This was exceedingly rare and not necessarily racial but rather class based. There were separate Mexican schools in the early 50s - but again, limitations weren’t strict and it was largely poor brown recent immigrants routed into them.
Poor Milton Berle's contract ended just before tax rates plummeted--and no inflation indexing. Were there many well-off Jews that soon after the war? I guess I've mostly heard about the West Side Reds.
I wonder if Desi and other Cubans could have made it big after Castro took over.
Yeah, I'd never heard this theory that there was more Jewish on screen talent in the early days because more Jews were early adopters of television. I'd like to see some evidence. Speaking of which, I saw a Lucy documentary this year which just kind of slipped in that the American public wouldn't accept a Latin as her husband, even though he was. I always assumed it was the thick accent they objected to. Oh, well, they said it, as the mainstream news likes to say whenever Trump makes an assertions, 'without offering evidence".
Speaking further of which I read a CNN article which pulled this on Trump and then included the evidence that he provided. Trump said that they must have been covering up Biden's prostate cancer when he was in the Whitehouse. CNN adds the editorial 'he said without providing evidence' and then go on to complete the report with the evidence that Trump stated, i.e. that the cancer was so advanced surely the president's doctors would have noticed it years ago.
The odd thing about that assertion is the information from Steve's post that Ball's TV show was the transfer of her radio show literally titled "My Favorite Husband". His accent always seemed to be played for laughs to me. To continue Steve's theme of projecting modern assumptions backwards, I suspect a lot of the claims of non-acceptance could also be generated by the way Ball/Anraz and other famous TV show couples from that era don't act "married". Specifically they don't have kids and aren't shown hopping in and out of the same bed. I think it was the Dick Van Dyke show among others that had separate twin beds in the bedroom scenes. Google sez there was an obscure (to me at least) show called "Mary Kay and Johnny" that filmed the couple in bed in 1947 but most people credit The Brady Bunch (1969) as being the first to regularly show the parents together in a double bed over two decades later.
I've never watched a lot of "I Love Lucy" but I don't remember Lucy and Desi kissing or doing anything romantic. And certainly the Mertzes never kissed. Vivian Vance hated Bill Frawley.
You may already know this, but Lucy's husband on the radio show was played by Richard Denning, not Desi Arnaz. Denning went on to star in several now-beloved (by me, anyway) '50s B&W sci-fi movies like "Creature from the Black Lagoon", "Day the World Ended" and "The Black Scorpion". He also played the governor of Hawaii on "Hawaii Five-O".
Anyway, I have read that Lucy had to fight to get Desi as her co-star on the TV show, something she wanted to bolster his career but also to keep an eye on him. (To say Desi had a wandering eye would be an understatement.) Producers were worried that he was too "foreign", what with that strong accent. I have never heard - probably because it never happened - that anyone had race-related concerns or anything specific to his being Hispanic.
Ironically because of his connection to Hawaii, Denning starred in a 50's Roger Corman film "Naked Paradise" which takes place in Hawaii. The Hawaiian islands shot in glorious technicolor right before statehood looked absolutely breathtaking.
Tax rates were very high in Berle's hay-day. Many Hollywood actors became Republican just because they were hit hard by Democratic taxes. One was Ronald Reagan.
The original 'Dick Van Dyke' show starred Carl Reiner and was based on his experience as a writer on (probably from memory) your show of shows. It flopped and was revived with the world's most gentile/most attractive couple, the way the country liked to think of itself in the early 1960s Kennedy era.
It's one of my favorite shows and the casting is a big part of it, but it is kind of funny that Dick Van Dyke is cast as head writer on a New York TV show while Don Rickles was cast as a mugger (in one episode). The character played by Rose Marie BTW, was based on the woman bailiff on "Night Court" (too lazy to look up her name).
Television radicalized entertainment. In a biography of Clint Eastwood I read ten years ago, it was written that ticket sales in America dropped by half between 1949 and 1950. That's quite a decimation, if true.
