black, white and stupid

I wonder why people are trying so hard these days to make a racial "thing" out of everything.   Isn't there enough REAL racism in the world today without looking for it in anything mentioning a color that is ascribed to a race?

Cases in point:

Over the Thanksgiving weekend, there was a meme going around about how "Black Friday" referred to the selling off of blacks the day after Thanksgiving to other owners, essentially holding a "Fire sale" of humans and how we should NOT participate to honor those slaves.  The MAJOR flaw in that thinking is that Abraham Lincoln, remember him- the Emancipation Proclamation guy?- was the one who created Thanksgiving as a national Holiday.  So.. there was NO big selling off of blacks, who were called "Negros" as a more common generic term during that period in time, if I remember my history.  Black Friday is a term from BUSINESS, meaning that the sales put them "in the black"  and they had made a profit.  Black ink was a good thing in the ledger book.

A few years ago, Pixar announced it was developing a film, tentatively called "Brave"  a small group of Native Americans, without bothering to discern the plot, protested Pixar's exploitation of Native Americans.  The film was about a red-haired Scottish girl.  There were  lot of Scottish stereotypes in the film, but those exist in literature as comic relief or to move the story along, don't they?  You don't say everyone behaves this way, but you paint a character with a large and somewhat unbelievable brush to make the tale move.  

White Christmas?????  There is a huge protest about the singing of the song in New York recently. Uh....  it's about SNOW and a nostalgia for the snowy Christmas of the past.  It has nothing to do with pale people like myself celebrating the birth of Christ with only other pale people like myself.

I think we should look at real issues and try not to make a mountain out of a molehill, although I will admit to being hacked off at the term "Paddy Wagon" that was used by LAPD as a St Patrick's Day free ride program.  "Paddy" is a pejorative term for an Irishman.  Every year I would call and talk to the officer in charge about how insulting that was to Irish people.  He didn't care, but eventually they stopped using it.  The inference that they needed a special vehicle to lock up all the drunken Irishmen was not something that should have been associated with what is for Irish Catholics, a holy day.  Here in America, it's a day to drink green beer. 

Don't get me started on the little "Fighting Irish" guy that represents Notre Dame.....