As something of an aside but not entirely, I read that in the last few decades, Hispanic populations in Texas are increasing rapidly relative to the overall population. Other states probably are undergoing a comparable demographic shift.
A certain type screams "Muh Great Replacement ZOMG!" but there is a much simpler answer. In 1973, there was no status boost in identifying as Hispanic. If anything it was the opposite. In 2023, there are definite advantages to identifying as Hispanic.
Plus projections where whites become a minority rely on Apartheid style one drop rules when defining race. Anybody who's half white gets classified as a minority even when in reality about half of those individuals classify themselves as white.
There's a comedian from San Francisco named Al Madrigal who is half Mexican and married a lady who's half Korean. "What do you get," he asks, "when you create a baby that is a quarter Mexican, a quarter Korean, a quarter Sicilian and a quarter Greek? A white person."
The incredibly Republican Congressional and Senatorial representation from Oklahoma is heavily Native American. As is the governor. I think they're pretty assimilated.
Wow. I have a PHD in U.S. history, and I never knew that.
ETA: by "I never knew that," I don't mean only the part about speaking Kansa, but the part about him being Native American. (I also didn't know the name of Hoover's VP....I don't know the names of most of the VP's.)
This is basically the thesis of Eric Kaufmann's book Whiteshift, where he talks about how the white population in America will not decline, but rather absorb more groups to maintain a majority. It happened with Irish and Italians and it will happen with light-skinned Latinos and Asians.
Yeah, I think it makes sense on a number of levels. There are a ton of whites in the United States so it makes sense that most of the mixed race marriages here involve at least one white person. Then the children of those unions are more likely to themselves marry a white person and so on.
But in addition there is an argument that Asians and Latinos are subject to "whitening" in a manner that blacks are not, for whatever reason.
It does make sense from a historical view. Black Americans had their cultures vaporized via slavery, so they built their own culture, which served as a counterculture to the dominant white one. But when immigrants come over, they usually see the white one as American culture rather than the black one, so they assimilate toward white culture, which is mainstream culture. Black Americans continue to pass down black culture, while other races assimilate toward the mainstream.
wait, you think Asians (as in full Asian) will be considered a part of the white population in America..? Light skinned Latino/as I can imagine for sure. As the commenter below says, mixed race Asians, perhaps.
After talking about America's changing demographics for decades, and rubbing their hands together about how it would inevitably give them dominant status, the Democrats have now decided that noticing those changing demographics involves buying into a "white nationalist conspiracy theory". Meanwhile two of the three most populous states -- Texas and California -- are now white minority.
“the urge of immigrant parents to push their children to assimilate is entirely understandable, and so is the desire of those children to reconnect with their heritage” - I think the opposite way round is common too (if anything, I think it’s more common, and it’s only a minority of second-generation immigrants undergo an awakening in college that makes them identify more than they used to with their parents’ culture, but I don’t have any stats on this). Thinking about my second-generation immigrant friends who I have had conversations about this stuff with, most of them grew up wanting to be more American while their parents were alarmed at how Americanized they had become.
This is because being FOB is low status when you actually are FOB, while proclaiming oneself to be the Right Kind Of Immigrant can be high-status in certain situations on campus.
Most people are not immune from status considerations but status considerations are rarely the whole picture. From what I saw, natural teenage rebelliousness can push a kid into further embracing assimilation, but when they mature they reconnect with that part of their identity somewhat. Still, I’d say that if it were up to the parents their kids would have ended up slightly less Americanized. A lot of this stemmed from American parents being less strict about homework, socialization, dating, etc.
Natural teenage rebelliousness is itself a manifestation of status: "I'm not a kid anymore" is the most purely status-driven statement it's possible to make. I am not of class X, I am of class Y, therefore I deserve the things appertaining to class Y. That's a status distinction, not a metaphysical one.
Feral Finster is right: the higher up the socioeconomic ladder you go, the more your 'exoticism' is prized and the more Americanism is scorned. This is true to the point of inversion if you work at the tire shop or the call center.
I'm not sure that teenage rebelliousness is the sort of thing we mean when we speak about "status" issues. You can use the term that way, but it dilutes the import of it when you do. Virtually every social act can be interpreted as a status issue (well, maybe I'm overstating, but I think you can see the point).
I think Hellbender makes a good point. You can make the case, based on examples, that the "immigrant experience" is much the opposite of the portrait sketched by Freddie. I don't think that undermines the portrait; it just means we should be wary of extending it into a stereotype or flattening the very diverse ways in which individuals may reach outcomes that appear to be the same.
How does taking the most archetypal aspect of status possible - one's position as a person of majority within the family and society at large - dilute it?
I don't really agree with calling adulthood the most archetypal status possible (you might go with parent/child or male/female or older/young-sibling), but more basically the dilution I'm talking about is because when we use "status" in talking about society we usually use it to refer to groups and hierarchies outside the family. Certainly, that's an essential element of Freddie's post.
Hellbender was using the term to refer to gaining status in the world outside the family (after all, learning the mother county's language is not likely to raise one's status within an assimilationist family). I think your challenge blurs the line between family and society in a way that doesn't really help throw light on the issues Freddie raises.
Status considerations and natural teenage rebelliousness are closely linked. For the second generation, teenage rebellioness is often fueled by parental resentment over being raised with cultural signifiers that are deemed low class by their peers (e.g. the classic example of the Asian kid who gets mocked for bringing "weird" food to school and begins to resent their parents for not giving them "normal" lunches)
I think what Freddie describes is increasingly common among the well-educated; becoming "more American" is not associated with status (in fact, is associated quite negatively with status) among that class. Everyone now clamors to show how they are different than your run of the mill American.
What's ironic is that immigrants who have failed to assimilate culturally (by being brusque or pushy for example) are penalized for their foreign qualities in these kinds of professional settings. What people really want is surface diversity but behavioral conformity.
An old Cuban lady blatantly cut me in line at a Hialeah ATM once and used the no hablo excuse when she knew what she was doing wasn't cool. We don't have to tolerate that kind of shit, I certainly didn't, it became a battle of wills that I won...We should send her ass back if she weren't most likely dead - this was in '04, I think. But in the immortal words of Walter Sobchak, "this is not Nam, Smokey! There are rules!"
I do get that, but are there no correspondences? It seems to me that any argument that you can make against patriotism on account of the distortions in thought, feeling, and action that can (but do not have to) happen because of it, you could also make against family - and some have made those arguments.
The way I'd put this is that both "family" and "country" are ways to privilege certain people in your life above others. Should I weight my brother's needs above this internet commenter? What about a fellow American vs. a Bulgarian? What about a fellow human vs. a dolphin?
If I try to think entirely morally, shedding my darwinian programming, I'm not sure I could make an argument for privileging any of these groups over the others. Maybe from a utilitarian point of view I could make the argument, but it's not obvious?
Which is all to say, we all have groups we privilege over others. Patriotism is one way to do that that's no more obviously wrong than others like "family."
Utilitarianism cannot tell you what is right until you give it some base values to start from. I'm sure there's a utilitarian argument in favor of nationalism, and I'm sure there's one in favor of internationalism, and both are equally valid rationally. Depends on where your values start.
Seems a bit outside the point of my comment either way, but I think utilitarianism is usually assumed to be "the greatest happiness/well-being for the greatest number", no?
Sorry, I was a bit obscure -- probably a symptom of my dislike for utilitarianism. I think we privilege the groups that are meaningful to us because they are meaningful to us. There's no rational way to deterministically tell if we *should* do that -- that's entirely a function of priors. I'm disagreeing that we can put aside our Darwinian programming: the core of all morality is feeling, and those feelings, though certainly not random, do not originate from rationality. Ethical systems (like utilitarianism) are simply a means to help us better understand and develop our moral feelings. They help us understand how to implement what we feel is moral.
You're arguing patriotism with an internationalist. I don't mean that as a pejorative, but you may as well be arguing bicycle brand loyalty with a fish ... as in 'an internationalist needs patriotism like a fish needs a bicycle.'
What you're describing would be true for ethnostates. Lesotho, for example, is basically all Basotho people, and it's pretty small, so the nation can be viewed as an an extended family. That's per its original etymology, nacio-: pertaining to birth. In a multi-ethnic empire like the US this makes very little sense, particularly considering that the American people themselves are discouraged in the public square from identifying them separately to those of immigrant stock.
But even within ethnostates there is tension. Germany has explicitly decided - or at least its elites have explicitly decided - to abandon ius sanguinis in favor of multiethnicity. Lesotho won't follow, but others might.
Even if you wanted to go with the country/family analogy, I don't think it works, because patriotism is often described as pride and familial pride is far from universal. Plenty of people have estranged feelings regarding their families of course.
But even beyond that, while I am proud of the things my children accomplish, I don't feel any sense pride in the things my ancestors did. I have no personal relationship with those accomplishments after all.
If a closer family relative does something which I am proud of (like say a cousin staying sober, or finishing a PHD program) I'll feel proud for them, but I recognize that this is primarily a facet of our lifetime relationship with one another - being friends, not being part of some arbitrarily defined lineage.
I think people sometime use it to mean some kind of loyalty to your countrymen - is there a word for that doesn't also indicate pride? Maybe nationalism, but that's typically just used as "patriotism, but bad."
I think that was was a bit of a cop out response. What about culture? Do you not value culture? Patriotism is a reaction to value and protect the ubiquitous culture of the place.
Maybe you think all cultures are equal and thus we don’t need to preserve any. For example fuck all American Indian cultures. Fuck Mexican culture. Fuck black culture. Fuck American culture. Let’s just blend everything into a common globalist culture that Klaus Schwab designs.