Here's a wikipedia article about notable things in the history of television. I suppose it's possible that the early 50s were top heavy with shows starring Jews and that they all came to nothing so only the few gentile shows remained notable enough for this article.
But it sure looks like mostly shows starring gentiles from the early days. Anyway, weren't most of the early shows jumps from radio? And radio was available outside the big east coast cities for decades.
"The character played by Rose Marie BTW, was based on the woman bailiff on "Night Court""
Selma Diamond? I didn't know that. Thanks.
Don't forget Buddy Sorrell, played by Morey Amsterdam. His character was Jewish (confirmed in the script, not merely implied, as with so many other characters on TV), as was Amsterdam himself, of course. There was an episode where Sorrell is bar mitzvahed. I don't remember why he didn't have one earlier, but his belated bar mitzvah was the central point of the episode, which must have been some kind of TV first.
By the way, OT, but how do you get proper formatting - italics, bold, quotes - in Substack replies?
Yep, Buddy Sorrel was unusually overt in his Judaism. There was also an episode with a very bourgeois black couple at the end as part of a gag. Until the 1970s or 80s, anyone out of the ordinary, Jew, homosexual, even Italian (like the Fonz) never mentioned it.
Not a star, but Akim Tamiroff (Armenian from Baku) was a well-known character actor. Twice nominated for Academy Award as best supporting actor. Probably best known for The Great McGinty and Touch of Evil. In Touch of Evil he played a Mexican, and he played all kinds of ethnicities. In For Whom the Bell Tolls, a Spaniard
Other character actors from former Soviet countries include Mischa Auer (My Man Godfrey) and Leonid Kinskey, who played Sascha the bartender in Casablanca. Kinskey got that role because he was a Bogart drinking buddy. A lot of euro refugees from either bolsheviks or Nazis in that movie.
People tend to assume that we lived like savages until just before they started paying attention. This applies not only to racial issues but to sexual mores. Late boomers like Todd S. Purdum tend to think this way about the 1950s.
It comes as a surprise when younger writers deplore the 1970s or even the 1990s!
I have found that Americans under fifty tend to be totally ignorant of the America that existed before they were cognizant. Who was Clark Gable? Who was Willie Mays? Girls always wore dresses before 1965? They didn't have cable television in the 1960s? Who was Elvis?
Everyone knows who Elvis is (not just was), even those under 30 in 2025. Elvis remains one of the US's most profitable dead celebrities. It helped that he lived into the 70's, toured a lot, and made movies, many of which are on Youtube as clips.
King Creole is awesome. So is Jailhouse Rock, Flaming Star, and even Follow that Dream is pretty good. A Hard Days Night is simply iconic for its time. I'd also make a case for Blue Hawaii being iconic (the Soundtrack was one of the biggest selling albums of the 60's and outsold Sgt Pepper album during the 60's). Viva Las Vegas is interesting in that it shows the chemistry between Elvis and Ann-Margaret, who were allegedly intimate in real life and remained good friends after shooting wrapped.
I understand you said "some"; I'm just giving the other "some" that were the other side of the coin--awesome.
I do like me some Yellow Submarine. Good little kids film.
In 2016, I saw that the first house that Lucille Ball ever owned, which she bought as a 22-year old rookie B-movie contract player, in West Hollywood, and she bought into the marriage with Desi Arnaz, went on the market for $1.75m. The house itself is only 1874 sq. So I figured the only reason it was going for that much was because Lucille Ball. But I checked Zillow, and it wasn't that much higher than other similar houses in the immediate era.
Which begs the rhetorical question. Could a 22-year old B-movie rookie buy that same house today?
Steve: Says the house's address is 1344 North Ogden Drive, just in case that helps you provide context.
Even B-actors lived quite comfortably in the 1930s. Homes in the Hollywood hills with swimming pools. Even a B-actor named John Wayne did quite well in the 1930s.
