Tom Brokaw Wasn't Wrong About Everything

Tom Brokaw should be more careful.

When the famous journalist and author suggested the other day that Hispanic immigrants need to assimilate into American society better (read: faster), he set off all kinds of hot buttons. Just goes to show that someone with as much wisdom as he has can also, if not circumspect, go off the rails and have to backtrack with the dexterity of Michael Jackson.

It's a silly notion. I think of my Polish grandparents, coming here in 1912. They stumbled through the language, never learned to drive. But they raised four children who ended up plenty respectable and who gave them ten grandchildren, one of whom is currently addressing you. Can being American mean all that much more? What would Brokaw think of their assimilation, a century later--a bit slow? Inadequate? Hmmm?

But they were white. Brokaw's comments were strewn with plenty of racial and ethnic assumptions, unwitting though they might have been. Maybe he forgot that his "greatest generation" that he declared (let's put that evaluation aside for the moment) included black, Hispanic, Asian (especially Japanese descendants) and Native folks, who need to be considered in the 440,000 who gave their lives for future generations to live in free lands around the globe, ours included.


Okay, But--
He added something, though, that strikes at the heart of the current dilemma of our immigration issues deeper than we're probably ready to admit. To wit: He also hinted that plenty of white folks here aren't comfortable with racial intermarriage: even at this point, even while watching Tiger Woods blossom and dominate professional golf; even after watching Nikki Haley become governor of South Carolina and U.N. Ambassador; even after Barack Obama won two terms as President; even after Kamala Harris declares her candidacy and brings out 20,000 to approve (Granted, it's in Oakland, where liberals thrive). In the Heartland, where Brokaw is from (South Dakota), that still doesn't connect very well. Martin Luther King remarked that he'd never seen prejudice like that in Chicago.

Too many are still flat-out scared of it. They foresee a non-white nation, led by non-whites. In their minds, it betrays the legacy of our Founding Fathers, all of whom were white and Anglo-Saxon and, to the best of my knowledge, Protestant as well. The specter of semi-brown-skinned members of Congress and (gasp) President (note that one with some genuine chops is running in 2020) goes beneath the skins of enough whites to give 45 and his white supremacist lackey, Stephen Miller, plenty of traction in continuing to insist on a wall to create an absolute barrier to, you know, them.

But one of those Fathers, Jefferson, wrote in our Declaration of Independence that everyone has natural rights, the pursuit of happiness being one of the big three (life, liberty and....). So millions are rushing north to get a chance at what looks like a better opportunity than the ones they've had. That's all they ask for.

That's all Jefferson and the signers asked for, too. They could not have foreseen, of course, the kind of world we are now in, where travel and migration are far more facilitatory. But they could have understood what peoples everywhere still want and believe can have--a chance, just a chance, to be better, do better, and live better. In the Western Hemisphere, that's what the USA still represents. In the Eastern Hemisphere, it's what the European Union still represents.

Would they have been so narrow as to preclude the migration of peoples of color, now that they have been freed from slavery by their white masters and thrown off the shackles of colonialism, the surrogate slavery continued beyond slavery itself? They were people of the Enlightenment. They had vision beyond that present moment, tainted by the politics of that day though it was. But they also limited their conclusions about slavery and Native peoples, and expressed that narrowness within the same Constitution we live by today.

Jefferson had what we now believe to be six children by one of his slave women, Sally Hemings, so he clearly recognized their humanity--though, speaking of intermingling, not enough to declare it or his love publicly. He and Washington arranged to have their slaves freed, but not until their deaths. They struggled with their consciences the same way we do now, because like it or not, life is not always so simple. We would like to think of the Founding Fathers as magnanimous mavens of liberty and justice, but their selfishness clashed with their high-mindedness as much as any of ours does.

The white Europeans used black slaves for their purposes and nearly wiped out Natives en route to trans-continental settlement to establish what passed for "civilization", and we continue to teach it in our history classes as if detached from another time. But as Faulkner said, history isn't even past. Ta-Nehisi Coates makes it clear in his collection of essays, We Were Eight Years in Power, that the failure of white America to successfully deal with the black genocide of slavery hangs upon it like mildew-laden bath towels. They need to be cleansed, but who's going to do it? As time goes by, they don't get better looking and smelling, they get worse.

The Jumbled Legacy
That jumbled legacy is what Tom Brokaw was referring to: Yes, people are coming. Yes, they have an ingrown right to a better life. But what about the people already here? They have in-bred attitudes that they didn't just conjure out of thin air. We have to deal with them, and more of us have them than we are ready, or likely, to admit.

Some think that to make America great again, what amounts to ethnic cleansing, or at least continued domination of one ethnicity over all others, is necessary. That denies what history has done. Nobody can do that, but the results of the forced intermingling of races (which is what white European settlement of the Americas actually is) have been that one part of our society has chosen to flow with it, accepts it and even nourishes it, and the other part which has chosen to deny and defy it, hiding behind a slowly deteriorating demographic facade to do so. Few better manifestations of our polarization exist.

So let's not throw rocks at an otherwise respected journalist. All he's trying to do is define and interpret reality as he sees it, because we're all trying to do that, too.

Be well. I'll see you down the road.


Mister Mark