This entire piece is about culture and assimilation. Name a country that works well without a binding culture. Even companies develop a culture. Assimilation is the key to success. Multiculturalism has proven a disastrous idea. A room of cultural snowflakes will not be very productive.
Europeans are confused with the flying of American flags and the tears from people singing the national anthem. They don’t do those displays in their home country. Then you remind them that theirs are 2000 year old cultures, while the US is 200 years old. They can take it for granted that theirs is established and not at risk of being vaporized by radicals.
I have told this story umpteen times here. My local Koreatown has a creation myth. Way back when the area used to be heavily African American and when the first Korean immigrants arrived there was a lot of racial tension. It was resolved with a massive brawl where a hundred Koreans armed themselves with clubs, knives, bats, etc. and battled it out with the locals in a parking lot. The Koreans emerged victorious and the area underwent a rapid demographic shift.
Human beings are naturally hard wired for competition, if not outright conflict, I think. In a genuinely diverse country you need some kind of unifying principle (the flag, the king, the American dream, whatever) to overcome the human tendency for tribalism. Is it really surprising that in an era that emphasizes tribe over national identity that crime is on the rise?
Agree. Tribalism is a evolutionary and biological reality of the human condition because it better support surviving and thriving of the individual. However, not all tribal cultures are created equal.
The US is the only country on the planet formed based on an idea. That idea sprouted into a tribal culture. Yes, it was modified by immigrants, but it held its foundation. A binding culture is the foundation that allows for creativity and difference. The radicals attempting to destroy the foundation are basically destroying the country... wrecking the idea... and eliminating what has been the greatest country on God's green earth. Those looking at the glass half empty and claiming there is nothing worth protecting need to be shipped to new places where they can test out that theory.
The US was founded by a specific people and for a specific people, irrespestive of the ideal they espoused. It's literally in the first sentence of the constitution: the nation was founded to secure the blessings of liberty "for ourselves and our posterity." Not for anyone who adopted the creed. It's a psyop to pretend that the US was an idea and not a people. The American people were as restrictive and jealous of their ethnic identity as anyone until the early 20th century, and Americanness remained largely a property of Whiteness until post-1965.
Even the Declaration of Independence, in its first sentence, defines the people seeking independence as "a people" and not as an idea.
Rooftop Koreans. My dad was a pre-rooftop Korean. He owned a liquor store in Baltimore for awhile when I was a kid and was always strapped. The Korean guy who took over it was shot and killed.
I belong to a private shooting range and there is a sizable Asian contingent there which is 90% Korean. I shoot with the same bunch of guys on the weekends and it's not uncommon for the group to head out to the local pocha afterwards for beer and stir fried intestine.
That’s interesting and also not at all surprising at the same time. My dad is too old and weathered with a heart condition these days to stomach any of that :) He could drink with the Russians back in the day. Old school Korean men were/are a contentious bunch, to put it lightly.
I grew up in a small European country. There is no shortage of flag waving. You see as many national flags in an average town there as you do in the US. Doubtless this varies by country but generally antipathy to the flag and patriotism is a function of class and status and not of nationality; that is, the kind of Europeans who feign confusion about American flag-waving are the kind who look down on it as tacky at home.
Would not agree re: Europeans are confused by American patriotism. Just a minor detail in your response but after living in the UK for almost 20 years, I can assure you patriotism is alive and well. Though counting the UK as European is a bit controversial, I suppose. Also maybe this is just in a football (soccer)/sports context, but that’s a great space to observe how patriotism shows it’s face over there. Flags and tears and fights oh my.
You’re right! So funny. I distinctly remember thinking about that when I was traveling back and forth from England to Denmark (long, uninteresting story). Copenhagen might be my favourite city, actually.
Patriotism is a difficult concept for a mobile people. Talk with people who have lived for hundreds to thousands of years in the same land, and they're horrified with the idea of immigration.
This really came home to me, when touring The Thistle Chapel in Edinburgh.
Yes. I don't feel anywhere as strongly about my country and culture as I do about my immediate family. I see good and bad in people and cultures everywhere. There are definitely things to be proud of as an American, but it isn't the same as how I feel about my family. Biology doesn't come into it for me. Most of my family isn't biological.
It's certainly one of the biggest reasons I'm here. It's sad that writing about the complexities of life from a left perspective seems so hard to find.
Writing about the complexities of life is hard to find in any politically salient space. I don't blame the left for this. Politics is inherently flattening.
Honestly, if it happens to everyone maybe it’s better to figure out how to get over it rather than working to make your racial heritage your defining characteristic.
That doesn’t mean you don’t get to claim an ethnic origin (if you’re so inclined). But I think that in America it makes more sense to try and claim your place *here* rather than demanding special privileges because your parents undertook a journey (immigration) that is ultimately the defining myth of this country.
And I say this as a first generation American with a refugee father.
Is it an either / or question ? People aren't deciding between a) making their ethnicity their "defining characteristic", and b) getting over it. There's a whole middle ground in there that's worth exploring.
Exactly. Those kinds of binary choices irritate me so much. Experience grants you the ability to think with a little more complexity and, hopefully, with extra empathy.
Are you moving towards assimilation or away from it? If you’re moving away you’re demanding your heritage takes precedence over your current environment.
Certainly you can (and should) integrate your ethnicity, experience, etc. into your life. But that demands fluidity.
You’re not asking me directly but as an Asian American myself I can certainly say that it’s not a matter or moving towards or away from but rather a constant push and pull dependent on situations I’m in. For example, I lost my mother relatively recently and so I’ve been more engaged with her culture, long for it, etc. Other times I’m perfectly American and hardly think about my race until someone says something shitty or asks me the classic “ok but where are you really from” question. It’s constant tension.
I think you would be surprised by the number of people for whom this is an internal struggle they work through on their own, and not something that results in demands being made of the people around them.
I grew up in Vancouver, in a very multicultural neighbourhood. The only kid we never got to interact with was the daughter of Chinese immigrants. She was always indoors, practicing the piano. Her parents never allowed her to play with the rest of us. I don’t know why. This isn’t meant to be a profound observation; it’s just a thing this piece makes me remember.
Feeling rooted somewhere feels like a common human condition. At least it is for me. I wasn't born in US and often find myself thinking about my identity being linked to the culture and place I was from. But I know I wouldn't fit in there either. I guess the best thing is to find your "tribe" or family wherever you happen to be.
I like my territory, I chose it myself, I like knowing where mice and songbirds are best found, where my friends are likely to be and the best spots for hiding, napping.
But I must live by my wits, knowing that my life is largely determined by forces that even a cat cannot control.
This is an old tale. My grandmother emigrated from Italy in the 1920's and refused to teach her children Italian in order that they would assimilate better. They in turn were resentful that they didn't learn Italian or more about Italy. Many people I've talked to over the years have told similar stories, regardless of ancestry.
Likewise, my great grandmother, from a Mexican family, when those pesky Americans took California away from Mexico. She refused to teach her children Spanish. At a family reunion, I met some of the family who stayed in the Mexican culture in American California ... a perpetual underclass.
My Italian family also dropped the language fairly quickly.
Learning a second language is so easy for toddlers, and so hard for adults, that it’s maddening to find out you *could* have been effortlessly bilingual. Whatever the language.
I’m just waiting for my kid to realize my spouse refused to pass on her native language. 😬
Andrea Long Chu wrote an interesting essay about a similar topic, how mixed Asian kids (usually half white, half Asian) grow up and struggle to connect with their culture. The essay discusses several fiction books on this topic. https://www.vulture.com/2022/09/the-mixed-asian-metaphor.html
She concludes: “And if there is one conclusion to be reached from the mixed Asian experience, it is this: People want race. They want race to win them something, to tell them everything they were never told; they want friendship from it, or sex, or even love; and sometimes, they just want to be something or to have something to be.”
It reminded me of how some white college students are envious of their POC peers who can join associations for their race or ethnicity, groups that bond and celebrate their heritage. While being white, for good reason, means you don’t get to do that.
I can't help but be saddened by that conclusion. Because that desire for "race" to give such things sets up a terrible dynamic that's corrosive to building a vibrant, functioning (for all) multiethnic democracy. There are solid arguments for whites not getting affinity groups of their own, much of which I agree with, but it makes me queasy to sell the majority (if shrinking) that they can only see their "whiteness" as a sin, as something that allows every other racial category to hate them because if racism is defined by power, hating white people for being white is completely acceptable. Is that idea understandable? 100%. But it also sets a terrible precedent for living, working and thriving together if we don't share the same color, or other birth trait. Like much of identity politics, I get it, but I wish we went one more step to talk about how we share this country and this world.
Is that a generational shift though? I can't help but feel that earlier generations, who grew up with the "melting pot" drilled into their brain through constant repetition, might have a different perspective.
I'm not that old, but what made me a liberal as a teenager was the idea of taking race, gender, sexual orientation off the table as a metric to judge anyone. It's been shocking to see those metrics re-introduced as a progressive ideal, rather than something fundamentally regressive. "I just feel more comfortable with people who look like me," will always sound misguided to me, even if I understand why.
In a country like Korea or Japan (not China) a race war would be a sad affair. The dominant ethnicity there enjoys an overwhelming numerical superiority and any minorities would be quickly crushed.
In a genuinely diverse country like the US on the other hand the outcome would be horrific chaos. I have to wonder if the old intelligentsia, who stressed assimilation and cultural unity, were wise to the ways of the world in a manner that the current generation is not.
America is basically the experiment in whether a multiethnic pluralist republic can survive the forces that would tear any such country apart in the internet era; considering we have lots of nukes, a massive standing army, and the fact that I live here I consider it imperative that pluralism work. Xi is wrong to "reeducate" the Uighurs in slave labor camps; he is not wrong on the importance of e pluribus unum...