Wayne's first wife was very well off, and was part of the Social Register. He married up, she married beneath her station. Ironically, his first wife's father was the Consul General of Panama in the United States, José Saenz, and was also a wealthy businessman who lived in Los Angeles. Wayne's other two wives were Latinas.
Technically, and as Gary Wills notes in his book John Wayne's America, Stagecoach did not make Wayne a superstar. It got him out of B films but not onto the Alist. Wayne would spend another 9 yrs or so in supporting roles in A films, while starring in B features (that had better budgets than what he was doing in the 30's).
Howard Hawk's Red River made Wayne the superstar he's remembered for and onto the Alist.
SoCal, ground zero for the entertainment industry, is very Latin America adjacent, and the region was initially a Spanish colony. John Wayne's three wives were all of Latin decent (Spanish, Mexican and Peruvian). Speaking of John Wayne, i see his son Patrick is still kicking around at age 85. One of my all-time favorite John Wayne movies is "Big Jake", which co-stars Patrick, and, interestingly, Robert Mitchum's son Christopher.
There were less than 10,000 Californios in what is today California at the time of annexation. Their descendants are functionally either white or Native American today and have been for 2 generations. You’d be more likely to meet a leprechaun than a Hispanic Californian who is an actual Californio descendant. There’s simply no organic, indigenous “Latin American” (it wasn’t part of Latin America and I’d encourage you to research the history of that term vs Spanish America) culture or heritage in California. The only place in the U.S. where there is such a heritage is the northern half of New Mexico and pockets of Texas, in addition to Puerto Rico of course.
Just to crossover to football, the first great NFL running back was Steve Van Buren of the 1940s Philadelphia Eagles. He ran for four 1000 yard seasons during the old twelve game seasons. He was the son of an American engineer and a Spanish mother and was born in Honduras while his father worked a job there. Van Buren was orphaned at age ten and was sent to live with relatives in New Orleans. He starred at LSU and then with the Eagles. He was sometimes called the first Hispanic football star, an attribute he very much resented.
It is interesting how myopic our elites can be, who often project their modern day cultural obsessions onto a past, rather than having the mental agility to understand attitudes and mores are unique to their eras. Yet another reason it’s hard to take our media seriously - there’s a major deficit in actual intellectual curiosity.
To return to the present, diversity in entertainment simply means shoehorning in increasingly ludicrous examples to made a ham fisted point rather than quality art. It’s a particularly tough sell when it involves integrating black actors into white milieus, because in real life blacks are the most culturally separatist group in America. They still retain a distinctive accent as a part of their identity, they have absurd naming conventions, and in politics and entertainment cannot resist bringing up their capital B blackness.
The nation has seen this long enough and largely considers it a joke, something the Purdums of the world apparently do not grok.
Cuba's ethnic history is different than most other Latin American countries in that the Indians of pre-Columbian Cuba were extraordinarily violent and unruly. The Spaniards that claimed Cuba killed off all the Indians by either disease or ethnic cleansing. Africans brought to Cuba as slaves were as strictly segregated as those in the American South so the miscegenation was minimal and it was the usual white master taking advantage of black slave women. So Cuba has no mestizos and not a whole lot of mulattoes.
For most of Cuba's history, whites of Spanish blood dominated Cuban society and the blacks were the underclass. I gather that Cuba remains communist today because it is majority-black now and that the white communist governing class uses race to cement the black Cuban bond with the communist government. The white communist apparatchiks hint to black Cubans that if the communist regime ever fell, the whites of Cuba who live in Miami will come back and relegate blacks to the underclass of old.
The whole leftist emotional framework around "diversity" is so tedious. The word "diversity" is value neutral, unlike say, love/hate, good/evil. Diversity can be good (diverse fruits and vegetables across the world fit for human consumption) or bad (diverse number of diseases that can disable/kill us). I'm fine with Americans with a diverse number of backgrounds (ethnic/racial cultures, alternative "lifestyles" - sexual or other) as long as they are believers of and exhibit due respect and deference to, our founding framework of representative government, centered on individual liberty and inviolable individual rights enumerated in the Constitution.
