I must apologize for my insensitivity.

I think maybe I'm starting to understand what Jehan has been telling me these past couple of years... that being oblivious to race issues is not necessarily a virtue. I've remained oblivious, as I've argued before (as in, race and gender issues never have an impact on my decisions regarding who I hire/work for/associate with), but this has also led me to do some very stupid things.

I tried to make a point in an earlier essay about flaws in logic. The piece took a few friendly swipes at friends of mine who work in e-tail (many in-jokes that do not warrant elaboration here), who live in Seattle, and who recently travelled in other parts of the world.

But while it might be okay to take jabs at, say, a pilgrimage to Cleveland (sorry, Matt), a known hotbed of credit card fraud (I'm making that up as an example), to do the same with some other specific area of the world could contain racial overtones. To refer to Clevelanders as a whole as crooks is easily perceived as an obvious joke about generalizations; to do the same about the inhabitants of a foreign country, on the other hand, could be construed as being literal. The sad thing is, there are people out there who actually believe such generalizations.

I am not one of them. That's why I make fun of them.

And so, I must sincerely apologize in public for having picked a very poor example when I was trying to make my point about generalizations. I had picked a geographic area that could very easily be construed as being a target of a racially or ethnically motivated generalization. That was not only not my intention, it was the exact opposite of what I was going for.

I was oblivious.

But, I will do better in the future.