"People want race. They want race to win them something, to tell them everything they were never told; they want friendship from it, or sex, or even love; and sometimes, they just want to be something or to have something to be.”
It's extraordinarily difficult to actually see past your own culture. Even when we try to turn away from our own culture, we usually end up embracing a critique that is itself well-established in the culture. Actual other cultures don't critique our culture on its own terms, they simply fail to understand it at all and critique the bastardized version that exists in their head (if they care about us at all).
A great example of this are atheists that embrace all the standard Puritan arguments against traditional religious expression, not realizing they're just retreading the same ground that was walked 400 years ago. Or decolonizers who recreate the liberal/romantic nationalist tradition from first principles. Even as they reject the outputs of the tradition they think they hate, they can't help but follow the same patterns of thought and the value systems that sit underneath it all.
A good tell for assimilation is the first name of the children of immigrants. In the United States, it seems most common to stick with a rather narrow range of English first-names, no matter how non-English the last name. Freddie deBoer, case in point. Lars deBoer just wouldn't be the name of a guy from Connecticut. Even Irish and Scottish first-names are rarely observed (always Patrick, never Padraig), and seem to be unpronounceable when they appear. This trend isn't as common in other countries. For example, Mohammad is a popular name in England. Somehthing about the culture of the US, its vast and inward provincialism, demands assimilation and uniformity.
I think it's mostly contextual. It was all fun and games making Jewish jokes to my brethren in New York before college. We get the jokes. Once in college in the Midwest and finding much of their knowledge of Jews came from Cartman I was less inclined to make those jokes, now that I was an outsider. At first what I was once forgiving of (such as first week of college when over dinner someone told me he was surprised I chewed with my mouth closed because he thought all Jews chewed with it open) briefly morphed into a Jewish "nationalist" phase where I strongly identified with an identity I had taken for granted before (lasted about a year before I got over it). But again, all these inclinations were determined by exterior forces. Feeling left out and alienated is a very strong and hurtful feeling. How one reacts to it is unpredictable.
Indeed. Growing up in a suburb that was so Jewish our public schools were closed for the High Holidays, and with a close friends group that was entirely Jewish until high school (which was roughly 75 percent Jewish in composition), I never felt "different" except, and only sometimes, when my lacrosse team played other teams across the county. The same went for living in New York City. This changed when I moved to a small city in the South about ten years ago (where I remain). The vast majority of interactions I've had down here regarding my Jewishness have come from a place of curiosity (or maybe ignorance, but not malicious ignorance), but they still underscore how I'm a minority, a feeling I never ever internalized growing up. In some ways I think it has motivated me to get more involved in the small local community, though this could also be driven by having small kids and wanting them to be in touch with this aspect of their identity that can't be taken for granted, as it was for me. I don't think this tension—which, to be fair, is not very high—will ever be fully resolvable. At this point (just turned 40) I think I'm okay with that.
Attended a Midwest university (cow school) and until the middle 2000s we would not infrequently call other people jew, jew-ey, jewish, etc. if they were parsimonious, being cheap, or not paying their fair share. I don't recall anyone who actually thought that Jews were in fact cheap, or that these terms were even connected to/related to living Jews. It was just a historical stereotype that was carried down through communities without a noticeable Jewish population. To be sure this practice has died out, even among the rural folk I know.
`he was surprised I chewed with my mouth closed'
Wow. That is a whole other level of ignorance. Must have picked up volume of Singer's that consisted entirely of his stories about shtetel yokels. If anything Jews were generally assumed to be more cosmopolitan and wealthier than non-Jews back then. Gold's `Jews without Money' was a good corrective before the internet.
Parents and children often have different, even competing, interests. In your friend's situation, it sounds like he felt rootless and alienated in America despite it being his birthplace. Being a Gen X or older Millennial Asian American guy would've had its unique set of alienating experiences too, which would explain why he was able to find some comfort—even if imagined—in Asia. His parents would've regarded America differently though, because whatever hardships they'd had in China, they did feel a sense of home, even if they had their issues with it.
It can swing the other way too, with immigrant parents who loved their formative years and youth back home so much that they demand that their kids want the same upbringing. Either way, being the same race or even being in the same family doesn't mean your motivations and interests will be perfectly aligned.
Yeah. I've seen this go both ways: some kids of immigrants want to "rediscover their culture" even though they were born here and have no real connection besides an ethnicity, then they get shocked when they go to Asia and everyone treats them like the foreigner they are.
But other kids did have parents that tried to instill values of the old culture, but they rejected it in favor of American culture. It all varies.
When Japanese factories were humming non-stop in the 1980s and were in need of workers, someone got the idea of convincing Brazilians of Japanese descent to return to the land of their ancestors.
Part of the rationale was that Brazilian-Japanese would *look* Japanese, and Japan is not a culture famously welcoming to outsiders. It was quickly discovered that, while Brazilian-Japanese may *look* Japanese, they *acted* like Brazilians.
Yep. I've seen this with adoptees too. It can be quite brutal when an adoptee from China or Korea tries to "rediscover their lost culture" by going to Asia... only to realize that everyone sees them as outsiders.
Thomas Wolfe famously said, "you can't go home again." Especially when it was never your home to begin with.
It's tough because often adoptees and the children of immigrants are hybrids. I had a friend who volunteered with a group that worked with Korean adoptees, teaching them a little Korean and providing classes on culture and so forth. When they took them out for a meal at Korean restaurant a bunch of the young kids burst into tears when they were able to eat Korean food for the first time in years--and with kids that young how much could they remember anyway?
Although I guess it could have been that they were bemoaning their fate, condemned to eat bland potato salad in the homes of their adopted parents.
I realize this is just a matter of personal preference, but I just can't eat potato salad. I like potatoes and I'm not against mayonnaise. I'm a big, big fan of almost every unhealthy food you can name. But for some reason, I just can't do potato salad. Or egg salad.
Adoptive parents have been strongly encouraged to give their kids as much of their birth culture as possible. Celebrating Chinese New Year and attending language classes. I did some of that, but I also worked with immigrant families whose kids never learned their parents language, so I decided gymnastics, soccer and music were a better choice for our time.
I was also a bit turned off by the mythical China we were encouraged to show our kids. I'm definitely not anti-China, not even now when it's becoming popular to be so. But what they were selling was a fairy tale, it lacked the complexity that is real life. I believe in honesty.
There was also a lot of dealing with grief over their loss of culture. As an infant? Really? Fears of abandonment, dealing with institutionalization and no one smiling into your new born face thinking you're the most precious thing on earth...learning to be loved when you're a year old...or having gone through four "families" in a year. Those were real issues. Maybe for some culture becomes an issue later, but not as a child unless you as the parents make it one.
My kids are part of a large supportive family. No apologies on culture.
I've always guessed this phenomenon stems at least partly from the American suburbs being a cultural wasteland. Among white people, I'd see kids who grew up in a suburban subdivision with parents who worked for an insurance company lean hard into hunting, fishing and being a country boy. I've seen white kids from the same background lean into "weeb" culture, Black culture, a specific ethnicity (Italian, Irish, Polish, Jewish, etc.) that may or may not show up if they took 23 and Me. Hell I've seen kids learn elvish and base their identity around that. I think there is an innate human need to be part of a culture, and the American suburbs have no culture, so it's inevitable kids of all races in the suburbs will look into their roots to find culture. It's definitely more complicated for non-white kids, but I've seen non-white kids from the suburbs make a similar transformation, and embrace their ethnic roots when they go to college, seemingly searching for some sort of culture. I plan to raise my kids in a city, and while they may have a smaller house and "worse schools" than I did, I hope they're less bored than I was, and exposed to more art and culture. A lot of American cities are sort of culturally dead too, but I still think they're better than a lot of suburbs, which can be really, really sterile.
This is George Carlin-tier "observation" that misses the obvious point: if the suburbs are themselves without culture, but the people of the suburbs lean hard into subcultures, then why isn't the culture of the suburb described as "rich in subcultures"?
If you go to some stereotypical Chinatown and everyone dresses the same and talks the same and listens to the same music you'd doubtless clutch your heart and sigh about how dreamily cultural it is. A certain type of person, meanwhile, if confronted with a very uniform suburb that had a set of shared interests (e.g. church attendance, grilling, watching hockey, taking kids to youth sports, local politics, charitable endeavor) would pillory it as being monocultural, or even acultural. So the suburbs are in a double bind: they do things indicative of suburbia and they are decried as being bereft of culture. They don't do those things, but instead permit people the space and creativity to indulge in all kinds of cultures, and then they're bereft of culture.
In fact suburbs are awesome, which is why people from all over the world would crawl over broken glass to live in them.
First, I absolutely agree that it's myopia not to recognize that the suburbs look quintessentially American to foreigners. Try living abroad sometime in a suburb in another country to see what I mean.
But I can't help but feel that there's a paradox to "Americaness" in that it's simultaneously high value and low value. High value is that living here confers a significant amount of wealth, prestige and comfort. But it's simultaneously low value because assimilating is pretty trivial (which is actually a great strength!). A club with low barriers to entry, which is not very exclusive and where anyone can get in, is often looked down upon.
Driving around in the big urban areas in Mexico and even Central American countries is always instructive to see how the middle and upper classes have basically reinvented suburbia, complete with gated communities and golf courses. (Someone ought to tell them about all the culture they're missing out on by not living in a two-room apartment next to a freeway with chickens squawking in the courtyard.)
Yeah, to be American is fairly worthless as an identity. The actual ethnic Americans aren't allowed to recognize or organize as such, and at high levels of society you're actively penalized for trying to adhere to some kind of retrograde, flag-waving ideal of patriotism. So there's nothing exclusive there, and the easily-achieved parts are seen as a bit gauche and prole. Inasmuch as there's an American creed that can be adopted and that operates as a status signifier, it's probably a hawkish foreign policy and a cultural universalism - a Pride flag in every emirate.
