I've just started it, and it's very intriguing. She conducted herself much like a college teacher, lecturing mostly in generalities, trying to catch the high points of a book that does exactly that anyhow.
In doing so, she brought up a very compelling idea (which, since I'm only 25 pages into it, I don't know if she's actually included it within the text). To wit: What has composed the American conversation boils down to three major concepts: Pluralism, freedom, and truth. Everything we have ever been about, and everything we will be, revolves around those three things.
Hmmm. What an interesting time to bring that up. We didn't discuss it, and neither did she; her thrust is to explain where we've gone, not to critique it. As she purveys in ideas, I hope she wouldn't be offended by my suggesting that this grouping represents significant discussion topics apiece, not to mention altogether. As such, they are excellent places to discuss this fundamental question, right or wrong, good or bad: Who the heck are we now?
Let's begin with pluralism, the idea that we are a diverse society. Yes, that's certainly what we are. But how many of us like it? How many prefer it? How many of us give it lip service but would really not deal with it? Are we a melting pot, or a tossed salad? What do we want to be, as opposed to or as a goal toward what we should be?
It's none of our faults that the Native Americans were in the way of our expanding the white frontiers of America, that they were hornswoggled out of treaty agreements and sometimes mercilessly slaughtered en route to being corralled onto reservations and then made to "assimilate" into white society. But we are left with the results. To tell them to "go back where you came from" is to relegate them to lands now considered private property for millions of other Americans. But they have places to go if they please, so that issue has spent itself. Hey, some say, at least they have the casinos.
Same, too, with African Americans. Nobody alive is responsible for forcibly carting them over to this continent to engage in chattel slavery for two and a half centuries, being freed either due to the sheer luck of a benevolent owner, the successful fleeing with assistance of white friends, or visits from Generals Grant, Sherman and their friends. Yet, Lincoln considered a plan to ship slaves back to Africa, and there was a significant "Back to Africa" movement engaged in the 1920s. That movement's leader, Marcus Garvey, was black. Jim Crow was well underway; the post-World War I Great Migration had stirred up racist attitudes long buried in the North. Headlong vigilantism in which groups of blacks were simply lynched en masse had erupted in Oklahoma, in Florida, in Arkansas, in North Carolina. Deadly rioting took place in Detroit. The Ku Klux Klan revived during the '20s, and although a well-publicized trial helped quell the swelling of membership, it merely went underground as it did after President Grant put down the first uprising in the 1870s.
The two have an underlying question lingering throughout: Shouldn't we just live in one place, and you go live in another place? Wouldn't we be better off if we all did? No hassles, no conflict, no angst, nothing to compromise or fight about. We wish you all the best. We promise to leave you alone. Now, get the hell out of here. Go back where you came from.
See how it works? If you allow the first question, you must allow the next several. Then the final statement, the one which found such intensity in the House of Representatives yesterday because 45 had the unmitigated gall to utter it about four young, female Members of Congress he wished to intimidate and isolate, becomes no more than a logical conclusion.
But the detachment provided by history ends there. The Hispanic experience is different; so is Asian (and let's not forget them). In theory as well as in fact, they really can return where they far more recently came from. But they won't. They don't want to. They want to live here.
And so many do. The white folks, the far more established descendants of our own immigrant forebears, have three ways to deal with this endless influx, like it or not, walls or no walls, because those who want to be in a place find a way (and remember how we cheered on those who risked it all to vault the Berlin Wall):
- Tolerance: Yeah, okay, I get it. But NIMBY--Not In My Back Yard. I'm uncomfortable, you know? Do I have to be uncomfortable every single day? Who says? This is America, damn it. I'm supposed to be free (See where the second Big Concept comes in? Rather naturally, right?).
- Acceptance: Yes, yes: Land of the free, home of the brave. Statue of Liberty and all that. They can even live across the street. That means they have money. That means they have American attitudes and values (as opposed to some other attitudes and values from somewhere else, the difference between which are usually pencil-thin). Dating my daughter? We'll see. Then I get grandkids that don't look like me. Give me a minute, okay?
- Advocacy: Welcome. We're glad you're here. This is a great place, and you'll make it even better. If there are barriers, please let us know. We'll do whatever we need to do--socially, politically, legally--to pave the way for your success. The rest is on your own, of course, but we can get you started. We want to. We're Americans.
The first two almost belong together. They're at least partially protective, suspicious, guarded. The third belongs in a category by itself. It's joyous, confident, and feels like a big smile. It also means that to get to that mentality is a significant leap of faith, like playing in the U.S. Open after winning your club championship.
Seriously now: Has this country, as a country, ever been there? Our geographic positioning has allowed us to flourish economically and politically like few nations ever have--but it has also allowed us to shield ourselves from the realities of belonging to the rest of humanity and pretend that we're better than everyone else just because we live here. It's far easier for us to retreat from pluralism in our own minds, even though, in fact, we are actually becoming by numbers an inevitably pluralist society.
Oh, yes. The New York Times reports today that more than half of our nation's pre-18-year-old youth, right this very minute, are not 100% white. That is the reality. That will reveal itself in less than ten years in our professions, in our workforce, in our scholars.
Will they all react to this attempted withdrawal from pluralism the same way? Will they deny their heritage? And will they vote with the political party that wants them to do so--Republican? Will they forget this awful development of clear and unadulterated anti-Americanism that claims to be the exact opposite?
Others have tried to advance the promise: Brown V. Board, affirmative action, busing for public schools, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act. All have been quietly and consistently reduced by grinding, laborious legal attacks. The other side has managed to manipulate the system at both ends to gain the advantage, creating a fait accompli once they manage to make it to the Supreme Court. (Abortion is coming up--a whole new can of worms) It has taken six decades, but they are there. I wonder how the new majority of non-white Americans will deal with that failure: whether they will begin to reverse that reversal, or whether they will simply take over and leave the whites behind--a karmic bit of universal justice.
Meanwhile, suffice it to say that 45 is leading us away from pluralism and toward a whites-only world that, like the other things he says we are, has passed us by. It's an attempt to retreat not only from the pluralism that has long since been evident, but from reality itself: no more, no less. It is a truly frightening scenario.
Even Grafton, North Dakota, not 50 miles from the Canadian border, has a significant presence of Hispanic seasonal workers. Border to border, north to south, we must deal with race and its underlying impacts. The president is suggesting that that doesn't matter. Too many are giving up thinking deeply and going along with him.
To get where we now are, the meanings of words have been twisted to create alternative realities, both inside and outside of our courts. One of them is freedom. The battle among us is for that operative definition, too. That's for next time.
Be well. I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
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