Assimilation, Ethnicity, Religion, and the United States
I haven't really commented much on Elizabeth Moon's comments about the cultural center in NYC, but it has been on my mind. (In fact, 
ladyjax got an earful from me yesterday.) I think I haven't commented because it's been on my mind in complicated ways.
One version of my response is this.
I am white, but I still have an ethnicity. Perhaps I am aware of this fact because I come from a white ethnic group that hasn't always been considered entirely white, although we are now, and people who see me walking down the street are all going to read me as white.
Perhaps I'm aware of this because many years ago other people who are also not seen as white bashed me with the clue bat and told me to figure out where my people are from and to stop idealizing their cultures and figure my own out.
Perhaps I'm aware of this because I got tired of grief around my legal last name.
I don't know why I am aware of this, precisely, but I am. I know that while I am white, every white person still has an ethnicity or a few ethnicities.
My grandparents, however, and my great-grandparents were not necessarily seen as white. They weren't black or brown or red or yellow, but they were a terrifyingly "other" enough presence that while the white people who built the mill town they immigrated to were happy to let them labor in those mills, many of the white people who'd been in the country longer were freaked out at the spectacle of their bodies being moved through the city to nearest Catholic cemetery for burial--which wasn't near at all. So it meant bodies of someone from a religion that seemed strange and foreign being hauled through the streets late and night, and it wigged the locals out. Those folks were freaked out enough by that that eventually, they built a local cemetery for those strange, new "self-isolating" people to use to be buried locally. Of course, then they got worried about the eyesore that the place was because it wasn't as nice as the palatially laid out ones that came along a while later. It's possible that some of them were so afraid of being seen as other that they lied about their ethnicity on the census. Which, let me tell you, makes doing family history a regal pain.
So the parts about Moon's post that made me angriest were the parts about assimilation.
I'm the result of that assimilation. Three or four generations removed and I not only cannot speak any of the languages that my great grandparents did (maybe? I've learned a little of one, but only one, and I had to study that in school), but I can't even tell you with certainty what languages they spoke, and I'm left trying to piece those details together from census reports because, apparently, my family didn't even see fit to pass on the full knowledge of what languages their parents and grandparents spoke and which countries or counties or cities they came from.
I don't think that loss makes America richer; I think that makes us all poorer.
I mourn the fact that I've had to spend my adult life in detective mode trying to figure out the traditions that we've either lost entirely or stopped marking as being ethnic traditions (rather than just the way our family does stuff).
For example, while I was growing up, my family always started our Christmas celebration on Christmas Eve. Rather than the big turkey meal on Christmas day, we had our big dinner on Christmas Eve. We did presents on Christmas day, but the meal was the evening before. I was well into my thirties and my father had been dead for more than 15 years before I found out that that probably had to do with his ethnic background as much as anything else.
The America I want to live in is an America that doesn't ask another generation of immigrants to give up their cultural traditions to be accepted. The America I want to live in shouldn't be a country where in order for this wave of immigrants to be accepted as American (hyphen or no) they must make the decision to buy into racism the way my great-grandparents' generations did. The America I want to live in is an America in which the larger American culture is genuinely enriched by the specific cultural heritage that every immigrant brings with him or her to our culture, and we continue to recognize the ethnic roots of those traditions rather than appropriating them or melting them into an unidentifiable, generic pseudo-whole that leaves no one's culture entirely whole any longer.
And Jim Hines's letter to Elizabeth Moon says some of that better than I can:
But I’m troubled by your comments on assimilation. You say, “Groups that self-isolate, that determinedly distinguish themselves by location, by language, by dress, will not be accepted as readily as those that plunge into the mainstream.” This conflates identity with isolation, and presumes that isolation, when it occurs, is entirely self-imposed. But I agree with you that often groups which appear “different” are not as readily accepted.
Self-isolation is a terrible term for the constant struggle that people are engaging in an an attempt to hold onto their culture and not pass on forgetting to their children. I'm the product of that, stuck trying to negotiate the fine line between finding out where my people came from and what their culture was without turning into one of those horrible tourists who go back to the old country and imagine a link that they don't really have.
My great-grandparents either made the decision not to fight that fight, or they lost the fight they did wage, or--more likely--some combination of both. I don't want anyone else to be saddled with that legacy, and the frantic panic I keep seeing about Muslims in America--as if Islam just arrived last week--is making me angry and depressed all at once.
Perhaps the people who are so afraid of a cultural center--with a space in which one small group of people might not have to endure the shame of having people look at them with suspicion as they practice their faith in a private space--don't get the irony that many of them are descended from people who were looked at the same way, but I do see the irony, and I don't understand how we want to forget so quickly when it's clear that doing so hurts us all.