"Yeah, to be American is fairly worthless as an identity."
Precisely what I meant to say.
Plus even the white population in this country is stunningly diverse. Look at honor cultures in the South versus Cali surfer culture versus rural cowboys and ranchers in Texas/Arizona/etc. That level of diversity makes deriving an identity as a white American difficult I think.
Being "American" is as useless as being "European". Being from Maine, or Texas, or California, or Michigan is much more useful, and that's how I describe myself when asked. The next question is "Oh, where is that?", instead of "ugh, phhhffc, Americans", and the conversation is much better than it would have been otherwise. Because where I come from *does* have a unique culture that is not bland white bread America, and I think many if not most Americans could say the same thing if they thought about it.
`Yeah, to be American is fairly worthless as an identity.'
It's always seemed to matter to people when I travel internationally (including Canada and Mexico). And there's a long history of Americans being considered unique/having a distinct identity; e.g., de Tocqueville or Trollope (his mother).
I believe his point was that lived culture as experienced across most of human history is about togetherness and rootedness with a cohort of people, usually but not universally within your local community. Modernity kind of robs you from that, so you tend to feel alienated from your neighbors rather than a part of something larger than yourself. So young people come of age and try desperately to fumble around for the sense of community lacking in their upbringing.
That's not a property of the suburbs, at least not uniquely. It is, as you say, a product of modernity. Living in "the city", if you're this guy, just means you're alienated only with worse grocery stores.
Yeah, I'm not sure the dig against the suburbs was needed. I mean, I grew up in the suburbs, hated it, moved to a city and love it, and am raising two kids in the city. No regrets regarding that.
But now my daughter is 13, and she assuredly doesn't like where we live. I don't think she'll necessarily be a "suburb person" when she grows up, but I can tell she finds our city too small and pedestrian, and is convinced there are bigger/better things out there to explore when she's ready for college.
Ultimately, I think if you're the kind of person who is unhappy in your teen years for whatever reason (whether home environment, or more your peer group, as I was) you will come to associate where you grew up with bad memories, and want to have something as different as possible when you are an adult. That doesn't mean where you grew up was inherently worse, just that it's worse for you.
I think this was less of a problem in pre-modern days because most people had much healthier social relationships/peer groups overall (lifetime friends in whatever small town they grew up in, etc.) which means that sense of alienation would be absent, making it more likely they'd be okay with staying put. Though of course people always migrated into the bigger cities for more opportunities - it's just that before modern sanitation, they tended to die off rather quickly.
Agreed 100% but the flip side is that those who for whatever reason didn't fit the mold would have found the 'embedded life' to be suffocating. Such people, as well as economic migrants, feel the pull of the metropolis more than those who had a healthy sense of belonging in their community. There's always pluses and minuses.
"If you go to some stereotypical Chinatown and everyone dresses the same and talks the same and listens to the same music you'd doubtless clutch your heart and sigh about how dreamily cultural it is."
I will concede I painted with too broad a brush on calling every suburb a cultural wasteland, when I was trying to critique at a specific upper-class/PMC cohort.
I would define culture as a group that you feel tied to in deep and meaningful ways cemented by rituals. Membership in the PMC cohort is mediated by education and earnings, which I think can feel both insecure and hollow. This is arguably an efficient way to organize society, but I believe people, or at least a good segment of people, crave in our animal brains rituals that bind us to a group. I'm not an expert on evolutionary psychology, but from what I understand we evolved as a tribal animal and still have a lot of those instincts.
It is true that suburbs allow people to choose their own subculture. But I think this often tends to be consumer-based and doesn't demand a lot of participants. The subcultures that seem to really bind people - minority identities, strict religions, groups like the military and police - tie people together based on immutable characteristics or serious personal sacrifice.
To bring it back to the original topic, I think this explains people who have membership by inheritance in the PMC seeking out cultural identities that better scratch the cultural itch.
A group that doesn't discriminate isn't a group; it's a blob. It's fair to say that PMC-membership is based on a pretty brutal and economic set of statuses - income, ZIP code, maybe even home size, definitely where one's kids are educated. But this doesn't do the actual formation of a culture any harm at all. "Coming Apart" by Charles Murray demonstrates this perfectly. He takes two hypothetical White neighborhoods in the US. The first is Belmont, which is the PMC neighborhood we're describing here. The second is Fishtown, which is non-college, lower income - and it's a given that Fishtown has a higher population density, by the way. It is Belmont and not Fishtown that has all the indicators of a thriving civic life: community involvement, trust between neighbors, the stuff you'd describe as ritual. Fishtown has none of these. In other words, there's nothing about the suburban environment nor the PMC requirements that debase its culture; if anything it's the exact opposite.
I'm not saying you're wrong about the immutable identities/personal sacrifice groups. War veterans, for example, often feel that they can only really talk to those who've seen what they've seen and done what they've done. But this isn't a slam dunk either. Minority identity is a tricky one: Blacks identify very strongly as Black in the US even in areas where they are the vast majority, whereas Whites only seem to coalesce into groups when they're in prison - and that occurs even where they're a majority of the prison population. So it's not wrong, there's just more to it.
Very fair point that the PMC are looking for something that they might lack, in that they might not feel at home in "regular" PMC culture. I'd further add, though, that there is only an upside and no downside in the US to adopting a non-White ethnic identity, with the sole exception of elite college admittance for Asians.
It's a good comment, but I'd push back is on what I'd describe as ritual. I subscribe to the Durkheim definition, and think that ritual has to be a bit irrational and exist outside instrumental daily life. The people of Belmont clean up their litter, say hi to each other in the morning, and volunteer for the PTA, but I think these behaviors are too rational and instrumentally useful to count as ritual. I think whether it's supernatural religious beliefs tying religious people together, counterproductive hazing tying the military together, insane beliefs tying extreme political tribes, being in smelly cramped shows and getting weird tattoos tying punks, even getting stupidly drunk with family at a wake or wedding, there's a binding force in a shared irrationality. I used the term suburbs, perhaps inappropriately, as a mindset that society should be rationally designed and laid out for comfort and convenience. This is a not a bad goal, but I think it crashes against the irrationality of human nature in interesting ways.
The suburbs are boring and don't have culture? I mean, maybe not things you like to do, but I find a lot of value in knowing your neighbors, I like having barbecues, I like ranging the outdoors in a somewhat more natural setting than one finds in urban settings.... I'm not saying it's better than cities or rural areas, but it is distinct and each 'burb has its own culture depending on what the people in that area tend to enjoy.
I will concede I painted with too broad a brush on calling every suburb a cultural wasteland, when I was trying to critique at a specific upper-class/PMC cohort. I try to better flesh out my thoughts above.
The American suburbs are not a cultural wasteland! Take a giant step back and look at it with fresh eyes. Suburban country club Caddyshack culture is maybe a civilizational peak.
I will concede I painted with too broad a brush on calling every suburb a cultural wasteland, when I was trying to critique at a specific upper-class/PMC cohort. I try to better flesh out my thoughts above.
I grew up in a Jewish family in an area of the country with a lot of Irish heritage. Most of my friends in high school were very into their “Irishness”, despite being several generations removed from Ireland. I always thought this was kind of, I dunno, cringey? I feel similarly about my family hanging on to Jewish roots, without a religious belief beneath them.
Neither of these groups feel “alienated” from mainstream US culture. I think it’s more about feeling distinct from the mainstream (or less charitably, “interesting” or “special”.)
My guess is that for people with more visible minority heritage (like Asian Americans), it’s partly alienation and partly seeking this distinction. Both feelings tend to be more pronounced with young people.
Nice post...resonates with me as I've had many Asian American friends with similar experiences going back to high school and college. I met my now-wife (a children of Indian immigrants that came in the 70's) in college and watched her go through this, although she has always accepted not speaking an Indian language fluently and never felt particularly at home in India. For awhile she was learning formal Hindi but relatives in India would make fun of her for talking like a schoolteacher.
It has been wild to see how our mixed children deal with it. They have grown up much more around their Indian-American relatives. One identifies as white and the other as Indian-American, and they even argue about it. Most people in school and our community assume they are Latino until they know them. Lots of interesting conversations...they of course reserve the right to make fun of either of their parents along racialized lines when it suits their needs!
As something of an aside but not entirely, I read that in the last few decades, Hispanic populations in Texas are increasing rapidly relative to the overall population. Other states probably are undergoing a comparable demographic shift.
A certain type screams "Muh Great Replacement ZOMG!" but there is a much simpler answer. In 1973, there was no status boost in identifying as Hispanic. If anything it was the opposite. In 2023, there are definite advantages to identifying as Hispanic.
At least all cats have a tabby gene.
Plus projections where whites become a minority rely on Apartheid style one drop rules when defining race. Anybody who's half white gets classified as a minority even when in reality about half of those individuals classify themselves as white.
There's a comedian from San Francisco named Al Madrigal who is half Mexican and married a lady who's half Korean. "What do you get," he asks, "when you create a baby that is a quarter Mexican, a quarter Korean, a quarter Sicilian and a quarter Greek? A white person."
The exception is for Native Americans. For reasons I don't fully understand, the "blood quantum" rule applies there.
Tribal status I'm guess, which still has legal benefits.
The incredibly Republican Congressional and Senatorial representation from Oklahoma is heavily Native American. As is the governor. I think they're pretty assimilated.
Charles Curtis, who served as Vice President of the United States, spoke Kansa before he spoke English.
Wow. I have a PHD in U.S. history, and I never knew that.
ETA: by "I never knew that," I don't mean only the part about speaking Kansa, but the part about him being Native American. (I also didn't know the name of Hoover's VP....I don't know the names of most of the VP's.)
