Watching Skip Gate's final (and maybe best) show of the season Tuesday made me remember 1996. I was invited to be on an NEH panel, but in order to participate I would have been required to assert that I was of one race. I could say all Cherokee or all Choctaw, maybe, but I could not say part Cherokee and Choctaw and mainly white. I wrote a tough letter denouncing the requirement as outright racist and never got invited to work for NEH again. Five years later, ten, popular musicians were casually describing themselves as bi-racial and a few years later it was hard to find anyone in the country who claimed to be all white. I wonder what NEH's policy is now.
No comments:
Post a Comment