As a boy growing up here in America, during World War II, I remember the plight of the Italian family who lived down the street from us. It hadn't mattered to most that part of their family members were native born, they suffered the discrimination of their disgruntled non-foreign born, American neighbors.

Presently, the Justice Department is investigating into those now nearly forgotten, darker episodes in United States history: the mistreatment of hundreds of thousands of Italo-Americans. The Department of Justice, under a law passed by Congress this last November, is attempting to document the treatment of over a half a million people of Italian ancestry, including those who were classified as enemy aliens from 1941 until Italy surrendered in 1943. The review covers the period from September 1, 1939, the Nazi invasion of Poland, to December 31, 1945, the fiscal year World War II ended.

In my mind, such a delayed overture by the United States Government is too late; it will have no affect on relieving the horrific memories such discrimination had left on its recipients. Some of them were arrested, many had their homes raided, thousands, like my neighbors, were forced to live under curfews and some were interred as Japanese-Americans were on the west coast.

Within today's social canvas, discrimination is alive and well. Acts of discrimination occur everywhere, sometimes under the most innocent of guises catching the observer unawares. At a Saint Patrick's Day party I was at this last March 19th, a group of us were talking about the explosion in our population over the last ten years and how the dynamics of our diversified populace has changed.

"The biggest explosion has occurred in the Southern California area where the Latino population now represents over half of that area's inhabitants and so they are now a tremendous buying market to contend with," I had said.

"Nonsense!" said one woman, who shall remain nameless. "How can you say that when it's a well known fact that all Latino's are at the lower rungs of our economic scale. We whites not only outnumber them by seventy-five percent, but our economic level is much higher!"

I shuddered at her retort and reprimanded her for her irresponsible remark. Her answer to that was the physical way in which she ignored my wife and I for the rest of the evening. However, as you see, I am not ignoring her shameless attitude. I'm writing about it.

For clarities sake, how does the Census 2000 Bureau, in this case, define the race category? "The White Race" refers to people having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East or North Africa. For the first time in the history of our census taking, it also included people who, by their own definition, considered themselves "White" or wrote in entries of their ethnic origins. "Latino" and "Hispanic" were used interchangeably in the census report but only as it referred to ethnicity and not to race. But somewhere along the line, its been forgotten that "Latino" refers to those people who speak anyone of the seven present day "Romance Languages" that has evolved from the original Latin language of our past.

EDITOR'S NOTE:
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