_______________ BABY BULLS BY HEATHER CHAPLIN (04/15/98)
	Though my peers will cringe, I've gotta admit that I always kind of liked the appellation "Generation X" -- had a certain spunk about it. But your recent "Baby Bulls" feature has finally soured me on the label. I finally see it really is just a side-of-the-journalistic-road sign reading: Thinly Veiled Slam Here. It seems to me that only a couple of years ago the media were filled with articles lamenting Americans' consumerist tendencies, our collective inability to save, our lack of preparation for retirement. And so when it comes out that the universally loathed Gen-Xers are saving and investing, are planning for our retirement, are more than aware that Social Security isn't likely to support us in our old age, there's just got to be something wrong with it. And lo and behold, it turns out we're approaching our investment strategies with the wrong attitude. Apparently we're doing it (gasp) to make money! Inexplicably, we're a little disappointed when our fund makes 20 percent while our neighbor's makes 35 percent. Ingrates! Curs! Even more weirdly, we entertain vain, monstrous hopes that we'll strike it rich and be freed from wage slavery. Downright un-American! Finally, while the times are good (and I dare say this goes against human nature itself), we don't spend a lot of time thinking about the bad times just around the corner. Freaks, for sure. As if we don't know it has all collapsed before and will again. I'm 27, and I remember stagflation -- I remember peanut butter that was too expensive for kids to eat, remember turning the heat down to 65, remember weeks of hamburger-based dinners, gas lines, ketchup as a vegetable, layoffs, Black Monday, divorce, the nuclear threat ... The more plausible spin is that we're anxious to build ourselves a little cushion now because we're keenly aware of how easily things can collapse. So enough already -- joke's up. Maybe we do have a collective bad attitude, maybe we are snide and sarcastic and snotty, but as of right now, we are buying in, we are working hard, we are paying our way. Imagine what we could do if you'd work with us, people. --Erika Peterson Denver Just read Heather Chaplin's "Baby Bulls" article. While avid investing is a definitive break from the stereotypical Generation X profile, I don't think it's amazing that certain young adults invest money. The mystique to the whole "Baby Bulls" phenomenon is shattered in the first paragraph of the article: "When Robert Gapasin graduated from Cal Poly San Luis Obisbo in 1991, his parents gave him a choice of graduation presents. He could have an all-expense-paid trip to Europe, $5,000 or 100 shares of IBM. Gapasin, who had never been the least bit interested in the stock market, still wonders why he chose IBM." Well shit, if I had parents who could afford to buy me those types of things, I could probably do pretty well for myself too! Nothing against the people profiled, but it isn't as if we're talking about people who start out with nothing and work their way to success via innovation and hard work. They are given all the help they need. All that is required is to not blow the load of cash they were handed. Remember, a rich kid with an ankle tattoo who does his investing with latte in hand is still a rich kid. -- Pete Tousignant
_______________ PASSING BY KAREN GRIGSBY BATES (04/15/98)
	Thank you for publishing the Grigsby Bates book review of the two books regarding light-skinned blacks passing for white. I think Bates' spirited criticism of Derracotte's "The Black Notebooks" is based on Derracotte's experience as a light-skinned black woman as needing to fit in to white society; that is, her experience of racism has to do with trying to join a lily-white country club. My own personal experience as a light-skinned black is closer to the child in Senna's book, "Caucasia": Witnessing unconscious racism by whites. When whites insist that I could not possibly be black, it is not simply due to my lack of pigmentation but by not being: poor, uneducated, athletic, rhythmic, a teenage mother, on welfare, in jail and/or on drugs. That is the racism I encounter the most, and am enraged by the most. Getting angry about not being accepted by the people perpetuating the racism reflects a subtle loathing of one's race. It reflects the "tragic mulatto" stereotype from a different era. At least I hoped it was from a different era. By the way, the day I read the book review, my mother, who is spending her retirement investigating our genealogy, mailed me a copy of my great-great-uncle's birth certificate. He is one of our lost ancestors, one of the ones who probably crossed over and became white. What people need to realize is that if most African-Americans are part white, then there must be a whole lot of white Americans who are part African-American and have no idea. -- Adrienne Eng I just read your article in the books section on blacks passing for white. What amazes me is that Karen Grigsby Bates never once questions the unspoken assumption that a person with any fraction of black blood is automatically black. To my mind, this is a remarkably racist concept, hearkening back to the ridiculous system of measurement to the nearest 1/64th that used to exist in the American South and, more recently, in apartheid South Africa. -- Paul Ilechko SALON | April 20, 1998

R E C E N T L Y+| GENE BLUES BY JEFFREY OBSER (04/06/98)

If you'd like to submit a letter to the editor for publication,
please e-mail us at salon@salonmagazine.com.
Letters may be edited for clarity and conciseness.
If you do not wish the letter to be published, please say so.