Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Minorities

As a white male of European descent, it is not often that I find myself in the minority anywhere I might wander. But I did this past weekend. Oddly enough, it was not in a place I expected to be a minority. Many of you are picturing a lot of stereotypical situations where I might have strayed. But it was not where you think. I was at a college graduation at a highly regarded university on the east coast of the United States. The disparity between us “whites” and the Asian and Middle Eastern “majority” was more pronounced during the portion of the Commencement where they conferred post graduate degrees. There was about a three to one ratio of “non-whites” to whites in both the Masters degree and Doctorate degree portions of the program. The undergraduate mix was a little more even. This apparently, was not an aberration www.bsos.umd.edu/socy/vanneman/socy441/trends/collrace.html To paraphrase an old quote, “I have seen the future, baby, and the future is now.”