THE BIG MIX : COMMENTARY : Diversity : ‘Beginning to Notice What We Are’

The Big Mix of ethnic cultures in Southern California is producing a new reality for the arts here.

Our metropolis has changed wildly with the influx of immigrants. This special issue of Calendar is an attempt to recognize and examine some of the diversity.

The following essay concerns how American culture, based on European tradition, can awaken to the multitude of powerful Asian, black and Latino voices that have long been enriching the cultural life of our region.

The author is the director of the Los Angeles Festival, which, in September of 1990, will be partly devoted to cultures of the Pacific.

I am a white American male trying to live in Los Angeles and trying to think about cultural diversity while riding the Wilshire bus. I am surrounded by people of color. They are thoughtful. They have lives. Many of them are thinking about their lives. These faces, of course, are filled with beauty and anxiety and not a little dignity. Some faces are sly necessarily so and some are a little crazy. This is America, but not the America that I encounter in the lobbies, galleries and modern auditoriums of our city’s leading cultural institutions.

So I sit on the bus and I keep looking and I realize how little I know about these people’s lives. What do their houses look like? What are their favorite songs? It shouldn’t be hard to find out; I could just ask. But this is an American city and we have rules about these things. One of the first rules is distance. Television and film are gratifying in this way; you can ask only questions that have very, very short answers and that in any case cannot be pursued, and that frightening point of human contact is thankfully avoided.

Western civilization has produced a neurotic, afflicted, hyperextended society where psychoanalysis has replaced culture and Big Entertainment has replaced everything.

Successful avoidance of problematic elements (people, traffic, credit-card payments, phone calls, etc.) is the key to the good life. Such cultural masterpieces as we have inherited are safely under glass and kept at arm’s length by a cloud of disinformation that encourages appreciation over experience. (The catalogue entry describes the last four owners of the painting but declines to speculate on why the painter painted it.)

We’re told that our culture, like our government, is for the experts to handle, and we shouldn’t get too close, because our uneducated guess would probably be wrong. Even the basic functions of birth and death in the sanitized society are hidden away, (we have sealed white rooms for those things too) and we are left without the experience or language to deal with AIDS, while we obsessively discuss and depict sex without knowing quite how to mention love, responsibility or even shame.

It should be fun to be us, but finally it isn’t. It’s a little lonely and it’s a little frightening. So we tend to congregate in little bunches of people who we presume are just like ourselves (at least they’re dressed the same way) and talk a little too loudly about things we don’t know that much about while drinking much too much.

Culture was invented as a way of helping people out of their isolation. Culture helped give you a sense of where you were coming from that made you feel a little better about where you were going to. It was about having something in common with people beyond a dress code. It allowed a mythology that gave permission for difficult, dark, mysterious or undiscussable things to be discussed. But we traded all that in for Big Entertainment.

Big Entertainment was cheaper (to buy, not to make) and required no maintenance. You didn’t in fact even have to pay attention to it at all. The hard core of this soft-core porn was the rock-bottom assurance that all the characters would be pretty, handsome and white and that all of their problems could be solved in one and sometimes two sentences. We bought this mythology of the perfect suburban life and we bought the appliances to go with it. But somewhere it just went out of control.

Of course, as we all know, and as the history of Hollywood film over the last decade has shown, drug dependency requires stronger and stronger doses to still get that high. So armed with this knowledge, why were we restocking the liquor cabinet so frequently? And what addiction caused us to let the national debt pass the $2-trillion mark?

America is a young country, a kid, and filled with the wonder and marvel and amazement of childhood. It is also apt to be bratty, petulant, lazy and solipsistic. America hates to eat its vegetables. America hates picking up after itself. And above all, America hates to learn things.

But this may be about the time to notice that we are surrounded by a range of cultures far more ancient, distinguished and profound than our own. My generation may be the first American generation that has had to notice that it’s not a white world. Four centuries of intensive disinformation from the British empire notwithstanding, we are the minority culture.

The dawning of this intelligence may be viewed by some as a threat (James Baldwin four years ago warned white America that it had a choice of becoming human or irrelevant). But I must say I view it as a sign that this country is ready (just before it is forced) to move into a phase of maturity. The first step on the road to knowing what we may be is beginning to notice what in fact we are.

In Los Angeles we have the single largest concentration of urban Native Americans in the United States. The Japanese community, the Chinese community are well-established. We have a Koreatown. We have a Cuban population. We have a Persian population. We have Thai and Hindu temples. And we have refugees: Vietnamese and Cambodian, Guatemalan, Salvadoran and Nicaraguan. And we have a large, proud black community. I used to go around claiming that there are 82 languages spoken in the elementary schools of this city. I have recently been corrected; there are 85.

This is the future of a great country. If the first 200 years of American culture were made in New York by European immigrants who battled it out on the Lower East Side, eventually moved up town, eventually built the Carnegie Hall and eventually produced Isaac Stern (allowing for the fact that the most important contribution to world music in this century was probably made by black people from the Mississippi Delta and the south side of Chicago and then was packaged in New York), then the next 200 years of American culture will be made and packaged in Los Angeles. The ethnic mix will provide the heat, and the new Americans will have the task of creating a culture whose models do match their lives, a culture not bought or sold or imposed, but a culture made with their own hands in which they can describe the world to their children.

We hear much about the fact that Los Angeles is set to overtake New York as an economic center for this country in the next decade. But cultural flourishing does not follow economic prosperity, it precedes it. Cultural understanding is the first key to equal justice and economic opportunity, to political cohesion in a participatory democracy. Because you have to start by meeting your fellow participants.

It is interesting to note how much of non-Western culture is centered in participation, not spectating. So many of these cultures have been virtually invisible to us because they are not susceptible to commercial exploitation. They are about sharing. They are about a graceful attempt to acknowledge and respect the unknown. They are about boundaries and mutual obligations. They are about friendship. They are about value before profit.

A couple of weeks ago I asked my UCLA seminar of smart white students to define heroism (an important concept, after all, in the history of drama). After about an hour of discussion it was agreed that they didn’t know what it meant. A couple hundred black people on Dr. King’s march in Selma could have told them what it meant. An old woman who survived a 200-mile forced march at the hands of Pol Pot’s soldiers (and who lives now in a Cambodian refugee camp) could have told them. And the mothers of Chile whose sons have never returned from police custody, they might have something to say on the subject.

These people have stories to tell that are not the same old spent run of buddy cop films. Their stories have the texture and grain of real lives lived in the face of unfairness, lives in which courage is not a luxury, an alternative or an option. They could tell us plenty about their lives, and they probably have some things to say about the way we live, or don’t live. (Baldwin again: “The Civilized have never been able to honor, recognize, or describe the Savage, but the Savage can, now, describe the Civilized.”)

These American citizens, these “minorities,” are not “emerging.” They are here, now. It is our duty, necessity and privilege to offer them everything we possibly have to offer, our traditional institutions, of course, to the extent that they are helpful, but also new institutions capable of creating new messages in a new context.

When the institution of our country was new, it was introduced with the words, “All men are created equal.” Do we really believe this? Of course not. To an age obsessed with proof and accountability, we have the stats to prove that such a notion is economically out of the question. But deep inside we actually do believe it.

Our first hope of fulfilling the promise of our Founding Fathers may be cultural. Let us begin by allowing all men to be equal culturally and see if our hearts aren’t moved to change a few other things from here.

This special issue was edited by David Fox, Sunday Calendar assistant editor.