exclusively

First, a sidebar: So it comes out that Strom Thurmond fathered a daughter by an African-American family servant when he was 22 and she was 16. He never acknowledged his paternity to anyone but his child. So for the majority of his career, he was advocating policies that ensured his own daughter second-class public accommodations. Oh, and that makes him at least a statutory rapist - and how likely, under the circumstances and at that time, is "consent" a real possibility (what choice did the young woman really have?) - so I'd have to say he was a rapist plain and simple. What a prick.

Anyway, in case anyone was thinking such racial arrogance was interred deep in our past, here's a story. We were at an old-line Italian restaurant the other day (you know: red-and-white checked tablecloths, candles in wicker-wrapped wine bottles encrusted with melted wax, lotsa Sinatra and Bennett...), and sitting in the waiting area was a copy of a local magazine aiming at wealthy, elderly suburbanites, Exclusively Yours. As a bit of a joke, Rose said, "let's play 'count the white people.'" We figured, this being the 21st century, that even in such a magazine, there'd be some sort of token representation of the fact that the Milwaukee area, even the burbs, isn't entirely white - but amazingly, every last person depicted in the magazine, from subjects of articles to models in ads to business owners, was white. This included a two-page spread from Shorewest Realtors with pictures of more than seventy real estate agents. Only one person in the entire magazine looked as if they might have some Asian heritage; one other person had what might have been a Hispanic surname. I find it hard to believe this exclusion was an accident - pretty damned sad.