I didn't either until Harris and Biden were elected. There were a spate of articles about Curtis at that point because of comparisons to Harris.
Kind of makes you wonder why, in an era devoted to tokenism, Curtis isn't more prominent.
This is basically the thesis of Eric Kaufmann's book Whiteshift, where he talks about how the white population in America will not decline, but rather absorb more groups to maintain a majority. It happened with Irish and Italians and it will happen with light-skinned Latinos and Asians.
Yeah, I think it makes sense on a number of levels. There are a ton of whites in the United States so it makes sense that most of the mixed race marriages here involve at least one white person. Then the children of those unions are more likely to themselves marry a white person and so on.
But in addition there is an argument that Asians and Latinos are subject to "whitening" in a manner that blacks are not, for whatever reason.
It does make sense from a historical view. Black Americans had their cultures vaporized via slavery, so they built their own culture, which served as a counterculture to the dominant white one. But when immigrants come over, they usually see the white one as American culture rather than the black one, so they assimilate toward white culture, which is mainstream culture. Black Americans continue to pass down black culture, while other races assimilate toward the mainstream.
wait, you think Asians (as in full Asian) will be considered a part of the white population in America..? Light skinned Latino/as I can imagine for sure. As the commenter below says, mixed race Asians, perhaps.
After talking about America's changing demographics for decades, and rubbing their hands together about how it would inevitably give them dominant status, the Democrats have now decided that noticing those changing demographics involves buying into a "white nationalist conspiracy theory". Meanwhile two of the three most populous states -- Texas and California -- are now white minority.
And Texas is increasingly looking like it will be permanently Republican.
“the urge of immigrant parents to push their children to assimilate is entirely understandable, and so is the desire of those children to reconnect with their heritage” - I think the opposite way round is common too (if anything, I think it’s more common, and it’s only a minority of second-generation immigrants undergo an awakening in college that makes them identify more than they used to with their parents’ culture, but I don’t have any stats on this). Thinking about my second-generation immigrant friends who I have had conversations about this stuff with, most of them grew up wanting to be more American while their parents were alarmed at how Americanized they had become.
This is because being FOB is low status when you actually are FOB, while proclaiming oneself to be the Right Kind Of Immigrant can be high-status in certain situations on campus.
Most people are not immune from status considerations but status considerations are rarely the whole picture. From what I saw, natural teenage rebelliousness can push a kid into further embracing assimilation, but when they mature they reconnect with that part of their identity somewhat. Still, I’d say that if it were up to the parents their kids would have ended up slightly less Americanized. A lot of this stemmed from American parents being less strict about homework, socialization, dating, etc.
Natural teenage rebelliousness is itself a manifestation of status: "I'm not a kid anymore" is the most purely status-driven statement it's possible to make. I am not of class X, I am of class Y, therefore I deserve the things appertaining to class Y. That's a status distinction, not a metaphysical one.
Feral Finster is right: the higher up the socioeconomic ladder you go, the more your 'exoticism' is prized and the more Americanism is scorned. This is true to the point of inversion if you work at the tire shop or the call center.
I'm not sure that teenage rebelliousness is the sort of thing we mean when we speak about "status" issues. You can use the term that way, but it dilutes the import of it when you do. Virtually every social act can be interpreted as a status issue (well, maybe I'm overstating, but I think you can see the point).
I think Hellbender makes a good point. You can make the case, based on examples, that the "immigrant experience" is much the opposite of the portrait sketched by Freddie. I don't think that undermines the portrait; it just means we should be wary of extending it into a stereotype or flattening the very diverse ways in which individuals may reach outcomes that appear to be the same.
How does taking the most archetypal aspect of status possible - one's position as a person of majority within the family and society at large - dilute it?
I don't really agree with calling adulthood the most archetypal status possible (you might go with parent/child or male/female or older/young-sibling), but more basically the dilution I'm talking about is because when we use "status" in talking about society we usually use it to refer to groups and hierarchies outside the family. Certainly, that's an essential element of Freddie's post.
Hellbender was using the term to refer to gaining status in the world outside the family (after all, learning the mother county's language is not likely to raise one's status within an assimilationist family). I think your challenge blurs the line between family and society in a way that doesn't really help throw light on the issues Freddie raises.
Status considerations and natural teenage rebelliousness are closely linked. For the second generation, teenage rebellioness is often fueled by parental resentment over being raised with cultural signifiers that are deemed low class by their peers (e.g. the classic example of the Asian kid who gets mocked for bringing "weird" food to school and begins to resent their parents for not giving them "normal" lunches)
That example is solely about belonging, I agree, but “I want as much freedom as my friends have to date and socialize on school nights” is different.
I think what Freddie describes is increasingly common among the well-educated; becoming "more American" is not associated with status (in fact, is associated quite negatively with status) among that class. Everyone now clamors to show how they are different than your run of the mill American.
What's ironic is that immigrants who have failed to assimilate culturally (by being brusque or pushy for example) are penalized for their foreign qualities in these kinds of professional settings. What people really want is surface diversity but behavioral conformity.
An old Cuban lady blatantly cut me in line at a Hialeah ATM once and used the no hablo excuse when she knew what she was doing wasn't cool. We don't have to tolerate that kind of shit, I certainly didn't, it became a battle of wills that I won...We should send her ass back if she weren't most likely dead - this was in '04, I think. But in the immortal words of Walter Sobchak, "this is not Nam, Smokey! There are rules!"
Mark it 8.
"For one thing, I’m opposed to patriotism in principle, for citizens of any country."
Is this different from "I'm opposed to any special love and loyalty towards one's own biological family, for any member of any family"?
Yes, for you see, one is a country, and another is a family.
I do get that, but are there no correspondences? It seems to me that any argument that you can make against patriotism on account of the distortions in thought, feeling, and action that can (but do not have to) happen because of it, you could also make against family - and some have made those arguments.
The way I'd put this is that both "family" and "country" are ways to privilege certain people in your life above others. Should I weight my brother's needs above this internet commenter? What about a fellow American vs. a Bulgarian? What about a fellow human vs. a dolphin?
If I try to think entirely morally, shedding my darwinian programming, I'm not sure I could make an argument for privileging any of these groups over the others. Maybe from a utilitarian point of view I could make the argument, but it's not obvious?
Which is all to say, we all have groups we privilege over others. Patriotism is one way to do that that's no more obviously wrong than others like "family."
Utilitarianism cannot tell you what is right until you give it some base values to start from. I'm sure there's a utilitarian argument in favor of nationalism, and I'm sure there's one in favor of internationalism, and both are equally valid rationally. Depends on where your values start.
Seems a bit outside the point of my comment either way, but I think utilitarianism is usually assumed to be "the greatest happiness/well-being for the greatest number", no?
Sorry, I was a bit obscure -- probably a symptom of my dislike for utilitarianism. I think we privilege the groups that are meaningful to us because they are meaningful to us. There's no rational way to deterministically tell if we *should* do that -- that's entirely a function of priors. I'm disagreeing that we can put aside our Darwinian programming: the core of all morality is feeling, and those feelings, though certainly not random, do not originate from rationality. Ethical systems (like utilitarianism) are simply a means to help us better understand and develop our moral feelings. They help us understand how to implement what we feel is moral.
Fine, but what if you and I have different things that make us happy?
That question, and utility monsters, are why utilitarianism isn't much good in practice.
You're arguing patriotism with an internationalist. I don't mean that as a pejorative, but you may as well be arguing bicycle brand loyalty with a fish ... as in 'an internationalist needs patriotism like a fish needs a bicycle.'
What you're describing would be true for ethnostates. Lesotho, for example, is basically all Basotho people, and it's pretty small, so the nation can be viewed as an an extended family. That's per its original etymology, nacio-: pertaining to birth. In a multi-ethnic empire like the US this makes very little sense, particularly considering that the American people themselves are discouraged in the public square from identifying them separately to those of immigrant stock.
But even within ethnostates there is tension. Germany has explicitly decided - or at least its elites have explicitly decided - to abandon ius sanguinis in favor of multiethnicity. Lesotho won't follow, but others might.
Even if you wanted to go with the country/family analogy, I don't think it works, because patriotism is often described as pride and familial pride is far from universal. Plenty of people have estranged feelings regarding their families of course.
But even beyond that, while I am proud of the things my children accomplish, I don't feel any sense pride in the things my ancestors did. I have no personal relationship with those accomplishments after all.
If a closer family relative does something which I am proud of (like say a cousin staying sober, or finishing a PHD program) I'll feel proud for them, but I recognize that this is primarily a facet of our lifetime relationship with one another - being friends, not being part of some arbitrarily defined lineage.
I think people sometime use it to mean some kind of loyalty to your countrymen - is there a word for that doesn't also indicate pride? Maybe nationalism, but that's typically just used as "patriotism, but bad."
I think that was was a bit of a cop out response. What about culture? Do you not value culture? Patriotism is a reaction to value and protect the ubiquitous culture of the place.
Maybe you think all cultures are equal and thus we don’t need to preserve any. For example fuck all American Indian cultures. Fuck Mexican culture. Fuck black culture. Fuck American culture. Let’s just blend everything into a common globalist culture that Klaus Schwab designs.
This entire piece is about culture and assimilation. Name a country that works well without a binding culture. Even companies develop a culture. Assimilation is the key to success. Multiculturalism has proven a disastrous idea. A room of cultural snowflakes will not be very productive.
Europeans are confused with the flying of American flags and the tears from people singing the national anthem. They don’t do those displays in their home country. Then you remind them that theirs are 2000 year old cultures, while the US is 200 years old. They can take it for granted that theirs is established and not at risk of being vaporized by radicals.
