Posted on 09/16/2009 11:47:53 AM PDT by DianeEllis
I had a conversation, not too long ago, with a member of the now dwindling Greatest Generation. The conversation ran a gamut of topics: favorite recipes, memories from childhood, what the town of Watsonville used to look like before the massive influx of the dot-commers to Santa Cruz County looking to escape the cramped suburbia of Silicon Valley. But the one thing I was just itching to ask this little ancient was about her ethnicity. You see, she had brown skin. And I was simply curious! Was she a Mexican-American, I wanted to know, or was she perhaps Native American?
Just after she had described her mother’s recipe for pink bean stew, I knew that the perfect occasion had arrived to ask her about her ethnicity. “Are you Mexican-American?” I inquired.
The response I received, for a period just long enough to feel that I had committed some terribly awkward social faux pas: silence. And then she replied, with slight irritation mixed with an audible tone of pride:
"I am an American. Just an American."
I relate this story because it is representative of my general experience with Americans born in the 1920s and ‘30s, regardless of their race or ethnicity. They simply wish to be called Americans; no prefix-hyphen for them, thank you very much!
This pride in being “just American” is the closest thing I can imagine to the manifestation of “post-racialism.”
Members of my own generation, on the other hand, have a near obsession with hyphens, with categorization (or lines of division?), with paying careful attention to the hues of our skin and the countries of our ancestors. We are African-American, Mexican-American, Asian-American, Cuban-American. We are seldom just American. In short, we are a generation (with our baby boomer parents as company) that is obsessed with race and with racial politics. Perhaps we think we like the sound of “post-racialism,” but we deceive ourselves. It’s simply the hyphen in that term that attracts us.
I am convinced that if we as a society ever truly want to move toward “post-racialism,” that it will require a renewed effort of Americanization, which will consist of the assimilation of our immigrants and the termination of our affair with multiculturalism.
According to Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, “[assimilation] is a kind of psychological or emotional process where you shift your emotional attachments and your fundamental allegiances from one people to another.” The problem, as Krikorian sees it, is that “we have a post-American elite that creates post-American immigrants.”
We cannot claim to want post-racial politics until we rid ourselves of our fixation with multiculturalism, with diversity for the sake of diversity. This obsession is entirely detrimental to any national cohesion because we open ourselves up to identity politics (as I’ve decried as Leninist in my previous post). By now, Krikorian gloomily asserts:
"multiculturalism is deeply rooted in every American institution – the schools, courts, media, churches, corporations, charitable institutions, chambers of commerce, fraternal organizations, local governments, etc. Uprooting [multiculturalism] from American institutions will require a cultural revolution."
I confess that I’m not comfortable with the term “cultural revolution” (it’s become too synonymous with the depravity of the 1960’s). But I think Krikorian has a point: our culture needs a fundamental shift in attitude.
My modest (some might say unsophisticated) proposal: that we once again become just Americans.
“...we once again become just Americans.”
Nice thought, but it’ll never happen. Too many people in the victimology/diversity/multicultural racket have too great a vested interest [read ‘preferences’ and ‘money’] to allow that to happen.
Good article.
Since I am an English-Welsh-German-Irish-Native-American-Ameican ... it’s a whole lot easier just to say “American.”
DH, who is a German-Swiss-Dutch-English-Irish-Texan-Native-American American, agrees with me.
Why is it that we need to hypenate our heritage? We are all Americans, this is our country, this is our home, this is who we are as a people, the ones who do not want to assimilate, or want to live by the laws and customs from the home country should be deported to their country of origin. If they like their way of life so much to have it supercede the American way of life, they have no business being here. To become Americans real true Americans they need to accept that this is not where they came from, they are visitors here until they assimilate, if they don't there is a boat, or train, or airplane headed back in the other direction too.
Visas were created for a reason, the Federal Government should invest in cleaning up the overstayers instead of trying to make us Americans pay for everyones healthcare.
Racism is a scam. Don’t be a SCAMERICAN!
Great article DE. Thanks for posting.
— Jo (American) Nuvark —
A line from a poem I wrote in high school;
How can we be the melting pot when every ingredient desires to be the main course?
I like “proud-Americans”.
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