Beginning in the mid-1800’s, we made Native Americans take ‘Christian’ names. These were the names we put on the role for their rations (and, much later, for their welfare payments). These were the names they took to our schools, where we taught them to speak English; where we forced them to forget their native languages.
We did the same to immigrants coming into America through Ellis Island. If the immigration agents couldn’t pronounce a name, they simply changed it. If the parents, the elders, couldn’t speak English, we sent their children to school so that they could act as translators.
As a nation, we perfected homogeneity. We made everyone recognizable to, and understandable by, everyone else. We did this for a hundred years or more. We became Americans, first and foremost. We became perfect little plastic people.
Then came the backlash – the surge toward ethnicity, toward recovering one’s roots. Corporations, recognizing a need they didn’t necessarily agree with but could not thwart, established boards and councils to explore, protect, and extend diversity. Government was forced to acknowledge heritage, and employ translators. Health care facilities complied readily; it’s hard to discover what hurts using elemental sign language. But some elemental acknowledgment of worth has been lost along the way. We have, in essence, agreed to disagree, but nobody’s willing to admit they are wrong. We pay lip service to diversity, but the whites hate the blacks, and vice versa, and everyone agrees the Latinos are gobbling up the jobs. Asians can’t drive worth a damn, Indians are all drunks, and those pathetic Eastern European Eurotrash brought their own Mafya.
This is not diversity; it’s culture-clash. We still cling to that quaintly American notion that no one is as good as we are – whatever we are, and our current Commander-in-Chief exemplifies all that is wrong with us in our narrow-minded assumption that the perfect color is pale, the best language is American, and the most acceptable behavior is two parents working ten hours a day to buy their latch-key offspring electronic gadgets that keep families in touch with one another.
Pathetic.
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