I have told this story umpteen times here. My local Koreatown has a creation myth. Way back when the area used to be heavily African American and when the first Korean immigrants arrived there was a lot of racial tension. It was resolved with a massive brawl where a hundred Koreans armed themselves with clubs, knives, bats, etc. and battled it out with the locals in a parking lot. The Koreans emerged victorious and the area underwent a rapid demographic shift.
Human beings are naturally hard wired for competition, if not outright conflict, I think. In a genuinely diverse country you need some kind of unifying principle (the flag, the king, the American dream, whatever) to overcome the human tendency for tribalism. Is it really surprising that in an era that emphasizes tribe over national identity that crime is on the rise?
Agree. Tribalism is a evolutionary and biological reality of the human condition because it better support surviving and thriving of the individual. However, not all tribal cultures are created equal.
The US is the only country on the planet formed based on an idea. That idea sprouted into a tribal culture. Yes, it was modified by immigrants, but it held its foundation. A binding culture is the foundation that allows for creativity and difference. The radicals attempting to destroy the foundation are basically destroying the country... wrecking the idea... and eliminating what has been the greatest country on God's green earth. Those looking at the glass half empty and claiming there is nothing worth protecting need to be shipped to new places where they can test out that theory.
The US was founded by a specific people and for a specific people, irrespestive of the ideal they espoused. It's literally in the first sentence of the constitution: the nation was founded to secure the blessings of liberty "for ourselves and our posterity." Not for anyone who adopted the creed. It's a psyop to pretend that the US was an idea and not a people. The American people were as restrictive and jealous of their ethnic identity as anyone until the early 20th century, and Americanness remained largely a property of Whiteness until post-1965.
Even the Declaration of Independence, in its first sentence, defines the people seeking independence as "a people" and not as an idea.
Rooftop Koreans. My dad was a pre-rooftop Korean. He owned a liquor store in Baltimore for awhile when I was a kid and was always strapped. The Korean guy who took over it was shot and killed.
I belong to a private shooting range and there is a sizable Asian contingent there which is 90% Korean. I shoot with the same bunch of guys on the weekends and it's not uncommon for the group to head out to the local pocha afterwards for beer and stir fried intestine.
That’s interesting and also not at all surprising at the same time. My dad is too old and weathered with a heart condition these days to stomach any of that :) He could drink with the Russians back in the day. Old school Korean men were/are a contentious bunch, to put it lightly.
I grew up in a small European country. There is no shortage of flag waving. You see as many national flags in an average town there as you do in the US. Doubtless this varies by country but generally antipathy to the flag and patriotism is a function of class and status and not of nationality; that is, the kind of Europeans who feign confusion about American flag-waving are the kind who look down on it as tacky at home.
Would not agree re: Europeans are confused by American patriotism. Just a minor detail in your response but after living in the UK for almost 20 years, I can assure you patriotism is alive and well. Though counting the UK as European is a bit controversial, I suppose. Also maybe this is just in a football (soccer)/sports context, but that’s a great space to observe how patriotism shows it’s face over there. Flags and tears and fights oh my.
Correct.
Even places that Americans don't think of as particularly nationalistic, like Denmark, are coated in flags.
You’re right! So funny. I distinctly remember thinking about that when I was traveling back and forth from England to Denmark (long, uninteresting story). Copenhagen might be my favourite city, actually.
Yes, wonderful place.
Even in Canada that oak leaf flag is everywhere.
Only to the myopic, though.
"Name a country that works well without a binding culture."
Canada?
Yeah right. The place is a tinderbox of tribal conflict.
*laughs in Quebecoix"
Patriotism is a difficult concept for a mobile people. Talk with people who have lived for hundreds to thousands of years in the same land, and they're horrified with the idea of immigration.
This really came home to me, when touring The Thistle Chapel in Edinburgh.
Yes. I don't feel anywhere as strongly about my country and culture as I do about my immediate family. I see good and bad in people and cultures everywhere. There are definitely things to be proud of as an American, but it isn't the same as how I feel about my family. Biology doesn't come into it for me. Most of my family isn't biological.
"As in all things, I think the only righteous urge in this conversation is to complicate where others would simplify."
I think that's why a lot of us come here.
It's certainly one of the biggest reasons I'm here. It's sad that writing about the complexities of life from a left perspective seems so hard to find.
Writing about the complexities of life is hard to find in any politically salient space. I don't blame the left for this. Politics is inherently flattening.
Honestly, if it happens to everyone maybe it’s better to figure out how to get over it rather than working to make your racial heritage your defining characteristic.
That doesn’t mean you don’t get to claim an ethnic origin (if you’re so inclined). But I think that in America it makes more sense to try and claim your place *here* rather than demanding special privileges because your parents undertook a journey (immigration) that is ultimately the defining myth of this country.
And I say this as a first generation American with a refugee father.
Is it an either / or question ? People aren't deciding between a) making their ethnicity their "defining characteristic", and b) getting over it. There's a whole middle ground in there that's worth exploring.
Exactly. Those kinds of binary choices irritate me so much. Experience grants you the ability to think with a little more complexity and, hopefully, with extra empathy.
Are you moving towards assimilation or away from it? If you’re moving away you’re demanding your heritage takes precedence over your current environment.
Certainly you can (and should) integrate your ethnicity, experience, etc. into your life. But that demands fluidity.
You’re not asking me directly but as an Asian American myself I can certainly say that it’s not a matter or moving towards or away from but rather a constant push and pull dependent on situations I’m in. For example, I lost my mother relatively recently and so I’ve been more engaged with her culture, long for it, etc. Other times I’m perfectly American and hardly think about my race until someone says something shitty or asks me the classic “ok but where are you really from” question. It’s constant tension.
I think you would be surprised by the number of people for whom this is an internal struggle they work through on their own, and not something that results in demands being made of the people around them.
I grew up in Vancouver, in a very multicultural neighbourhood. The only kid we never got to interact with was the daughter of Chinese immigrants. She was always indoors, practicing the piano. Her parents never allowed her to play with the rest of us. I don’t know why. This isn’t meant to be a profound observation; it’s just a thing this piece makes me remember.
Feeling rooted somewhere feels like a common human condition. At least it is for me. I wasn't born in US and often find myself thinking about my identity being linked to the culture and place I was from. But I know I wouldn't fit in there either. I guess the best thing is to find your "tribe" or family wherever you happen to be.
I like my territory, I chose it myself, I like knowing where mice and songbirds are best found, where my friends are likely to be and the best spots for hiding, napping.
But I must live by my wits, knowing that my life is largely determined by forces that even a cat cannot control.
This is an old tale. My grandmother emigrated from Italy in the 1920's and refused to teach her children Italian in order that they would assimilate better. They in turn were resentful that they didn't learn Italian or more about Italy. Many people I've talked to over the years have told similar stories, regardless of ancestry.
Likewise, my great grandmother, from a Mexican family, when those pesky Americans took California away from Mexico. She refused to teach her children Spanish. At a family reunion, I met some of the family who stayed in the Mexican culture in American California ... a perpetual underclass.
My Italian family also dropped the language fairly quickly.
Learning a second language is so easy for toddlers, and so hard for adults, that it’s maddening to find out you *could* have been effortlessly bilingual. Whatever the language.
I’m just waiting for my kid to realize my spouse refused to pass on her native language. 😬
Your beautiful family! ♥️
❤️❤️❤️
Andrea Long Chu wrote an interesting essay about a similar topic, how mixed Asian kids (usually half white, half Asian) grow up and struggle to connect with their culture. The essay discusses several fiction books on this topic. https://www.vulture.com/2022/09/the-mixed-asian-metaphor.html
She concludes: “And if there is one conclusion to be reached from the mixed Asian experience, it is this: People want race. They want race to win them something, to tell them everything they were never told; they want friendship from it, or sex, or even love; and sometimes, they just want to be something or to have something to be.”
It reminded me of how some white college students are envious of their POC peers who can join associations for their race or ethnicity, groups that bond and celebrate their heritage. While being white, for good reason, means you don’t get to do that.
I can't help but be saddened by that conclusion. Because that desire for "race" to give such things sets up a terrible dynamic that's corrosive to building a vibrant, functioning (for all) multiethnic democracy. There are solid arguments for whites not getting affinity groups of their own, much of which I agree with, but it makes me queasy to sell the majority (if shrinking) that they can only see their "whiteness" as a sin, as something that allows every other racial category to hate them because if racism is defined by power, hating white people for being white is completely acceptable. Is that idea understandable? 100%. But it also sets a terrible precedent for living, working and thriving together if we don't share the same color, or other birth trait. Like much of identity politics, I get it, but I wish we went one more step to talk about how we share this country and this world.
Is that a generational shift though? I can't help but feel that earlier generations, who grew up with the "melting pot" drilled into their brain through constant repetition, might have a different perspective.
I'm not that old, but what made me a liberal as a teenager was the idea of taking race, gender, sexual orientation off the table as a metric to judge anyone. It's been shocking to see those metrics re-introduced as a progressive ideal, rather than something fundamentally regressive. "I just feel more comfortable with people who look like me," will always sound misguided to me, even if I understand why.
In a country like Korea or Japan (not China) a race war would be a sad affair. The dominant ethnicity there enjoys an overwhelming numerical superiority and any minorities would be quickly crushed.
In a genuinely diverse country like the US on the other hand the outcome would be horrific chaos. I have to wonder if the old intelligentsia, who stressed assimilation and cultural unity, were wise to the ways of the world in a manner that the current generation is not.
America is basically the experiment in whether a multiethnic pluralist republic can survive the forces that would tear any such country apart in the internet era; considering we have lots of nukes, a massive standing army, and the fact that I live here I consider it imperative that pluralism work. Xi is wrong to "reeducate" the Uighurs in slave labor camps; he is not wrong on the importance of e pluribus unum...
