Ric, I didn’t mean that to be as accusatory as it might have sounded and I’m sorry if it seemed that way.
It seems to me that when people say “let’s all just be American” they are also saying “stop being different.” And then I have to think if freedom means anything, it surely means the right to live as you like, worship as you like, practice whatever cultural traditions you like, within reason. I mean, what else would being free mean except the right to be different, to choose to live as you like? It surely doesn’t mean that the Italian immigrant has to stop listening to opera and easting pasta, or the Mexican immigrant’s kids can’t go to a taco stand. I actually like and value the differences between people and find them interesting. So the challenge for the US, it seems to me, is not “how do we make people stop maintaining their cultural differences,” but rather “how can we set up a society where difference doesn’t get translated into the kind of prejudice that the US (sadly) showed for so long?”
You could argue that if a store chooses to speak only Spanish, it’s going to lose the business of English speakers and it should, and if you want to show up for an interview at IBM dressed in your native costume, you won’t get the job. That seems reasonable to me. But if you tell black people that they have to stop being black, and just be American, you’re in effect asking them to erase 300 years of history and culture–to erase specific family histories that were shaped by the fact of pervasive racial prejudice. Try telling someone whose ancestors were pioneers in, say, Colorado that none of that stuff matters and he should just forget about it.
Obviously there has to be some balance struck between cultivating a sense of separateness and making a coherent national culture. That, to me, is one of the challenges of living in a free society. How do you make room for people to live as they choose? It’s ALWAYS been hard.
I use the “colored ancestor” thing to point out that our modern ideas about race and what it is are not as simple as they seem. It’s hard, today, to imagine Irish people as anything but white, but that’s not how it was in the past. Look at that Nast cartoon–isn’t it weird that he drew an irish guy who looks like a back guy? It’s a very interesting way to get into the immigration debate in the present. My classroom has white kids but also a lot of Arabs, Persians, and Asian Indians. Are they white? Some say yes, some say no. They all seem to be in my class to fulfill the American dream. Can they live out that dream and not have to repudiate their family heritage? I hope so.
So that’s why I think Holder’s right that it’s worthwhile to have a “national conversation” (whatever that means) about race. It makes us better able to balance the right to live as we choose against the need for a coherent national culture we all share.
PS I had no idea about the "colored ancestor " thing till my dad retired and started doing family history about ten years ago. He discovered it, and that year we had a big family Christmas party and he blew the certificate up to poster size and then gathered everybody together to reveal it. It was very funny. That year he sent out Kwanza cards
He didn’t call and hasn’t stopped by, but I guess that is my fault. I’m sorry.
