A modest proposal...

There are so many things about political correctness that bug me, but perhaps the thing that most bothers me is the emphasis on race. For the past few decades, scumbags like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton have done their best to divide America along racial lines. Everyone of a certain skin color is a victim, they will tell you, which is exactly the opposite of Dr. Martin Luther King's dream of a time when men were judged "not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."

We've become obsessed with race. Business feel forced by the government to meet quotas for both employees and customers. (One of the biggest reasons for our present economic situation was the burst of the real estate bubble, a bubble that was largely caused by banks feeling pressured to issue loans to unqualified borrowers, lest they be called "racist" by ACORN and the federal government.)

Schools reject more qualified applicants because they need to fill racial quotas. (Do you want to be treated by a doctor that had low MCAT scores and poor grades, but was accepted into medical school because of his ethnicity?)

It irks me every time I have to fill out a form and there are those little boxes asking for "race" or "ethnicity." I've always wondered if I could get preferential treatment by checking that "Native American" box, in honor of my maternal great-grandmother, who was a full-blooded Sioux.

But there's a bigger principal at work here than any individual possible advantage. The fact is that virtually all of us are descended from someone who left a different country in order to become an American. They left because they didn't want to be Italians or Swedes or Brazilians or - in my great-great grandfather's case - Dutchmen. They wanted to be Americans.

Now comes a little method for fighting the madness. In the next few weeks, most of us will get a census form in the mail. You can see what it looks like here, and if you scroll down to question 9, you'll see that you're going to be asked about the ethnicity of everyone in your household.

The explanation even tells you why you should be hesitant to answer. It says, "State government uses the data to determine congressional, state and local voting districts. Race data are also used to assess fairness of employment practices, to monitor racial disparities in characteristics such as health and education and to plan and obtain funds for public services."

Is that really what you want your government doing?

Now, providing false information on the census is a crime, and I would never urge anyone to break the law. However, what has been suggested by some - and what I plan to do - is this:

On question 9, there is a box for "some other race," and space to write the name of that other race. My intention is to check the box, and in the space provided for my race, write in "American."

Granted, it's a small gesture, but sometimes a small gesture is all it takes. And maybe if enough people do this we can make some bureaucrat somewhere begin to re-think this whole racial nonsense, and maybe our children and grandchildren can someday actually live in a color-blind society, free from the racial poison that Jackson, Sharpton and other have left us.