‘Awareness’ Threatens Our Concept of Oneness

The Pilgrims who crossed the Atlantic Ocean on the Mayflower envisioned starting a new society in the Americas in which everyone would be welcomed. They dreamed of creating a new life and a new culture completely different from the one they left behind--a culture that absorbed and integrated old ethnic ways and wove these ways into itself to create a unique American fabric.

For 400 years, immigrants came into the United States, gave to our culture, assimilated into it and were proud to be known as Americans--not Irish Americans, not African Americans, not Chinese Americans and so on.

In recent years the historical concept of America as a melting pot where individuals from all nations join together to seek new lives has come under attack. Somewhere along the way, a new gospel has emerged that favors a nation of groups and a shift from the idea of assimilation to the celebration of ethnicity.

Instead of a nation composed of individuals making their own free choice, America increasingly sees itself as composed of groups more or less indelible in their “ethnic character.”

This conflict plays out in our language, our politics and our churches (Martin Luther King once said, “The most segregated hour in America is 11 o’clock Sunday morning.”) Most important, it is being played out in our system of education and business.

In the past few years, we have all read about ethnic cleansing in Rwanda, Cambodia, Somalia, Bosnia and Serbia. What would happen if one of America’s ethnic groups started an ethnic cleansing in the workplace, in politics or in our schools? You don’t think it could happen? I have news for you. It has already started.

We don’t call it cleansing; we call it hate groups.

*

The word “ethnic” has a long history. It originally meant heathen or pagan. Soon, it came to mean anything pertaining to race or nation. In the 1930s the word had acquired an association with foreigners. It definitely carried the meaning of non-Anglo minority or nonwhite.

Meanwhile, the noun “ethnicity” made its debut in the 1940s and came into vogue during the celebrations of the American independence bicentennial, the restoration of Ellis Island and the centennial of the Statue of Liberty. These celebrations were not a tribute to the melting pot but extravaganzas of ethnic distinctiveness.

All of a sudden, there was a new drive to identify with one’s immigrant culture and, at the same time, to move away from being uniquely American.

In 1974, Congress passed the Ethnic Heritage Studies Program Act. This act defied the first settlers’ ideal of a new American culture as embodied in John Quincy Adams’ own words when he told a group of new American citizens from Europe, “You must cast off the European skin never to resume it.”

*

Ethnic awareness began as a gesture of protest against Anglo-centricity. The upsurge took cliquish dimensions. Today, it threatens to become a counterrevolution against the original theory of America as one people, a common culture, a single nation.

The trend of ethnic identity is false. All we have to do is look at our young people. They are a product of many different cultures. In fact, my own children can claim heritages of Native American, African, Irish, Spanish and Filipino. Their cousins can claim Jewish, Hungarian, Native American and German ancestry.

What binds them all is their common tie to being American.