Significant factions on the left (and on the right, though smaller there) want to replace that with a collective based neo-Marxist framework ignoring individual liberty and substituting the old bourgeoisie (evil) and proletariat (good), with a new evil (European Whites) and good (everyone else).
They are not around anymore to ask, but I'm pretty sure the average Russian rural farmer-peasant or urban factory worker, 5 years into the "Revolution", would certainly agree with the lyric in the Who's Won't Get Fooled Again: "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss".
When I arrived in the US for my first year of college in the early 80s, as a USian who had mostly grown up in France, I was confused by a few things, including this « Latino race » thing. As I filled out a form that asked me the (to me) bizarre and unheard-of question about my race, the choices were: white, black, a few others, and « Hispanic ». So I asked my roommates, wait, what is this, are you saying Spanish people aren’t white? I never got a proper explanation.
Race pretty much never existed as a legal thing in France, at least in my lifetime. They also never asked about religion. These are statistically interesting data, of course, but wow… the naivety of making these part of law… in this day and age…
Well it’s got a nice retro dystopian feeling. Another interesting datum is IQ: could we include it on driver’s licenses? Just for laughs… and some awesome stats!
Thanks.
If there were, indeed, LA restaurants that refused service to Hispanics in the 50s, they were likely still bitter about the zoot-suiters of WW2.
This was exceedingly rare and not necessarily racial but rather class based. There were separate Mexican schools in the early 50s - but again, limitations weren’t strict and it was largely poor brown recent immigrants routed into them.
“He remains the rarity that proves the necessity — indeed, the essential Americanness — of diversity.”
I have no idea what that means.
Poor Milton Berle's contract ended just before tax rates plummeted--and no inflation indexing. Were there many well-off Jews that soon after the war? I guess I've mostly heard about the West Side Reds.
I wonder if Desi and other Cubans could have made it big after Castro took over.
Yeah, I'd never heard this theory that there was more Jewish on screen talent in the early days because more Jews were early adopters of television. I'd like to see some evidence. Speaking of which, I saw a Lucy documentary this year which just kind of slipped in that the American public wouldn't accept a Latin as her husband, even though he was. I always assumed it was the thick accent they objected to. Oh, well, they said it, as the mainstream news likes to say whenever Trump makes an assertions, 'without offering evidence".
Speaking further of which I read a CNN article which pulled this on Trump and then included the evidence that he provided. Trump said that they must have been covering up Biden's prostate cancer when he was in the Whitehouse. CNN adds the editorial 'he said without providing evidence' and then go on to complete the report with the evidence that Trump stated, i.e. that the cancer was so advanced surely the president's doctors would have noticed it years ago.
The odd thing about that assertion is the information from Steve's post that Ball's TV show was the transfer of her radio show literally titled "My Favorite Husband". His accent always seemed to be played for laughs to me. To continue Steve's theme of projecting modern assumptions backwards, I suspect a lot of the claims of non-acceptance could also be generated by the way Ball/Anraz and other famous TV show couples from that era don't act "married". Specifically they don't have kids and aren't shown hopping in and out of the same bed. I think it was the Dick Van Dyke show among others that had separate twin beds in the bedroom scenes. Google sez there was an obscure (to me at least) show called "Mary Kay and Johnny" that filmed the couple in bed in 1947 but most people credit The Brady Bunch (1969) as being the first to regularly show the parents together in a double bed over two decades later.
I've never watched a lot of "I Love Lucy" but I don't remember Lucy and Desi kissing or doing anything romantic. And certainly the Mertzes never kissed. Vivian Vance hated Bill Frawley.
