I am a member of the dominant culture, Anglo-American something or other, Working class, but able to mimic Middle class in a pinch, enough Protestantism in my background to pass, and white. Some dominant culture members have a sense of their Country-specific European cultural manifestations; the majority of people I’ve met do not. Our grandparents or great-great grandparents did their best to assimilate, to conform. The promise was that if they left behind their language, their myths and stories, their particular ways of being, that they would be transformed into Americans, transformed into “a new alloy forged in a crucible of democracy, freedom and civic responsibility”.[1] This premise, known as the melting pot, is a belief that this country can transform people of every color and background into “one America”. It has been a central metaphor for national identity far too long.
Watching Looney Tunes before school was a lesson in racism. Speedy Gonzales may have been fast, but the other Mexican mice were so slow—read lazy, you know we did—they couldn’t keep ahead of the cats. Were the French truly overly concerned with amour like Pepé Le Pew? The cartoons took jabs at the Scottish, Africans, and Irish and ad infinitum, all of which made it clear that if we were to be All-The-Way-American, we had to cut ourselves off from any heritage identification—even if European.
The great assimilation started before my time. I only know about it through textbooks and newspaper articles. No family member within memory’s reach ever wore a kilt. They didn’t share stories about the mists and marshes, no fairies except perhaps the tooth fairy who you quickly enough learned was another lie. At school I was blithely unaware of anyone’s background. Was McFarland Irish or Scottish? Kanda asked me to stop already with my daily round of Polish jokes since she was Polish. I hadn’t realized that Poland was a place. I just thought it was another word for dumb. Stephanie said her family was Welsh. Is there a Welsh-land?
We were all eventually white—the Italians, the Poles, the Scotts, the Irish, and the English. The three exceptions may not have been exceptions, and maybe it is only in hindsight that a different vocabulary is needed. Back then, B. Heron, the one Native American, he was one of us. Would we have said white then? G. Inukai, Korean, he was one of us too, so we—or I—didn’t have to see him as representing the entire Asian community. And Silvio C., the only dark-skinned kid in school. Where he came from is anyone’s guess. I know I didn’t think about it. It was irrelevant. Being the second largest boy in school and a prankster may have prevented underlying racial attitudes from being acted out, which seem more likely than that we were all open-minded, inclusive young things.
I did not see or even hear about the “race problem” until I was in Junior high and African American kids from the Central District, the CD, were bused into our school. Suddenly, there was a demarcation line. Inukai wasn’t dark at all. Even Cunha paled next to them, not so much because of his skin color as for the differences in dress and personal style. These new kids wore cake cutters in their hair. Cake cutters could easily enough be used as weapons, though none ever were used that way as far as I remember. These new kids were not going to assimilate into our white version of America. Some of them even wanted to talk about racism—about our racism.
The “race problem”, what was that anyway? No one had any kind of clear definition of the problem. Our white parents had this strange and general aversion to black people, an aversion to just their presence alone. Our parents talked about a perceived lack of character; a lack that utterly prevented African Americans from assimilating as true white—Americans. Actually, there was no lack. The aversion was not based on any intellectual, moral, nor any behavioral characteristic within any individual African American. It was an aversion based solely on skin that was not white.
I didn’t get it. How could our parent’s irrational attitudes be labeled “the race problem”, when “the race” wasn’t the problem? The attitudes were the problem. Adding to my confusion and obvious ignorance, I was under the impression that Martin Luther King had taken care of that whole race thing anyway, meaning, I thought we all clearly knew that race was not an indicator of value. Weren’t we all the same? However, I too, still retained some ideas that assimilation was a goal and couldn’t understand the resistance to severing away one’s culture. I didn’t understand that assimilation was an act of negating one's otherness and buying into the values of white supremacy.
Today, the United States is experiencing a second great wave of immigration which is dissimilar from the first that took place between 1890 and 1920. The current immigrants are not Western European, but Eastern European. They are coming from Asian countries and from Latin America, from the Middle East, India and Africa. They are not so keen to assimilate as the Europeans were. The new immigrants are preserving their ethnic identity. They are finding ways to celebrate and to defend their cultural roots. By the year 2050, white ain’t gonna be right no more—as if it ever was.
