Video From Angle Event Reopens Subject of Race

By SUSAN SAULNY
NYT

Louie Gong, a 36-year-old Seattle resident who is a mix of American Indian, white and Chinese, is often mistaken for Latino.

“Most people don’t look at me and say ‘Chinese,’ ” he said. “Then I tell them what my heritage is, and they argue with me, saying, ‘No, you look Hispanic.’ That’s offensive on a whole other level — it’s like their sensibility of racial aesthetics trumps my 36 years of life experience, and the fact that my last name is Gong.”

Mr. Gong, like many other racial and ethnic minorities, was taken back to some of his own uncomfortable encounters with being assigned a heritage that was not his own when a video circulated widely on the Internet this week showing Sharron Angle, the Republican candidate for the Senate in Nevada, telling a group of Latino students that she did not know if they were all Latino because “some of you look a little more Asian to me.”

Ms. Angle, who is running with Tea Party support against the Democratic majority leader, Harry Reid, made the comments at Rancho High School in Las Vegas, to the Hispanic Students Union. Her sentiments, not the first unorthodox statements she has made, have thrust activists, experts and bloggers into a conversation about race in a campaign season that has been far more about mortgages than minorities.

(More here.)