The world is full of white people celebrating there heritage. We have every right to do so. No apologies will be forth coming. Ever.
"People want race. They want race to win them something, to tell them everything they were never told; they want friendship from it, or sex, or even love; and sometimes, they just want to be something or to have something to be.”
I have none of these wants. Humans are weird.
It's extraordinarily difficult to actually see past your own culture. Even when we try to turn away from our own culture, we usually end up embracing a critique that is itself well-established in the culture. Actual other cultures don't critique our culture on its own terms, they simply fail to understand it at all and critique the bastardized version that exists in their head (if they care about us at all).
A great example of this are atheists that embrace all the standard Puritan arguments against traditional religious expression, not realizing they're just retreading the same ground that was walked 400 years ago. Or decolonizers who recreate the liberal/romantic nationalist tradition from first principles. Even as they reject the outputs of the tradition they think they hate, they can't help but follow the same patterns of thought and the value systems that sit underneath it all.
A good tell for assimilation is the first name of the children of immigrants. In the United States, it seems most common to stick with a rather narrow range of English first-names, no matter how non-English the last name. Freddie deBoer, case in point. Lars deBoer just wouldn't be the name of a guy from Connecticut. Even Irish and Scottish first-names are rarely observed (always Patrick, never Padraig), and seem to be unpronounceable when they appear. This trend isn't as common in other countries. For example, Mohammad is a popular name in England. Somehthing about the culture of the US, its vast and inward provincialism, demands assimilation and uniformity.
Isn't Freddie actually Fredrik though?
Frodrik
Frudrak.
I think it's mostly contextual. It was all fun and games making Jewish jokes to my brethren in New York before college. We get the jokes. Once in college in the Midwest and finding much of their knowledge of Jews came from Cartman I was less inclined to make those jokes, now that I was an outsider. At first what I was once forgiving of (such as first week of college when over dinner someone told me he was surprised I chewed with my mouth closed because he thought all Jews chewed with it open) briefly morphed into a Jewish "nationalist" phase where I strongly identified with an identity I had taken for granted before (lasted about a year before I got over it). But again, all these inclinations were determined by exterior forces. Feeling left out and alienated is a very strong and hurtful feeling. How one reacts to it is unpredictable.
Indeed. Growing up in a suburb that was so Jewish our public schools were closed for the High Holidays, and with a close friends group that was entirely Jewish until high school (which was roughly 75 percent Jewish in composition), I never felt "different" except, and only sometimes, when my lacrosse team played other teams across the county. The same went for living in New York City. This changed when I moved to a small city in the South about ten years ago (where I remain). The vast majority of interactions I've had down here regarding my Jewishness have come from a place of curiosity (or maybe ignorance, but not malicious ignorance), but they still underscore how I'm a minority, a feeling I never ever internalized growing up. In some ways I think it has motivated me to get more involved in the small local community, though this could also be driven by having small kids and wanting them to be in touch with this aspect of their identity that can't be taken for granted, as it was for me. I don't think this tension—which, to be fair, is not very high—will ever be fully resolvable. At this point (just turned 40) I think I'm okay with that.
`I never felt "different" except, and only sometimes, when my lacrosse team'
Where I'm from anyone who plays lacrosse is inherently suspect, so this sounds right. =)
Fair enough!
Attended a Midwest university (cow school) and until the middle 2000s we would not infrequently call other people jew, jew-ey, jewish, etc. if they were parsimonious, being cheap, or not paying their fair share. I don't recall anyone who actually thought that Jews were in fact cheap, or that these terms were even connected to/related to living Jews. It was just a historical stereotype that was carried down through communities without a noticeable Jewish population. To be sure this practice has died out, even among the rural folk I know.
`he was surprised I chewed with my mouth closed'
Wow. That is a whole other level of ignorance. Must have picked up volume of Singer's that consisted entirely of his stories about shtetel yokels. If anything Jews were generally assumed to be more cosmopolitan and wealthier than non-Jews back then. Gold's `Jews without Money' was a good corrective before the internet.
Parents and children often have different, even competing, interests. In your friend's situation, it sounds like he felt rootless and alienated in America despite it being his birthplace. Being a Gen X or older Millennial Asian American guy would've had its unique set of alienating experiences too, which would explain why he was able to find some comfort—even if imagined—in Asia. His parents would've regarded America differently though, because whatever hardships they'd had in China, they did feel a sense of home, even if they had their issues with it.
It can swing the other way too, with immigrant parents who loved their formative years and youth back home so much that they demand that their kids want the same upbringing. Either way, being the same race or even being in the same family doesn't mean your motivations and interests will be perfectly aligned.
Yeah. I've seen this go both ways: some kids of immigrants want to "rediscover their culture" even though they were born here and have no real connection besides an ethnicity, then they get shocked when they go to Asia and everyone treats them like the foreigner they are.
But other kids did have parents that tried to instill values of the old culture, but they rejected it in favor of American culture. It all varies.
When Japanese factories were humming non-stop in the 1980s and were in need of workers, someone got the idea of convincing Brazilians of Japanese descent to return to the land of their ancestors.
Part of the rationale was that Brazilian-Japanese would *look* Japanese, and Japan is not a culture famously welcoming to outsiders. It was quickly discovered that, while Brazilian-Japanese may *look* Japanese, they *acted* like Brazilians.
Yep. I've seen this with adoptees too. It can be quite brutal when an adoptee from China or Korea tries to "rediscover their lost culture" by going to Asia... only to realize that everyone sees them as outsiders.
Thomas Wolfe famously said, "you can't go home again." Especially when it was never your home to begin with.
I wouldn't know. I have no home.
The road is your home, right?
Not really. I have territory, but "home" is kind of a foreign concept.
Well, that's why you're not called Domesticated Finster.
It's tough because often adoptees and the children of immigrants are hybrids. I had a friend who volunteered with a group that worked with Korean adoptees, teaching them a little Korean and providing classes on culture and so forth. When they took them out for a meal at Korean restaurant a bunch of the young kids burst into tears when they were able to eat Korean food for the first time in years--and with kids that young how much could they remember anyway?
Although I guess it could have been that they were bemoaning their fate, condemned to eat bland potato salad in the homes of their adopted parents.
Condemned to eat slaw...
Healthy and nutritious, if perhaps a little bland. You can't have everything.
`bland potato salad'
If they can't make something that has a base of potatoes and mayonnaise flavorful, it being bland is on them (the kids).
Hey, I like potato salad.
I realize this is just a matter of personal preference, but I just can't eat potato salad. I like potatoes and I'm not against mayonnaise. I'm a big, big fan of almost every unhealthy food you can name. But for some reason, I just can't do potato salad. Or egg salad.
Adoptive parents have been strongly encouraged to give their kids as much of their birth culture as possible. Celebrating Chinese New Year and attending language classes. I did some of that, but I also worked with immigrant families whose kids never learned their parents language, so I decided gymnastics, soccer and music were a better choice for our time.
I was also a bit turned off by the mythical China we were encouraged to show our kids. I'm definitely not anti-China, not even now when it's becoming popular to be so. But what they were selling was a fairy tale, it lacked the complexity that is real life. I believe in honesty.
There was also a lot of dealing with grief over their loss of culture. As an infant? Really? Fears of abandonment, dealing with institutionalization and no one smiling into your new born face thinking you're the most precious thing on earth...learning to be loved when you're a year old...or having gone through four "families" in a year. Those were real issues. Maybe for some culture becomes an issue later, but not as a child unless you as the parents make it one.
My kids are part of a large supportive family. No apologies on culture.
I've always guessed this phenomenon stems at least partly from the American suburbs being a cultural wasteland. Among white people, I'd see kids who grew up in a suburban subdivision with parents who worked for an insurance company lean hard into hunting, fishing and being a country boy. I've seen white kids from the same background lean into "weeb" culture, Black culture, a specific ethnicity (Italian, Irish, Polish, Jewish, etc.) that may or may not show up if they took 23 and Me. Hell I've seen kids learn elvish and base their identity around that. I think there is an innate human need to be part of a culture, and the American suburbs have no culture, so it's inevitable kids of all races in the suburbs will look into their roots to find culture. It's definitely more complicated for non-white kids, but I've seen non-white kids from the suburbs make a similar transformation, and embrace their ethnic roots when they go to college, seemingly searching for some sort of culture. I plan to raise my kids in a city, and while they may have a smaller house and "worse schools" than I did, I hope they're less bored than I was, and exposed to more art and culture. A lot of American cities are sort of culturally dead too, but I still think they're better than a lot of suburbs, which can be really, really sterile.
This is George Carlin-tier "observation" that misses the obvious point: if the suburbs are themselves without culture, but the people of the suburbs lean hard into subcultures, then why isn't the culture of the suburb described as "rich in subcultures"?
If you go to some stereotypical Chinatown and everyone dresses the same and talks the same and listens to the same music you'd doubtless clutch your heart and sigh about how dreamily cultural it is. A certain type of person, meanwhile, if confronted with a very uniform suburb that had a set of shared interests (e.g. church attendance, grilling, watching hockey, taking kids to youth sports, local politics, charitable endeavor) would pillory it as being monocultural, or even acultural. So the suburbs are in a double bind: they do things indicative of suburbia and they are decried as being bereft of culture. They don't do those things, but instead permit people the space and creativity to indulge in all kinds of cultures, and then they're bereft of culture.
In fact suburbs are awesome, which is why people from all over the world would crawl over broken glass to live in them.
First, I absolutely agree that it's myopia not to recognize that the suburbs look quintessentially American to foreigners. Try living abroad sometime in a suburb in another country to see what I mean.
