Question: "So what's wrong with normal regular America that we have to celebrate diverse people and cultures?"
Answer: Diverse people and cultures are America.
E pluribus unum.
The USA was founded as an idea, not a blood-and-soil ethnic people. The writers of the Constitution had no choice but to accept diversity as they understood it. The Protestants of New England with close ties to England had to join with the Quakers and German speakers of Pennsylvania and the Roman Catholics of Maryland. Their diversity was imperfect. They did not include indigenous people. They kicked the can down the road on the enslavement of Black Americans. They did not mention women. But the idea was there: We are a republic that joined diverse people in a single polity.
We are experiencing a counter-revolution against globalism, modernism, the free movement of labor, and therefore diversity itself. This shows up as efforts to insist on the centrality of Americans of White European ethnicity in the story of the USA. In that understanding, non-conforming people are minor players in the real story of real Americans. That definition of the "real" America has required marginalization of Women, Blacks, Native Americans, Mormons, Jews, and people from outside White Northern Europe, including Greeks, Italians, Japanese, Chinese, and many others. It required marginalizing the Hispanics who predate annexation of the American Southwest and the ones who immigrated since.
A metaphor facilitates that marginalization, the "melting pot." It defines those groups as proto-Americans who disappear as they become real ones when they melt.
The Multicultural Fair makes an opposite point. They don't melt and disappear. They change that pot. America includes them. Their histories aren't a sideshow. They are American history. Black soul music, whether sung by a Black man or a White woman, is American. Middle Eastern Belly Dancing is American. Philippine, Japanese, Mexican, and Ukrainian music and dancing is American. Philippine, Hawaiian, Japanese, Mexican, and Peruvian food trucks are serving American food, right along with the ones selling hot dogs and cotton candy.
The event was not political, and yet it made an unsaid political statement by its very existence. We were seeing America. It was a good Saturday. Children ran around. Parents sampled food trucks. The rain stopped just in time.
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32 comments:
That’s a wonderful event. What makes America great isn’t its wealth and power, but the degree to which people of all races and religions are able to live here in relative peace and harmony. That’s one of the things that makes the rise of Trump and his white nationalist base such a threat to America’s greatness.
Off topic/political comment: I assume that many readers watch the political and public affairs programs on the weekend.
Today I was thinking, why don't the more sane Republicans organize and fight back? They could call themselves the Real Republicans compared to the crazy "Fake Republicans." A partial list of Real Republicans: Liz Cheney, Cindy McCain (I think), Mitt Romney, Jeff Flake, Bob Corker, the other Republican on the Jan. 6th Committee, Chris Sununu (I think), Susan Collins, the Senator from Alaska, Chris Christie (I guess), etc.
There needs to be a balance. Too much diversity leads to extremes of identity politics and disunity. Too much uniformity leads to boredom and cultural stasis.
At the moment, we have way too much uncontrolled immigration, which is leading to a variety of social problems. New York City, for instance, is drowning in a wave of uncontrolled immigration that could eventually bankrupt the city.
We can all come from different cultural backgrounds, but we need to have something that ties us all together as Americans.
Good idea, anon. The Latinos might be attracted, too, since Spanish “real” means royal, regal, kingly, real, actual, etc. en el español.
A good point was made that culturally, we need better balance. Currently, 75% of our population identifies as White, which has spurred Republicans to extremes of White identity politics. We need more Blacks, Indigenous, Asians and so on until the proportion of Whites is more balanced.
What unites us all as Americans is respect for the Constitution, which leaves out MAGA Republicans.
The better balance we need is less emphasis on race and other divisive identity politics claims.
E pluribus unum means, “out of the many, one”, not “out of the one, many”. Functional emphasis on the latter inevitably signifies cultural hierarchies, often based on selective historical group-based moralizing, today as before. “Diversity” with emphasis on neutral inclusion, as the word itself properly signifies? Or on self-referential, hence politicized exclusion? Maybe there was, or could have been, a Scandinavian booth! Hot dogs, eh? It’s all in the attitude and the purpose.
To Low Dudgeon
There was no subtext of ethnic exclusion or grievance. Scandinavians were welcome, but I did not see a booth for them . There is typically a bagpipe group in the Chinese New Year parade. They would have been welcome, even if the players are light skinned and bagpipe music is annoying.
Today you employed the form of making sideswipe accusations by the device of “just asking questions.” The device has been around forever, I suppose, but Trump and Fox opinion hosts have made it very familiar in political messaging. It works. It puts ideas out there like little anonymous roadside IEDs. If the target ignores them, the question remains. If the target answers/refutes them, then the target clarifies the implied accusation, thus amplifying it. Excellent use of it here. Diabolical, but subtle.
The event was a pretty happy, easy-going love-in kind of place. You might have enjoyed it and had your concerns allayed.
Peter Sage
In order to become citizens, immigrants become far more knowledgeable about what it means to be American than the so-called Americans freaking out about them, most of whom can’t even name the three branches of government.
The very “Question” with which you opened your own post, Mr. Sage, raised the issues I expanded upon. The default position appears to be, for you and yours anyway, not celebrating America’s diversity as such, but decrying and rectifying her sins.