Anyway, enough of that. Y'all should just go read all of Jim Hines's letter. Because he says that, I think, more efficiently and less theoretically than I just did.
ladyjax got an earful from me yesterday.) I think I haven't commented because it's been on my mind in complicated ways.
One version of my response is this.
I am white, but I still have an ethnicity. Perhaps I am aware of this fact because I come from a white ethnic group that hasn't always been considered entirely white, although we are now, and people who see me walking down the street are all going to read me as white.
Perhaps I'm aware of this because many years ago other people who are also not seen as white bashed me with the clue bat and told me to figure out where my people are from and to stop idealizing their cultures and figure my own out.
Perhaps I'm aware of this because I got tired of grief around my legal last name.
I don't know why I am aware of this, precisely, but I am. I know that while I am white, every white person still has an ethnicity or a few ethnicities.
My grandparents, however, and my great-grandparents were not necessarily seen as white. They weren't black or brown or red or yellow, but they were a terrifyingly "other" enough presence that while the white people who built the mill town they immigrated to were happy to let them labor in those mills, many of the white people who'd been in the country longer were freaked out at the spectacle of their bodies being moved through the city to nearest Catholic cemetery for burial--which wasn't near at all. So it meant bodies of someone from a religion that seemed strange and foreign being hauled through the streets late and night, and it wigged the locals out. Those folks were freaked out enough by that that eventually, they built a local cemetery for those strange, new "self-isolating" people to use to be buried locally. Of course, then they got worried about the eyesore that the place was because it wasn't as nice as the palatially laid out ones that came along a while later. It's possible that some of them were so afraid of being seen as other that they lied about their ethnicity on the census. Which, let me tell you, makes doing family history a regal pain.
So the parts about Moon's post that made me angriest were the parts about assimilation.
I'm the result of that assimilation. Three or four generations removed and I not only cannot speak any of the languages that my great grandparents did (maybe? I've learned a little of one, but only one, and I had to study that in school), but I can't even tell you with certainty what languages they spoke, and I'm left trying to piece those details together from census reports because, apparently, my family didn't even see fit to pass on the full knowledge of what languages their parents and grandparents spoke and which countries or counties or cities they came from.
I don't think that loss makes America richer; I think that makes us all poorer.
I mourn the fact that I've had to spend my adult life in detective mode trying to figure out the traditions that we've either lost entirely or stopped marking as being ethnic traditions (rather than just the way our family does stuff).
For example, while I was growing up, my family always started our Christmas celebration on Christmas Eve. Rather than the big turkey meal on Christmas day, we had our big dinner on Christmas Eve. We did presents on Christmas day, but the meal was the evening before. I was well into my thirties and my father had been dead for more than 15 years before I found out that that probably had to do with his ethnic background as much as anything else.
The America I want to live in is an America that doesn't ask another generation of immigrants to give up their cultural traditions to be accepted. The America I want to live in shouldn't be a country where in order for this wave of immigrants to be accepted as American (hyphen or no) they must make the decision to buy into racism the way my great-grandparents' generations did. The America I want to live in is an America in which the larger American culture is genuinely enriched by the specific cultural heritage that every immigrant brings with him or her to our culture, and we continue to recognize the ethnic roots of those traditions rather than appropriating them or melting them into an unidentifiable, generic pseudo-whole that leaves no one's culture entirely whole any longer.
And Jim Hines's letter to Elizabeth Moon says some of that better than I can:
But I’m troubled by your comments on assimilation. You say, “Groups that self-isolate, that determinedly distinguish themselves by location, by language, by dress, will not be accepted as readily as those that plunge into the mainstream.” This conflates identity with isolation, and presumes that isolation, when it occurs, is entirely self-imposed. But I agree with you that often groups which appear “different” are not as readily accepted.
Self-isolation is a terrible term for the constant struggle that people are engaging in an an attempt to hold onto their culture and not pass on forgetting to their children. I'm the product of that, stuck trying to negotiate the fine line between finding out where my people came from and what their culture was without turning into one of those horrible tourists who go back to the old country and imagine a link that they don't really have.
My great-grandparents either made the decision not to fight that fight, or they lost the fight they did wage, or--more likely--some combination of both. I don't want anyone else to be saddled with that legacy, and the frantic panic I keep seeing about Muslims in America--as if Islam just arrived last week--is making me angry and depressed all at once.
Perhaps the people who are so afraid of a cultural center--with a space in which one small group of people might not have to endure the shame of having people look at them with suspicion as they practice their faith in a private space--don't get the irony that many of them are descended from people who were looked at the same way, but I do see the irony, and I don't understand how we want to forget so quickly when it's clear that doing so hurts us all.
Anyway, enough of that. Y'all should just go read all of Jim Hines's letter. Because he says that, I think, more efficiently and less theoretically than I just did.