You may already know this, but Lucy's husband on the radio show was played by Richard Denning, not Desi Arnaz. Denning went on to star in several now-beloved (by me, anyway) '50s B&W sci-fi movies like "Creature from the Black Lagoon", "Day the World Ended" and "The Black Scorpion". He also played the governor of Hawaii on "Hawaii Five-O".
Anyway, I have read that Lucy had to fight to get Desi as her co-star on the TV show, something she wanted to bolster his career but also to keep an eye on him. (To say Desi had a wandering eye would be an understatement.) Producers were worried that he was too "foreign", what with that strong accent. I have never heard - probably because it never happened - that anyone had race-related concerns or anything specific to his being Hispanic.
Ironically because of his connection to Hawaii, Denning starred in a 50's Roger Corman film "Naked Paradise" which takes place in Hawaii. The Hawaiian islands shot in glorious technicolor right before statehood looked absolutely breathtaking.
Tax rates were very high in Berle's hay-day. Many Hollywood actors became Republican just because they were hit hard by Democratic taxes. One was Ronald Reagan.
Not sure if Spanish aristocrats played the bongos
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAV3bOJaQuY
Or sang Babaloo.
The original 'Dick Van Dyke' show starred Carl Reiner and was based on his experience as a writer on (probably from memory) your show of shows. It flopped and was revived with the world's most gentile/most attractive couple, the way the country liked to think of itself in the early 1960s Kennedy era.
It's one of my favorite shows and the casting is a big part of it, but it is kind of funny that Dick Van Dyke is cast as head writer on a New York TV show while Don Rickles was cast as a mugger (in one episode). The character played by Rose Marie BTW, was based on the woman bailiff on "Night Court" (too lazy to look up her name).
TV penetration went from 9% in 1950 to 87% in 1960. This led to more hillbilly shows like The Beverly Hillbillies.
The hillbillies who didn't leave didn't have TVs because the mountains ruined reception.
I watched many DvD shows (as reruns) but couldn't tell you a single plot to save my life.
I don't think shows about hillbillies were for the hillbilly demographic
Television radicalized entertainment. In a biography of Clint Eastwood I read ten years ago, it was written that ticket sales in America dropped by half between 1949 and 1950. That's quite a decimation, if true.
Here's a wikipedia article about notable things in the history of television. I suppose it's possible that the early 50s were top heavy with shows starring Jews and that they all came to nothing so only the few gentile shows remained notable enough for this article.
But it sure looks like mostly shows starring gentiles from the early days. Anyway, weren't most of the early shows jumps from radio? And radio was available outside the big east coast cities for decades.
"The character played by Rose Marie BTW, was based on the woman bailiff on "Night Court""
Selma Diamond? I didn't know that. Thanks.
Don't forget Buddy Sorrell, played by Morey Amsterdam. His character was Jewish (confirmed in the script, not merely implied, as with so many other characters on TV), as was Amsterdam himself, of course. There was an episode where Sorrell is bar mitzvahed. I don't remember why he didn't have one earlier, but his belated bar mitzvah was the central point of the episode, which must have been some kind of TV first.
By the way, OT, but how do you get proper formatting - italics, bold, quotes - in Substack replies?
I don't know
Yep, Buddy Sorrel was unusually overt in his Judaism. There was also an episode with a very bourgeois black couple at the end as part of a gag. Until the 1970s or 80s, anyone out of the ordinary, Jew, homosexual, even Italian (like the Fonz) never mentioned it.
Not a star, but Akim Tamiroff (Armenian from Baku) was a well-known character actor. Twice nominated for Academy Award as best supporting actor. Probably best known for The Great McGinty and Touch of Evil. In Touch of Evil he played a Mexican, and he played all kinds of ethnicities. In For Whom the Bell Tolls, a Spaniard
Other character actors from former Soviet countries include Mischa Auer (My Man Godfrey) and Leonid Kinskey, who played Sascha the bartender in Casablanca. Kinskey got that role because he was a Bogart drinking buddy. A lot of euro refugees from either bolsheviks or Nazis in that movie.
