[rach2005]

Hi, I am new to this forum, just sort of stumbled upon it as I have always been intrested in South Africa since as long as I can remember, and am planning on a holiday sometime mid year 2008. So I have just been looking around the internet gathering all the infomation I can find.

Anyway as I realize I am about 3 years late on this thread I was just going through the forum seeing what it was all about, and stumbled across this thread. And as I agree with the post above, I am afraid that our media here in the USA like to find and exploit stories that will grab attention and I am certian that a lot of the time this gives a bad impression and a false representation of what it is like over here.

We are a very large country at 300 million, and our population is very very diverse and in some instances very multi racial, and I think for the most part, we are intergrated very good, and most of us are very open minded and accepting, and value diversity. I am white of English, Irish, and French descent, the familys I descended from came here circa the 1850's. But since then, my generation of my family have mixed with Hispanics, Black Americans, and Asians, which is very characteristic of a lot of North American families.

The area in which I was raised and live is like 40% white, 35% Hispanic,
23% Black American, 3% Asian, and a little less than half a % Native American. However, these statistics for the Native Americans are somewhat skewed in the fact that about 60 km north is an American Indian Nation, which with about 300,000 people is the largest Native American entiy in the country, so if you live near this area and in compared to the rest of the population, the Native Americans make up about 25% of the population.

I know we still have a lot of problems here and a lot of work to do, but for the most part we are a very mixed diverse society, and most of us like and appreciate this, and are very intrested in continuing on this path. I am sure we do still have hate crime, but as I have talked about, a lot of the time, our media goes looking for it, and sometimes even fabricates it, or will instigate an occurence, just to sell a story, and appease whatever demographic they are trying to appeal too.

good will to everyone,

-rache-