Minor detail, really.
For the stories in the print editions, the Chicago Tribune simply uses the word minority, while the Sun-Times places the word in quotes.
I say they're sneer quotes, and I say to hell with 'em.
As usual, I'm much more interested in how people discuss these issues than in the issues themselves. And I realize that my participation -- or rather, the addition of my domain name -- has a distorting effect on the discussion, which prevents me from actively. . .
Hi, my name is Aaron, and I was up entirely too late last night. I also have a head cold. I will not be making much sense today, and may start babbling about discourse analysis for no particular reason. I apologize for the inconvenience.
Anyway, the actual events/story/topic, from that Trib link:
The politically connected Duff family used its matriarch and a trusted black associate to pose as fronts for phony women- and minority-owned businesses in a massive, dozen-year fraud that garnered more than $100 million in contracts from the city of Chicago, a federal indictment charged Thursday.[. . .] "Yeah, I know them," [Chicago Mayor Richard] Daley said of the Duffs. "You know that. They're hard-working people. This is an unfortunate incident."
"Unfortunate incident."
Words fail me.
Although the races and genders of the fronts are obviously given in the story, I must have missed the bit where they explicitly mentioned that James M. Duff, the brains of the operation, is a white male.
Probably votes Republican, too.
I'm just speculating, of course. Head cold. Not thinking clearly.
9/28 Update: Slight edit. Head cold.
Recently noticed: Didion herself became a writer so famously distrustful of abstraction that the skeptical quotation marks she liked to put around all but the commonest of nouns constituted an important element in one of the most recognizable -- and brilliant -- literary styles to emerge in America during the past four decades.