I'm degenerate/defective!!

This is a horrendous time of the year. Between fending off angry students at the reference desk who want me to 1)come up with a paper topic for them 2)formulate their arguments and 3)find their sources, and writing my own twenty-page papers, there is not time for eating/sleeping/thinking about anything interesting to write here. Don't get me wrong, I'm at the reference desk to serve. I just can't do all the thinking for everyone that comes to talk to me. You guys gotta meet me halfway here.

In researching aforementioned 20-page paper however, I am discovering fascinating things about the Library of Congress classification system (and Dewey Decimal too, to be fair.) If you've ever used a large library like a university library, you've probably wrestled with finding books shelved according to LCC. Library of Congress call numbers usually have 1 or 2 letters followed by some numbers, and then yet more letters and numbers, and sometimes a year. Believe it or not, those letters and numbers are assigned according to a classification system that represents the spectrum of subject matter covered in books. This classification system has been devised by the LC to partition the world's knowledge into tidy little categories. According to their tidy little system, there's a patch of call numbers starting with Gs that describe persons such as myself, 'Interracial offspring.' This topic is conveninently sandwiched between 'Inbreeding' and 'Degeneration.' Furthermore, 'Interracial marriage' appears in the Gs between 'Inbreeding' and Marriage of Degenerates and Defectives.' (Noted by Karen Downing in her new book, Multiracial America.)

How quaint, you may say. This is an artifact of past time when people were not so politically correct, you add. But is this really about political correctness? Some would argue that how we arrange books on a shelf shapes our view of the proper order of things, and vice versa. In fact, how else do we know the world except through classification? Doesn't identification of anything involve, to a certain degree, classification of that thing as animal/mineral/vegetable? What does Linnaeus have to say about this?

Maybe I'll change my name to shameless_degenerate.