What "minority" means in todays world

My name is Henry Franklin Crumblish and I am a minority. You may not know it from my name alone, but in addition to being 50 percent Irish I am also 50 percent Black.

The word minority should be anything but commonplace in our society. In our hyper-sensitive age where a tweet can get you fired, it puzzles me as to how minority manages to remain politically correct.

In theory, the word is applicable when used to label or identify small groups but in reality it makes large groups of Americans feel small. As the eloquent Himanshu Suri of Das Racist said, "Minorities mad, who you fooling b? White people skin is their jewelry."

A term I once threw around callously now pesters me similarly to festering boils. The word minority shouldn't be used to refer to, or describe a human-being in the year 2014.

I have the utmost reverence for the right to free speech and believe in speech with impunity. After all, I am a journalist with a raunchy mouth, a follower of luminaries such as Hunter S. Thompson, and ultimately everyone can say and do as they please.

However, it doesn't mean that there aren't certain rules to semantics and there certainly is a time and place for certain words. The word minority has no place in American society because it has inherent negative connotations with it.

Every reported criminal that appears on television news that isn't a white guy, is automatically labeled a minority suspect. As viewers and consumers of media we've been conditioned to think of Latinos and African-Americans as minorities.

Although in the year 2014, a minority suspect could be Samoan, Chinese, Indian, Columbian, Moroccan, or Mongolian. Not only is the word minority damaging to the psyche of anyone who isn't Caucasian, it's no longer effective for communication.

Ubiquitous diversity of the United States has rendered the meaning of the word useless. Since minority has become a blanket term for every ethnic and racial group in America, you'd have to be a medium to know which group someone is talking about without clarification.

But what exactly is a minority?

Statistically, Latinos are far from being the minority in California, where they constitute 38.2 percent of the state's population according to the United States Census Bureau. History is not a muse to be forgotten lightly.

The point of words and language is communication, and when the words we use no longer serve their purpose or accurately communicate then they become obsolete.

If we are truly striving for equality in post racial America our vernacular must evolve past divisive vocabulary and archaic forms of speech. Minorities are a major force in the United States who should never be made to feel belittled. Let's instead erase the lines on the map, both socially and personally.