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RangerDave:
The older I get, the more convinced I am that the people driving diversity, race, gender, sexuality, and other vogue identity issues really have no idea what diversity, tolerance, and community really are. To answer your question, we have to consider a lot of things, primarily how we should identify our society and our citizens.
I tend to find our fascination with ethnic heritage foolish, detrimental, and generally responsible for perpetuating a society based on continuous marginalization. And then I remember that our ruling class has been engaged in that particular brand of fear mongering for as long as Europeans have been colonizing this continent. If you strip the ethnic information out of a full demographic survey of Boulder County, Colorado, for instance, you end up with the most homogeneous county in the United States in terms of median wages, assets, earning potential, education, quality of life, etc. Neo-Conservatives like to harp on that as proof this diversity bullshit isn't about diversity. Unfortunately, the same is true of almost any county or region in the United States. There are exceedingly strong historical arguments which place the height out of diversity, tolerance, and acceptance somewhere before 1776. It takes a concerted effort from multiple people with media and information control to make a poor man hate the equally poor guy suffering the same daily **** as him for something so trivial as genetics; and that's been rather true for an exceedingly long time. American Racism was created by its ruling class. American Racism is perpetuated by its ruling class. And when an immigrant population that's easy to marginalize continues to flood our borders and working class communities illegally, it's really easy for our government to be as duplicitous as possible. They speak of amnesty, because they know the legal immigrants and natural born citizens will react negatively. They talk of a humanitarian effort on our continent to make sure people resist it. After all, if the poor folks are too busy hating each other to think, they won't question all the stupid **** our government is doing. Between 1820 and 1860, the slave-owning gentry needed the free white man to hate the free black man, especially if he was poor.
Well, we still do that. We just change who the other is. As far as you're concerned, there are probably few things in this work more despicable than a conservative Christian in the American political sense -- they're gay hating, wife beating, child-raping troglodytes who think only white people should be allowed in the United States; that perception is by design. Someone with an agenda wants you to think as much. Someone with an agenda also wants people to think that homosexuals are evil. Someone with an agenda also wants you to believe that heterosexuality is socially oppressive, wrong, and that heteronormativity based on sexual dimorphism is somewhere between genocide and mutually-assured-destruction on the list of things that should never happen again.
So, you ask me if I think non-assimilation issues are restricted to illegal immigrants or new immigrants, and I say, quite assuredly, "No." Non-assimilation issues are the bread and butter of our ruling class's politics; non-assimilation issues are the entire reason the delusional academic version of diversity that Guyatri Spivak and her ilk have drawn from post-structural, post-modern reductionism exists: to perpetuate class warfare and identity conflicts they're trying to resolve. Terry Eagleton, for instance, is a cultural Marxist; as are the vast majority of our academics. These individuals strive for a level of meta-normalization that belies their immediate thoughts and work. And, yet, here we are talking about poor people or normal people or average people or South American Hispanics (which is rather redundant by the bye, but I don't feel like explaining the difference between Spanish and Hispanic). We've labeled them, categorized them, separated them, isolated them with languages and labels already. To be certain, there's no malice or ill-intent or dislike (at least from me), but there's the catch-22 of communication: we can only use what is academically accepted as flawed, Anglo, and representative of Western social exploitation -- language. In case you're wondering, I'm marginalizing every non-white reader in the world by using American Edited English with a Modernist period set. It's a horrible crime on my part, apparently.
But, I'll return to my, "No." My father is an immigrant. My mother is an immigrant. Their parents were immigrants. My father's siblings were immigrants. The first two people in my family born in this country are my older brother and myself. Incidentally, my immigrant family came here legally. My father assimilated by becoming a American. His parents assimilated by becoming Americans. My mother and her family the same. And growing up, at least in my household, Americans were Americans because we didn't to divide ourselves by following the example our European or Asian or African colleagues did. Perhaps that has something to do with being the grandson of two Auschwitz survivors and a British Army officer from World War I. I'm not sure, but here I am. Amusingly, that didn't mean shucking our Slovenian or British West Indian heritage. It didn't mean giving up any of that identity. Today, though, being American and having an understanding, respect, and knowledge of your roots are mutually exclusive. The world American needs an ethnic qualifier or its academically incorrect.
And, amusingly, the party responsible for this now century long fascination with a meaningless checkbox on the census is yours. The Democrats are terrified of vanilla Americans.
_________________ Corolinth wrote: Facism is not a school of thought, it is a racial slur.
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