May 3, 2022

The ethnic thing that gets ignored

Sam Smith – Strangely distorting our dealing with multiculturalism is our obsession with racism and ethnic conflict while ignoring ways people – especially the young –can learn the benefits of living in a mixed ethnic society. Ev­­en many of the most virtuous among us treat it all as a perpetually challenging problem rather than also a cultural asset that can make life more valuable, enjoyable and workable.

Key to us learning, enjoying and becoming more decent thanks to our multicultural lives is education, but even schools and colleges  treat ethnic differences as a major problem rather than something that can also make our lives better.

When I reflect on how different my own life has been in this regard, I find myself drifting back to my high school where I started its first jazz band inspired by people like Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald and Fats Waller. I played the drums in those days, taking lessons from a black drummer. I took what was then one of two high school anthropology courses in the country, enjoying it in part because, as a ninth grader, you’re not crazy about your own culture and glad to learn about other ways of doing things. And it was a Quaker school , a faith that taught one “to see that of God in everyone.”

I thus had, at a quite young age, been introduced to multiculturalism not as a massive  problem but as one of the fascinating and favorable aspects of life that a free thinking teen age dude didn’t mind a bit.

And my powerful learning in those days wasn’t just about ethnicity. I worked for a number of summers on a farm in Maine, guided by older men who I still regard as some my great mentors. One year I worked a summer as a radio newsman in DC when I was 19 and had sailing guidance that helped prepare me for a tour as operations officer of a Coast Guard cutter.

In short, I am who I am in no small part thanks to the aid of older folks who showed me how to do things when I was young. They didn’t scare me, warn me, or treat life as a huge problem but rather showed me how to do it right and enjoy it at the same time.

In living with ethnic variety, we can’t ignore the awful stories of the past and the day. But if we are going to have a dramatically different society, we have to create one in which we learn much different stories.

And there is much more than history working against us. For example, over the past few decades there has been increased emphasis on individual high school achievement. Students are no longer typically defined as members of a community in which they must cooperate with others and learn common values. Instead, they have increasingly become part of the capitalist drive for individual success. An unspoken aspect of this is that other people become creatures to surpass, criticize and defeat rather than to work with together.

Urbanization is another factor. Less than 15% for Americans (as opposed to 70% at the beginning of the 20th century) live in rural areas these days. As I learned from farmers as a teenager, part of successful rural living was was working with, helping and relying upon others, something far less emphasized in urban America. You didn’t abuse others because some day you might need to borrow their tractor.

If we want to change the way Americans live with each other, the best place to start is with the education of the young. What if we had curricula about  the multicultural nature of our society in elementary and junior high school? What if we had more projects that required cooperation and decency towards others? What if we had school assemblies where students got to describe their own culture, like the one in my sons’ elementary school where five kids told their classmates about their religion? What if we dared to teach our children the fact that race is cultural and lacks the scientific status so widely assumed.

The great unspoken misjudgment with our approach to ethnicity is that we overwhelming concentrate on its problems rather than its assets. We say we oppose racism but fail to celebrate multiculturalism. This reduces the  sense of decency, fun, and joy available from others who aren’t quite like you.

1 comment:

Greg Gerritt said...

Maybe it is my anthropology background, but I agree with Sam. Celebrate all kinds of diversity. But given the state of the republican party and its adherence to white christian violent nationalism getting from here to there is going to be a tough row to hoe.