Someone seems to be in a high dudgeon about Low Dudgeon… 😀
The sin I decry is ignoring, minimizing, or distorting the role of the marginalized. I remember the way both the settlement of Oregon was treated in my Medford schools, and the way that Reconstruction was explained.
Good Indians welcomed the pioneers, bad ones were killed in self defense and sent away where they would be happy. Blacks weren’t “ready” for participation in self government, so after the failed Reconstruction experiment they were returned to quasi servitude as sharecroppers.
I knew nothing about the Chinese Exclusion Act, nothing about the Rogue River Wars, nothing about Woodrow Wilson except that he was an idealist for the League of Nations. (I got an 800 on the American History SAT subject exam! Yet I was so ignorant, a child of the early 1960s education.)
So, yes, I consider the current counter-Revolution regrettable.
The attitude and the purpose, indeed. Corrective, remedial, judging. Now stated openly, after a veneer of neutral celebration. Not that critiques such as yours aren’t warranted as a general matter. The problem is when they become the equal opposite of the whitewashing of American history. Self-serving, jingoistic praise gives way not to balance but to an ahistorical demonizing of Bad America which wrongly casts group division and discord as this nation’s point of departure and continued raison d’etre. Both excesses—glass full, glass empty—trickle down into the public consciousness.
Someone seems to be in high dudgeon about ignorant racism.
Someone else seems to be in a high dudgeon about a diversity of viewpoints.
My viewpoint has always been that we need more diversity - equity and inclusion too.
Their only divisive to those who chose to make them that way.
A Mexican flag or Indian belly dancer are not a threat to the Constitution the way Republicans.
Peter is very open to diversity of viewpoints no matter how ignorant or dangerous they may be.
Why do people think food trucks are such a big deal?
I avoid them every since my debit card was "skimmed" and I got food poisoning.
Everything in moderation, as the wise person said, including when it comes to depicting American history. That means e.g. neither the jingoistic whitewashing of yore, nor the pharisaical denunciations of today. That means neither an idealized “I cannot tell a lie” about a fabled cherry tree, from Parson Weems’ hagiography of Washington, nor that Washington led the sinister American Revolution with the maintenance and expansion of the slave trade as top of mind, from the fabulist “The 1619 Project”. Each canard reaps social and political consequences among the credulous and the opportunistic.
The 1619 project makes the very valid case that enslavement is not marginal to our history; it is inextricable. So many of our traditions and institutions were shaped by slavery, and so many of our persistent racial inequalities stem from its enduring legacy. That is a historical fact the far white would like us to forget.
The 1619 project, led by racial narcissist Nikole Hannah-Jones, promoted the vicious lie that the entire purpose of the American Revolution was the preservation of slavery. This lie was rightfully denounced by many prominent historians.
Sounds like someone who hasn't read the 1619 Project, but maybe heard something about it on Fox Noise.
Among other things, Nikole Hannah-Jones was awarded the Pulitzer Prized for her work on the 1619 project.
Neither flinging insults nor appealing to (liberal) authorities like the Pulitzer Committee is even the beginning of a refutation of what I said about the vicious lie at the heart of the 1619 project, shamelessly promoted by racial narcissist Nicole Hannah-Jones.
The American Revolution was not about the preservation of slavery. That lie is an expression of an America-hating ideology.
Leave it to the far-white to zero in on one questionable point in the 1619 Project and use it to try and discredit the entire work.
It’s not “one questionable point“. It’s the basis for the entire orientation of the 1619 Project.
Mike is apparently incapable of discussing anything without including ad hominem insults. He apparently thinks that anyone who disagrees with him must be a racist. Or maybe he thinks that wielding the R word in a menacing manner might intimidate those who want to pose alternative viewpoints.
We can all see how that’s working out for him.
Ya gotta love it. People call Black history an America-hating ideology, and can’t understand why they might be considered prejudiced. The American Revolution may not have been all about slavery, but that was certainly a factor. The only vicious lie currently going around, besides what comes out of most Republicans’ mouths, is that slaves were able to benefit from the valuable skills they learned.
The only vicious lie currently going around, besides what comes out of most Republicans’ mouths, is that slaves were able to benefit from the valuable skills they learned.
Here’s what Mike is referring to, quoted from the Florida State 2023 Academic Standards. The line in question was written by a black historian.
There is nothing racist in this description. It was just a convenient propaganda opportunity for left wing ideologues to screech about.
————————
SS.68.AA.2.3
Examine the various duties and trades performed by slaves (e.g., agricultural work, painting, carpentry, tailoring, domestic service, blacksmithing, transportation).
Benchmark Clarifications:
Clarification 1: Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.
Whatever you say, Michael. I'm sure slaves benefitted personally from their experience. No doubt they were better off here than in Africa. Not only did they gain all those valuable skills, but were introduced to the twin blessings of Christianity and capitalism. I can practically hear them now, happily singing on the plantations. They should be the ones making reparations to us.
Can’t respond factually, retreats into pointless sarcasm.
Responded factually above, but was impervious.
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