I believe Sessue Hayakawa played a lot of Mexicans as well.
People tend to assume that we lived like savages until just before they started paying attention. This applies not only to racial issues but to sexual mores. Late boomers like Todd S. Purdum tend to think this way about the 1950s.
It comes as a surprise when younger writers deplore the 1970s or even the 1990s!
I have found that Americans under fifty tend to be totally ignorant of the America that existed before they were cognizant. Who was Clark Gable? Who was Willie Mays? Girls always wore dresses before 1965? They didn't have cable television in the 1960s? Who was Elvis?
Everyone knows who Elvis is (not just was), even those under 30 in 2025. Elvis remains one of the US's most profitable dead celebrities. It helped that he lived into the 70's, toured a lot, and made movies, many of which are on Youtube as clips.
Some of those movies are the worst ever made. The movies the Beatles made were pretty bad, too.
King Creole is awesome. So is Jailhouse Rock, Flaming Star, and even Follow that Dream is pretty good. A Hard Days Night is simply iconic for its time. I'd also make a case for Blue Hawaii being iconic (the Soundtrack was one of the biggest selling albums of the 60's and outsold Sgt Pepper album during the 60's). Viva Las Vegas is interesting in that it shows the chemistry between Elvis and Ann-Margaret, who were allegedly intimate in real life and remained good friends after shooting wrapped.
I understand you said "some"; I'm just giving the other "some" that were the other side of the coin--awesome.
I do like me some Yellow Submarine. Good little kids film.
In 2016, I saw that the first house that Lucille Ball ever owned, which she bought as a 22-year old rookie B-movie contract player, in West Hollywood, and she bought into the marriage with Desi Arnaz, went on the market for $1.75m. The house itself is only 1874 sq. So I figured the only reason it was going for that much was because Lucille Ball. But I checked Zillow, and it wasn't that much higher than other similar houses in the immediate era.
Which begs the rhetorical question. Could a 22-year old B-movie rookie buy that same house today?
Steve: Says the house's address is 1344 North Ogden Drive, just in case that helps you provide context.
Even B-actors lived quite comfortably in the 1930s. Homes in the Hollywood hills with swimming pools. Even a B-actor named John Wayne did quite well in the 1930s.
Wayne's first wife was very well off, and was part of the Social Register. He married up, she married beneath her station. Ironically, his first wife's father was the Consul General of Panama in the United States, José Saenz, and was also a wealthy businessman who lived in Los Angeles. Wayne's other two wives were Latinas.
After the Duke made it big in 1939 with "Stagecoach", he began to prowl other women. He got big-headed.
Technically, and as Gary Wills notes in his book John Wayne's America, Stagecoach did not make Wayne a superstar. It got him out of B films but not onto the Alist. Wayne would spend another 9 yrs or so in supporting roles in A films, while starring in B features (that had better budgets than what he was doing in the 30's).
Howard Hawk's Red River made Wayne the superstar he's remembered for and onto the Alist.
SoCal, ground zero for the entertainment industry, is very Latin America adjacent, and the region was initially a Spanish colony. John Wayne's three wives were all of Latin decent (Spanish, Mexican and Peruvian). Speaking of John Wayne, i see his son Patrick is still kicking around at age 85. One of my all-time favorite John Wayne movies is "Big Jake", which co-stars Patrick, and, interestingly, Robert Mitchum's son Christopher.
"Big Jake" has cameos from Maureen O'Hara and John Agar. Wayne always like to reward friends by putting them in his films if he could.
There were less than 10,000 Californios in what is today California at the time of annexation. Their descendants are functionally either white or Native American today and have been for 2 generations. You’d be more likely to meet a leprechaun than a Hispanic Californian who is an actual Californio descendant. There’s simply no organic, indigenous “Latin American” (it wasn’t part of Latin America and I’d encourage you to research the history of that term vs Spanish America) culture or heritage in California. The only place in the U.S. where there is such a heritage is the northern half of New Mexico and pockets of Texas, in addition to Puerto Rico of course.