By the time I entered high school in the mid70s, I started to notice people who were connected to a history that started outside of the United States borders. They possessed a commitment to their culture that we white people had long denied ourselves. I could see this process happening whenever I ate dinner at my boyfriend’s house. His parents could speak English, but more often spoke Tagalog. My boyfriend understood them, yet he couldn’t speak a word of Tagalog. He refused to wear the traditional shirts with their clipped butterfly wing sleeves. He also refused to break up with me, even though his parent’s tried to arrange a marriage with a suitable girl from the Philippines instead of a Puta like me. The process of rejecting his family’s traditions was not totally complete though; he kept some traditions and self-identified as Filipino as much as he did American.
It seems to me that for those who are not white assimilating into the monochromatic western culture, internalizing western values and yet not being accepted by others as western, I imagine they must retain a sense of being an alien; much like I would imagine a female born inside a male body feels. Even being a white woman within this male-valued culture leaves many women feeling alien. We know that our contributions are not accorded their full worth. Being different is not a problem; being devalued is. What does it matter if our devaluation is based upon sex, skin, or country of origin?
Frankly, I am not sure what my friends and I identified with. Surrounded by others who looked like us, we didn’t think of ourselves as anything other than “normal”. It is so easy to assume that I know how others self-identify. Once I finally started meeting African Americans, I found few that they identified with any one particular country. Some identified with a continent. Some identified with concepts; for instance, the concept of oppression, of being oppressed. If dark-skinned people identify with subjugation to oppression, and if light-skinned people refuse to acknowledge the privilege of being and descending from oppressors, will we ever bridge to each other and get rid of the oppressor/oppressed paradigm? I believe that a part of the change process is for white people to quit looking for approval from people of color and acknowledge that we are very much members of a culture of oppression.
Recently I was met a male who, although he told me he was from South America, I still saw as white. It wasn’t until the next time I saw him, he was reading Che, in Spanish, that I looked a little closer, actually listened to his alliteration, and then it dawned on me that he wasn’t white. All my old interior transcripts had come into play. I liked him. He was “one of us”, just like in grade school. If you’re “one of us”, hey, there’s no need to acknowledge differences! I’ve just given you carté blanche to take my culture on.
There is an on-going social debate on the merits of being color-blind. I am not well versed in this discussion; however, I’m pretty sure that being color-blind does not mean turning everyone white. There are over 350,000 species of flowers on the planet earth. They’re beautiful, are they not? So why are humans working so hard to destroy each other over inessential differences? We must see each other as opportunities, as miracles, as gate ways to deeper understanding so that we can collectively reshape our world for the mutual benefit of all.
Once it sunk in that he identified as Latino, I have to admit a passing obsession with finding out what that meant. I didn’t have any context of my own for Latino-American. Growing up the only people I knew from South of the Border –and there is another construct of the Western Culture. We invade a continent, annihilate one group of people, push another group south, then reframe our thinking so that we picture them as having always been south, then we will never have to consider our historical part in taking their homes, their land, and often their lives—were the apple pickers on my uncle’s ranch.
The apple pickers were undocumented workers. They were housed, if you can call it that, in tiny shacks that had two cots, and one table. There was a stoop for sitting, a busted-up outhouse, and removing the irrigation hose from the faucet allowed for ditch water. Ditch water, mostly snow run off, was good enough for apples, but uncovered, bugs and rodents fell into it, along with leaves and human debris. My brother went swimming in the ditch several times, and one summer my uncle bagged up the mouser-cat’s kittens and drowned them there.
Once I spent two days picking apples just so I could experience it. I was twenty, at the peak of my physical health. If I wasn’t family, if I wasn’t working for free, my cousin said he would have fired me. My production was too low to even remotely reach quota, and I thinned out too many good apples. Plus, I sure wasn’t sleeping in one of those filthy little boxes. I had two showers a day and three full meals. My experience was radically different than the experience of the Apple-pickers. I was not Mexican. I was white. When I was done, I drove away.
So, I was looking at this man and wondering if we had the ability to bridge our differences. I didn’t even know what differences we have. Did I have any empathy? Could I go the distance past my own prejudiced thoughts? Do I even know yet who I am and what I bring to any one encounter? These are the questions I will continue to ask myself and of others until…well, until there is no longer need to ask.
[1] One Nation, Indivisible: Is it History? William Booth. Washington Post, Feb 1998. Downloaded April 2005.
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