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An Awful Admission


I didn't hear how it began, but a band of Whitefaces were keenly commenting about a pipeline being built in North Dakota--sometimes Whitefaces gather 'round in a circle and smoke an oil pipeline together:  bonding, you know:  worry about lung and liver cancer later--and someone must have said something about the Standing Rock Sioux and the others protesting that the pipeline endangered their sacred grounds in North Dakota.

Nobody said it, but you could see the scorn in the air, like pipe smoke.  Sacred grounds!  North Dakota ain't no Lourdes or Jerusalem!  Sacred grounds!

"They don't even want to be called "Indians", someone said.  "They want to be called . . . " (you could smell the smoke) "Native Americans"!

Actually, it was our government that decided to call the people native to America when Christopher Columbus got lost, "Native Americans".  No explorer into the Americas ever met anyone who introduced him- or herself as, "A Native American".  Some did say they were humans.  Or Lakota.  Nisqually.  Comanche.  Haudenosaunee.  Chippewa.

I suppose that, like the people who live in Scotland, the people who first migrated to the Americas are perfectly capable of naming themselves.  It is, we must admit, a bit of a problem that some of them named themselves after football teams.

But is it the acceptable scorn that I want to talk about.  If I want to call myself a "Squarehead", that is my business.  If you call me a Squarehead, that just might be a problem.

Once, at a grocery store, the clerk referred to the fish I placed on the checkout belt as, "Polack", and said she liked it.  I tried as nicely as I could to say it was "Pollock", not "Polack".  "Oh, OK!", she said.  The distinction eluded her.  She wasn't being scornful.  She was simply ignorant of spelling and pronunciation.

"They want to be called Native Americans!", was scornful.  And only just barely factual.  It was completely unacknowledged racism.

Donald Trump's remarks about women was completely unacknowledged sexism.
His remarks about Mexicans was completely unacknowledged racism.
His scorn of recent immigrants was xenophobia (fear and scorn of other cultures).

"They want to be called "Americans".

I am not even sure of how to say it, but it is true that I have never been so aghast at some of my fellow Americans as I am right now.  Very few of them believe, even for a moment, that they are racist, of sexist, or xenophobic.  They do, in fact, vehemently deny it, and then they say something racist, or sexist, or xenophobic.  It is so pervasive that all I want to do is excuse myself and go away.  I have never in my life had such a powerful urge to simply go away from so many people.  Everything I believe about how to form and maintain community urges me to stay and debate the matters sensibly, but that only results in barely manageable anger and insults, so I want to walk away.  My head tells me to focus on the issues at stake, and my legs tell me to walk away.

What Donald Trump says about women, and immigrants, and Mexicans, and Asians is both ignorant and contemptible, and almost half of voting Americans elected him to be our President.

I am capable of something approaching cool analysis of the situation, and even defending the underlying, understandable anger that is at work, but my sense of decency, and the history of our nation, and of our democracy makes me want to walk away.  I simply want to walk away.

And I may do it.




Comments

  1. UnknownNovember 21, 2016 at 9:42 AM

    Thank-you for framing so well the urge to walk away. It is exactly where I am right now. So far I am boycotting most news except a short glance at headlines. Can't take the aggravation that wells up in me.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Conrad RøyksundNovember 21, 2016 at 11:04 AM

    I can read the news, and do, but what weighs down so heavily is the fact that we have elected a man who is a self-admitted sexual predator, and who seems to be anxious to "purify" us to a dominant White nationalism, even if that means expelling children who have no recollection of ever living anywhere else. I can understand that such people exist. I do not understand how the people I know, who support him, can say so, without shame, without disgust. It is, "Go back to where you came from!" all over again, without recognizing that we all came from there, and that what America is, is where migrants have made a nation.

    ReplyDelete

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