropriate by the newest "African-American"?

And, more than before, one encounters the phrase "dark whites" to denote Arabs, some Asiatic Indians, Mediterranean peoples like Spaniards and Italians, and almost everyone except people from cold northern Scandinavian countries.

Unbelievably, USA TODAY in a piece about demographics thought it necessary to refer to "whites who are not Hispanic." Geez, guys, most Hispanics are white -- dark white, perhaps, but white. Not Yellows (oops, not Asiatics), not Redskins (oops, not Native Americans) . . . see how silly this gets.

How narrow the mindset which attempts to assign positive or negative behavioral characteristics to individuals based on group identity. Even the essentially neutral "WASP," for White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, is considered offensive by some, whether applied to themselves or to others.

Frank Versagi is the editor of Versagi Voice.