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'The United States of America, according to my racist aunt'

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July 28, 2005 11:25 am
By Sheila Lennon

I had an aunt, long dead now, who would ask about my friends and mutter the ethnic origin of each of their last names as I said it.

NYC comedian Todd Levin, the author of this piece at Tremble, has such an aunt, too:

Recently, as an experiment, I placed a map of the United States of America (not including U.S. territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam, for fear that the resulting confusion would dismantle my experiment before it even began.) in front of my racist aunt, and asked her to tell me what she made of it. She was given full license to comment, and her knee-jerk reaction was encouraged over careful, diplomatic consideration.

The map is pretty funny, perhaps because we all unconsciously stereotype. (Florida is labeled simply "winter.") There's a larger pdf version, too.

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