Day 18...
So, we are back in Connecticut. It's nice.
One observation about American life - it seems obsessed with race. Here's what I mean....
The US has representatives from every country on Earth within its borders. If you were to seek out a guy from Togo, a woman from the Marshall Islands, a family from Tajikistan, a young boy from Namibia and an elderly woman from New Guinea - they are all out there. We are probably the most representative nation on Earth from the perspective of countries that have citizens living within America at this moment.
Perhaps the UK and a few other places have this same distinction, perhaps not. Not sure.
Anyway....
With all of those specific details of America's ethnicity melting pot pushed aside, we generally function day-to-day with a very simple idea in place - this is the idea that there are three main groups of Americans - white people, black people and Hispanics.
Now, white Americans got tagged with the moniker "Anglos" or "Anglo Americans" about ten years ago by the news media like CNN. It didn't stick and we're all probably better off by not having a label.
Blacks, around the same time got the title "African Americans", which has taken. It is a fine label, although I have a deep suspicion that this was established by white professorial types. I don't use it. Too many syllables.
Then the third "group" is Hispanics, which are now often called "Latinos". The term "Hispanic" was used to refer to the fact that Hispaniola, the eastern half of the island that is Haiti and the Dominican Republic, is where Columbus landed. I never really understood this, but the term took with me.
So, this is how most Americans see the ethno-racial landscape around them. Buried within this description is a much more nuances, complicated set of perceptions - admiration, fears, misunderstanding, enjoyment, unity and a million other things. I am more or less free of seeing the world through generalizations, and look at people as people. There exists in me some vestiges of the society I grew up in, but I would count it as a significant change in my person that I don't function with standard American racial perceptions in place, for the most part.
70% of the US is white, about 16% is Hispanic and 14% black. When Hispanics grew more numerous than blacks, I remember the media getting all ablaze about what it meant. It's sort of funny to think back on this.
Additionally, American Muslims outnumbered American Jews for the first time in the late 1990's. There was a small murmur about this, as well.
For the most part, I have been an interested observer in this ongoing dynamic in the US, which borders on an obsession, although key events can bring out ugly thoughts. If I am completely honest, the Los Angeles riots and 9/11 were difficult days for everyone and I probably felt my fair share of negative and fearful thoughts those days. But, generally, I don't live in a racial mindset.
So, how does this connect to a blog about India?
India taught me a great deal about this question of race and ethnicity and the idea of human differentiation in general. In a very Indian way, India is confusing on this subject. It is at once the most diverse-yet-unified land I have ever seen, where people of all walks of life go about their business in an incredibly diverse nation with remarkable freedom from strife - yet - there is a constant undercurrent of caste, religion, class, state allegiance, ethnicity, etc. that infuses so much of life there. It's a confusing set of dynamics in India. It can be accurately described as a place of great harmony and a place of extreme dischord.
I can surely say that in India I learned once and for all that people are, in point of fact, people.
So, returning to the US has been amazing in this way.
Michael Jackson died and the American media has been feeding on the story ever since. He was a black guy who became a white guy (sort of) and spent some of his time singing about unity. But in the current American environment there are ongoing questions and subtle comments and the occasional slander across racial lines in the media about what Michael "was made to endure". Was it the beatings from his black father that made him seek an increasingly white visage, or did the white-run media and establishment push this guy to the point that they killed him - intentionally or unintentionally?
And so it goes, while they drone on and on from CNN and Fox News about this.
Yuck.
Then, there are the Hispanic people who clean our property and public spaces, watch our children and work incredibly hard in menial jobs throughout the country. And some demagogues like Pat Buchanan state that we are "under siege" and in a "state of emergency". It is with some irony that we say this, as the ancestors of these same people have been here for thousands upon thousands of years. Most Hispanics are at least partly indigenous Americans, what we have generally called "Indians".
History is funny, no? "American Indians".
Racial politics and racialism in general are like an industry here in America.
We spend time dissecting ourselves across ethnic and racial lines to a degree that is perhaps unhealthy. It's ongoing and all of the time. And until I had a chance to get away from it for a few years, I didn't realize how pervasive it is.
So, I will state that this has been a very interesting thing to witness with new eyes - America's racial climate. And all of this still goes on in a country that just elected a black President for the first time.
Interesting.
