Publicly funded journalists continue to tackle the hard questions.
“Heath Racela identifies as three-quarters white and one-quarter Filipino,” begins a National Public Radio report published on the internet this week, detailing the fraught racial politics of choosing emoji skin colors. Your humble correspondent, for those who might be wondering, identifies as one-half white and one-half Irish.
It’s a rather strange construction. Either Mr. (Mx.?) Racela is one-quarter Filipino, or he is not. Race and ethnicity seem odd arenas for the advancement of the self-identification fad. These past few years we have witnessed the mainstreaming of a zealous race essentialism which asserts that such identities are the burdens of our history—inescapable if inconvenient facts handed down to us from the past.
