Let’s say you are a young HispanicLatino, say, in your 20’s, and you are aware enough to know there are more important things in life than social networking, music, dancing, drinking, friends, entertainment and games. Let’s say that you pick up on the fact that 57 percent of white non-HispanicLatinos have anti-HispanicLatino sentiments, that is, that so-called Anglos think negatively about you, your family and your friends. The findings from a recent survey commissioned by the Associated Press and conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago and Stanford and Michigan universities are no surprise to most HispanicLatinos. But what is someone so young supposed to think – or do? The answer is to make it about you yourself, not them. What 57 percent of Anglos think is less important as each day passes and will have lesser and lesser bearing.
Most writers across the country have bemoaned the results of the study. It is, I suppose, sad – if you live in the past. A different viewpoint should take hold instead of morose musings that the country never achieved harmonic convergence on race. It does not matter now that the country never got to some nebulous promised land where skin color and ethnicity blended into some sort of multicultural muddle. The very point of where humankind finds itself today is that in a globalized world, all cultures matter, and, in fact, matter equally. The point of the future is that we are going to have to get along despite lasting natural differences not melt each other into some vapid subsistence.