On his authority as Admiral of the battlestar Galactica, Edward James Olmos addresses a crowd in the United Nations chamber and gets them to condemn the use of the constructed term [edited] “race” with a shout of “So say we all!”
Apart from the, I believe, indisputable general awesomeness of this moment, I’m not sure there’s that much else to say. The poor UN official who set Olmos off by using the word “races”—in quotation marks—was pretty good-humored about it.
Links explaining the occasion here.
6 comments
March 18, 2009 at 3:21 pm
Buster
Y’all may see the BSG admiral, but I kept expecting Olmos to revert into his Jaime Escalante role and tell that guy that if he sees him on the street, he’s gonna kick his ass.
March 19, 2009 at 4:08 am
dave
I’m guessing here, but when you said “to condemn the constructedness of race”, you probably really meant to say “to insist on the constructedness of race “. Otherwise you’d be calling them racial essentialists…
March 19, 2009 at 5:52 am
eric
I meant to condemn the use of such a constructed term. Sorry.
March 19, 2009 at 10:09 am
jimbo
Why wasn’t he at the Westminster show a few weeks back, condemning the continued use of the word “breed”? It seems to me they are both equally doublepulsungood.
March 19, 2009 at 10:39 am
RobinMarie
jimbo, maybe you are being satirical, but I actually think that is a good point. I love watching dog shows because I like seeing all the adorable puppy dogs, but they always make me kind of uncomfortable; it is as if they are civilized outlets for eugenicist thinking as football is called a civilized outlet for violence. After all, the primary lesson of dogs is that it does not matter at all what they look like or what their measurements are, because they are just huge (or tiny) bundles of unconditional love. It seems wrong to judge such enlightened creatures on such a shallow basis.
March 19, 2009 at 11:18 am
dana
Unless you try to use a terrier as a bloodhound.