Perceptions such as the one made about the Latino community play into a long history of racist perceptions about cleanliness of minority races. The perceptions, in turn, fit into the story of the American dream.
A dream created—and perpetuated, in this way and others—by white folks and bought into, at least to some degree, by all folks… however, to link the American dream directly to race would, I feel, be inaccurate… a forth category of truth, the half-truth or, more accurately, the some-percentage-out-of-one-hundred-percent-truth—the binary 50-50 a bit too black-and-white.
(another category… the unacknowledged fact? The American dream isn’t trying to hide the fact it’s a dream, or…?)
* and if I’m trying to sound smart here, or, well, since I should at least be honest enough to admit that creating tidy categories of “truth” is pretty damn simplistic itself… wouldn’t “categories” serve to delimit the ways to classify “truth,” when it seem more true to my perceptions, at least, that the very notion of truth creates a solid category of the false.
