Today I read my American Lit kids an essay by a French man who visited the American colonies and famously described their multicultural diversity:
He is neither an European, nor the descendant of an European; hence that strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other country. I could point out to you a family whose grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife was Dutch, whose son married a French woman, and whose present four sons have now four wives of different nations.
After which I commented, “That should have been their motto: Colonial America–where a white person is free to marry a slightly different kind of white person.”
This might end up being the best received joke I tell all year.
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If you wanted to go beyond a joke and give your students a real lesson on the conception of race in America, you should read the opening chapters of Paul Reeve’s Religion of a Different Color.