But I can't help but feel that there's a paradox to "Americaness" in that it's simultaneously high value and low value. High value is that living here confers a significant amount of wealth, prestige and comfort. But it's simultaneously low value because assimilating is pretty trivial (which is actually a great strength!). A club with low barriers to entry, which is not very exclusive and where anyone can get in, is often looked down upon.
Driving around in the big urban areas in Mexico and even Central American countries is always instructive to see how the middle and upper classes have basically reinvented suburbia, complete with gated communities and golf courses. (Someone ought to tell them about all the culture they're missing out on by not living in a two-room apartment next to a freeway with chickens squawking in the courtyard.)
Yeah, to be American is fairly worthless as an identity. The actual ethnic Americans aren't allowed to recognize or organize as such, and at high levels of society you're actively penalized for trying to adhere to some kind of retrograde, flag-waving ideal of patriotism. So there's nothing exclusive there, and the easily-achieved parts are seen as a bit gauche and prole. Inasmuch as there's an American creed that can be adopted and that operates as a status signifier, it's probably a hawkish foreign policy and a cultural universalism - a Pride flag in every emirate.
"Yeah, to be American is fairly worthless as an identity."
Precisely what I meant to say.
Plus even the white population in this country is stunningly diverse. Look at honor cultures in the South versus Cali surfer culture versus rural cowboys and ranchers in Texas/Arizona/etc. That level of diversity makes deriving an identity as a white American difficult I think.
Well, that and the fact that it's illegal
Being "American" is as useless as being "European". Being from Maine, or Texas, or California, or Michigan is much more useful, and that's how I describe myself when asked. The next question is "Oh, where is that?", instead of "ugh, phhhffc, Americans", and the conversation is much better than it would have been otherwise. Because where I come from *does* have a unique culture that is not bland white bread America, and I think many if not most Americans could say the same thing if they thought about it.
`Yeah, to be American is fairly worthless as an identity.'
It's always seemed to matter to people when I travel internationally (including Canada and Mexico). And there's a long history of Americans being considered unique/having a distinct identity; e.g., de Tocqueville or Trollope (his mother).
Well, if Paco and Bruce are impressed, I take it all back.
You really should have your own Substack. Your comments are the best (and most accurate) on here.
Thank you! It is something I've considered. We'll see!
I believe his point was that lived culture as experienced across most of human history is about togetherness and rootedness with a cohort of people, usually but not universally within your local community. Modernity kind of robs you from that, so you tend to feel alienated from your neighbors rather than a part of something larger than yourself. So young people come of age and try desperately to fumble around for the sense of community lacking in their upbringing.
That's not a property of the suburbs, at least not uniquely. It is, as you say, a product of modernity. Living in "the city", if you're this guy, just means you're alienated only with worse grocery stores.
Yeah, I'm not sure the dig against the suburbs was needed. I mean, I grew up in the suburbs, hated it, moved to a city and love it, and am raising two kids in the city. No regrets regarding that.
But now my daughter is 13, and she assuredly doesn't like where we live. I don't think she'll necessarily be a "suburb person" when she grows up, but I can tell she finds our city too small and pedestrian, and is convinced there are bigger/better things out there to explore when she's ready for college.
Ultimately, I think if you're the kind of person who is unhappy in your teen years for whatever reason (whether home environment, or more your peer group, as I was) you will come to associate where you grew up with bad memories, and want to have something as different as possible when you are an adult. That doesn't mean where you grew up was inherently worse, just that it's worse for you.
I think this was less of a problem in pre-modern days because most people had much healthier social relationships/peer groups overall (lifetime friends in whatever small town they grew up in, etc.) which means that sense of alienation would be absent, making it more likely they'd be okay with staying put. Though of course people always migrated into the bigger cities for more opportunities - it's just that before modern sanitation, they tended to die off rather quickly.
Agreed 100% but the flip side is that those who for whatever reason didn't fit the mold would have found the 'embedded life' to be suffocating. Such people, as well as economic migrants, feel the pull of the metropolis more than those who had a healthy sense of belonging in their community. There's always pluses and minuses.
"If you go to some stereotypical Chinatown and everyone dresses the same and talks the same and listens to the same music you'd doubtless clutch your heart and sigh about how dreamily cultural it is."
For much of the world, Mickey D is ethnic food.
I will concede I painted with too broad a brush on calling every suburb a cultural wasteland, when I was trying to critique at a specific upper-class/PMC cohort.
I would define culture as a group that you feel tied to in deep and meaningful ways cemented by rituals. Membership in the PMC cohort is mediated by education and earnings, which I think can feel both insecure and hollow. This is arguably an efficient way to organize society, but I believe people, or at least a good segment of people, crave in our animal brains rituals that bind us to a group. I'm not an expert on evolutionary psychology, but from what I understand we evolved as a tribal animal and still have a lot of those instincts.
It is true that suburbs allow people to choose their own subculture. But I think this often tends to be consumer-based and doesn't demand a lot of participants. The subcultures that seem to really bind people - minority identities, strict religions, groups like the military and police - tie people together based on immutable characteristics or serious personal sacrifice.
To bring it back to the original topic, I think this explains people who have membership by inheritance in the PMC seeking out cultural identities that better scratch the cultural itch.
A group that doesn't discriminate isn't a group; it's a blob. It's fair to say that PMC-membership is based on a pretty brutal and economic set of statuses - income, ZIP code, maybe even home size, definitely where one's kids are educated. But this doesn't do the actual formation of a culture any harm at all. "Coming Apart" by Charles Murray demonstrates this perfectly. He takes two hypothetical White neighborhoods in the US. The first is Belmont, which is the PMC neighborhood we're describing here. The second is Fishtown, which is non-college, lower income - and it's a given that Fishtown has a higher population density, by the way. It is Belmont and not Fishtown that has all the indicators of a thriving civic life: community involvement, trust between neighbors, the stuff you'd describe as ritual. Fishtown has none of these. In other words, there's nothing about the suburban environment nor the PMC requirements that debase its culture; if anything it's the exact opposite.
I'm not saying you're wrong about the immutable identities/personal sacrifice groups. War veterans, for example, often feel that they can only really talk to those who've seen what they've seen and done what they've done. But this isn't a slam dunk either. Minority identity is a tricky one: Blacks identify very strongly as Black in the US even in areas where they are the vast majority, whereas Whites only seem to coalesce into groups when they're in prison - and that occurs even where they're a majority of the prison population. So it's not wrong, there's just more to it.
Very fair point that the PMC are looking for something that they might lack, in that they might not feel at home in "regular" PMC culture. I'd further add, though, that there is only an upside and no downside in the US to adopting a non-White ethnic identity, with the sole exception of elite college admittance for Asians.
It's a good comment, but I'd push back is on what I'd describe as ritual. I subscribe to the Durkheim definition, and think that ritual has to be a bit irrational and exist outside instrumental daily life. The people of Belmont clean up their litter, say hi to each other in the morning, and volunteer for the PTA, but I think these behaviors are too rational and instrumentally useful to count as ritual. I think whether it's supernatural religious beliefs tying religious people together, counterproductive hazing tying the military together, insane beliefs tying extreme political tribes, being in smelly cramped shows and getting weird tattoos tying punks, even getting stupidly drunk with family at a wake or wedding, there's a binding force in a shared irrationality. I used the term suburbs, perhaps inappropriately, as a mindset that society should be rationally designed and laid out for comfort and convenience. This is a not a bad goal, but I think it crashes against the irrationality of human nature in interesting ways.
The suburbs are boring and don't have culture? I mean, maybe not things you like to do, but I find a lot of value in knowing your neighbors, I like having barbecues, I like ranging the outdoors in a somewhat more natural setting than one finds in urban settings.... I'm not saying it's better than cities or rural areas, but it is distinct and each 'burb has its own culture depending on what the people in that area tend to enjoy.
I will concede I painted with too broad a brush on calling every suburb a cultural wasteland, when I was trying to critique at a specific upper-class/PMC cohort. I try to better flesh out my thoughts above.
"Weeb"?
Don't know the term? LOL. I recommend Google to get the full story of how it jumped from a comic strip to a forum to a meme, mutating along the way.
Will do, after I catch some lunch.
*inhales deeply*
PREPARE YOURSELF
The American suburbs are not a cultural wasteland! Take a giant step back and look at it with fresh eyes. Suburban country club Caddyshack culture is maybe a civilizational peak.
I will concede I painted with too broad a brush on calling every suburb a cultural wasteland, when I was trying to critique at a specific upper-class/PMC cohort. I try to better flesh out my thoughts above.
I grew up in a Jewish family in an area of the country with a lot of Irish heritage. Most of my friends in high school were very into their “Irishness”, despite being several generations removed from Ireland. I always thought this was kind of, I dunno, cringey? I feel similarly about my family hanging on to Jewish roots, without a religious belief beneath them.
Neither of these groups feel “alienated” from mainstream US culture. I think it’s more about feeling distinct from the mainstream (or less charitably, “interesting” or “special”.)
My guess is that for people with more visible minority heritage (like Asian Americans), it’s partly alienation and partly seeking this distinction. Both feelings tend to be more pronounced with young people.
Nice post...resonates with me as I've had many Asian American friends with similar experiences going back to high school and college. I met my now-wife (a children of Indian immigrants that came in the 70's) in college and watched her go through this, although she has always accepted not speaking an Indian language fluently and never felt particularly at home in India. For awhile she was learning formal Hindi but relatives in India would make fun of her for talking like a schoolteacher.
It has been wild to see how our mixed children deal with it. They have grown up much more around their Indian-American relatives. One identifies as white and the other as Indian-American, and they even argue about it. Most people in school and our community assume they are Latino until they know them. Lots of interesting conversations...they of course reserve the right to make fun of either of their parents along racialized lines when it suits their needs!