One might say that race-mixing with white women is the industry that Los Angeles is built upon.
Just to crossover to football, the first great NFL running back was Steve Van Buren of the 1940s Philadelphia Eagles. He ran for four 1000 yard seasons during the old twelve game seasons. He was the son of an American engineer and a Spanish mother and was born in Honduras while his father worked a job there. Van Buren was orphaned at age ten and was sent to live with relatives in New Orleans. He starred at LSU and then with the Eagles. He was sometimes called the first Hispanic football star, an attribute he very much resented.
It is interesting how myopic our elites can be, who often project their modern day cultural obsessions onto a past, rather than having the mental agility to understand attitudes and mores are unique to their eras. Yet another reason it’s hard to take our media seriously - there’s a major deficit in actual intellectual curiosity.
To return to the present, diversity in entertainment simply means shoehorning in increasingly ludicrous examples to made a ham fisted point rather than quality art. It’s a particularly tough sell when it involves integrating black actors into white milieus, because in real life blacks are the most culturally separatist group in America. They still retain a distinctive accent as a part of their identity, they have absurd naming conventions, and in politics and entertainment cannot resist bringing up their capital B blackness.
The nation has seen this long enough and largely considers it a joke, something the Purdums of the world apparently do not grok.
Cuba's ethnic history is different than most other Latin American countries in that the Indians of pre-Columbian Cuba were extraordinarily violent and unruly. The Spaniards that claimed Cuba killed off all the Indians by either disease or ethnic cleansing. Africans brought to Cuba as slaves were as strictly segregated as those in the American South so the miscegenation was minimal and it was the usual white master taking advantage of black slave women. So Cuba has no mestizos and not a whole lot of mulattoes.
For most of Cuba's history, whites of Spanish blood dominated Cuban society and the blacks were the underclass. I gather that Cuba remains communist today because it is majority-black now and that the white communist governing class uses race to cement the black Cuban bond with the communist government. The white communist apparatchiks hint to black Cubans that if the communist regime ever fell, the whites of Cuba who live in Miami will come back and relegate blacks to the underclass of old.
The whole leftist emotional framework around "diversity" is so tedious. The word "diversity" is value neutral, unlike say, love/hate, good/evil. Diversity can be good (diverse fruits and vegetables across the world fit for human consumption) or bad (diverse number of diseases that can disable/kill us). I'm fine with Americans with a diverse number of backgrounds (ethnic/racial cultures, alternative "lifestyles" - sexual or other) as long as they are believers of and exhibit due respect and deference to, our founding framework of representative government, centered on individual liberty and inviolable individual rights enumerated in the Constitution.
Significant factions on the left (and on the right, though smaller there) want to replace that with a collective based neo-Marxist framework ignoring individual liberty and substituting the old bourgeoisie (evil) and proletariat (good), with a new evil (European Whites) and good (everyone else).
They are not around anymore to ask, but I'm pretty sure the average Russian rural farmer-peasant or urban factory worker, 5 years into the "Revolution", would certainly agree with the lyric in the Who's Won't Get Fooled Again: "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss".
When I arrived in the US for my first year of college in the early 80s, as a USian who had mostly grown up in France, I was confused by a few things, including this « Latino race » thing. As I filled out a form that asked me the (to me) bizarre and unheard-of question about my race, the choices were: white, black, a few others, and « Hispanic ». So I asked my roommates, wait, what is this, are you saying Spanish people aren’t white? I never got a proper explanation.
Race pretty much never existed as a legal thing in France, at least in my lifetime. They also never asked about religion. These are statistically interesting data, of course, but wow… the naivety of making these part of law… in this day and age…
Well it’s got a nice retro dystopian feeling. Another interesting datum is IQ: could we include it on driver’s licenses? Just for laughs… and some awesome stats!