There was a great video getting sent around the blogosphere earlier today — which has since lamentably been made private by its uploader — with a young kid learning about homosexuals and just sort of going ‘oh, ok’ and reacting the way children do to any new fact they encounter. It’s a wonderful example of the ease with which children can ‘get’ homosexuality.

But it’s also a lesson, I think, that the sorts of awkward things we try to avoid talking about with our kids, things like sexuality and homosexuality and racism, are exactly the sorts of things they need to learn when they’re young. Whether we like it or not, it’s very hard to break the prejudices of our youth. Growing up in a family that eschews acknowledgment of homosexuals will betray an implicit otherness to children. But talking about these things in a straight-forward manner, invariably works.

A few years ago, at the dinner table with my dad, my sister, and her daughter we were having a conversation and homosexuals came up. My niece asked what that was and I explained it very matter-of-factly as my sister and father looked on with shock. After I finished my explanation, she got a look on her face that meant she thought it was weird that some men like men the way most men like women, but once she knew it wasn’t a soul shattering experience.

It’s not that the new generations are inherently more accepting, the conversations are just happening earlier.

A couple weeks ago, Adam Serwer wrote a great post trashing Pat Buchanan and his offensive talk about white American’s ‘losing their country.’ Cutting to the quick, Adam says:

Black Americans have shed blood in every American war since the Revolution. This country, even the very Capitol building in which today’s legislators now demand to see the birth certificate of the first black president, was built on the sweat and sinew of slaves. Before we were people in the eyes of the law, before we had the right to vote, before we had a black president, we were here, helping make this country as it is today. We are as American as it gets.

I have trouble not cheering that paragraph on as I read it, it reads so fucking true. And obviously true. Maybe it’s because I’m from Canada, a nation more forward about its mosaic-esque nature, but it seems so clear to me that what America is all about is not white Americans or black Americans or any colour or creed. They’re all a part of the big beautiful conglomeration.

But while I cheered on that post, the follow ups that came from Andrew Sullivan and his horde of purple prose packed readers gave me that sort of sighed chagrin you get when you see the point, and then you see the person trying to make it drive right on by.

Sullivan was so busy trying to describe how white England is and how black America is, he forgot that the real point was that America isn’t white. The Banjo is an African instrument, and Cajuns originate from the Canadian East coast. America is the people who are there and what they brought with them.

This is not me trying to downplay the Blackness of America, but all this talk about how Black America is was tiring me. The world is not that black and white, pardon the pun, which was the whole point of Serwer’s original post; not that America is black, but that it isn’t wholly white.

Maybe I’m quibbling over semantics — and some of this is about southern white people sharing many cultural commonalities with southern black people, which is more about cultural regionalism than about racial identity, though perhaps they’re overly conflated in the American South — but I think it’s an important distinction.

There’s been a bit of talk about Tom Cruise’s new movie Valkyrie and how Tom Cruise speaks without a German accent despite playing a German character. I don’t understand that really. Having your characters speak in outrageous accents didn’t make a lot of sense to me. Why exactly is it offensive to have a Chinese character say “Me so solly” and yet it’s expected for a German character to speak like “Zis und Zat”? Aren’t those really the same thing?

I’d understand those sorts of accent in a film which is based on English speaking events, but the events of Valkyrie all took place in the real world in German. The fact that those events have been transcribed to English means that the audience should simply accept that some invisible translation has occurred for their sake. (Also, I know that many Americans during World War 2 spoke German fluently as a disguise, why couldn’t Germans have done the same thing?)

A couple reviews I’ve read — mostly through blogs, traditional media wouldn’t dare be so glib about a WW2 movie — essentially cast aside the movie because of the “unauthentic” accents. The people the film is based on spoke perfect and unaccented German. It was their native tongue. So it makes sense to me that any retelling of this story in the English speaking world would either be entirely in German (unfeasible for commercial reasons) or use English as the primary language and treat the characters as if it was their native tongue (what seems to have been done). Then again, I haven’t seen the movie so I should probably just shut my mouth until I can decide how distracting the American accent is.

So this moron here is claiming that Obama was disrespectful to Latinos because none of his big cabinet appointments were Latinos despite their avid support of him. He also claims that Alberto Gonzales was a good idea simply because it broached a racial barrier. Completely ignore the gross misconduct and all the other reasons why Gonzales was terrible and just look exclusively at his skin.

First of all, the cabinet of a presidential administration is not there to meet racial quotas or to pay back favors done during the campaign. They are there to advise the president, and ensure their mandates are implemented. (I’m grossly simplifying this because I barely know American politics, and yet I still know this guy’s stupid)

If you think there are more qualified people that should be in Obama’s cabinet that’s a perfectly fine criticism, but they can’t be more “qualified” because of the race of the parents. You fucking idiot.

Second of all, Obama was not a good choice because he’s black, and Gonzales certainly wasn’t a good choice because he’s Latino. The fraction of people that voted for Obama simply to breach a racial barrier in politics is not what won him the presidency. It was his political acumen, in collusion with the economic meltdown and an infamously bad sitting president. I’m sure his race helped him in some groups and hurt him in others. But in the end, he won primarily because he was the best person for the job.

Basically, that guy’s a douche and a moron. He also defends Bush’s appointment of a Latino to Commerce Secretary and immediately follows it up with a rebuke of Obama because he appointed Bill Richardson as Commerce Secretary. The guy’s a moron, people.