Free Your Mind
Assimilation doesn’t mean cultural betrayal
LAST month in Warsaw, President Trump said, “the West will never, ever be broken. Our values will prevail. Our people will thrive. And our civilization will triumph.”
And did that throw the fat into the fire!
The Atlantic’s Peter Beinart detected thinly veiled bigotry. Trump was talking about Christendom, “a particular religious civilization that must protect itself from outsiders.”
Then on CNN, The New York Times’ Charles Blow looked at the debate about culture and saw, inevitably, that it was all about racism. If we’re supposed to assimilate to an American culture, he asked, are you saying that “you need to abandon your ethnicity and become more like, you know, the kind of the white America that I’m [envisioning]?”
Maybe I’ve missed something, but I always thought that culture was something to be enjoyed, not politicized. “We write symphonies,” Trump told the Poles. That’s fair enough, but when Robert Schumann wrote his symphonies and Chopin his études, I don’t think they thought, “Take that, Karl Marx!” It’s like the Catholics (usually converts) who hate the pope because he’s not rightwing on economics.
Like culture, religion isn’t the continuation of politics by other means. Culture is about sharing a transcendent emotional experience. Religion is about feeling really, really guilty (if you happen to be Catholic). It’s not about Medicare Part B. There are “Odes to Joy,” but not to proportional representation.
But let’s give Blow the credit of posing a question that requires an answer. What he asked was whether conservatives were weaponizing culture as an instrument of war against America’s minorities. And the problem is, some alt-right types do just that. But it shouldn’t be like that.
High culture — and low culture, too — is like a manyroomed mansion, at which a Virgil stands before each door, beckoning one in. That’s how W. E. B. DuBois saw it. “I sit with Shakespeare, and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm and arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls.” But when culture is weaponized, a “no admittance” sign is hung before each room, if you’re not from the right culture.
Amongst the idiots on the altleft, there’s a movement to ban what they call cultural appropriation. That’s where a man writes a book in a woman’s voice, or where a white person paints a scene from Native American life. The idea is that only women may write about women, only a member of one ethnic group can portray that group.
It’s about cultural segregation, the same thing the alt-right is saying about culture. We’ve got Shakespeare, and you butt out, W. E. B. DuBois. Here as elsewhere, the nasty fringes in American politics come to resemble each other, “so that I fear they do but bring Extremes to touch, and mean one thing.”
Blow was talking about assimilation, and from Lorraine Hansberry on, that’s been a sensitive topic for AfricanAmericans. Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun,” which the New York Drama Critics’ Circle called the best play of 1959, portrayed assimilation for AfricanAmericans as a betrayal of their own culture and a cynical aban- donment of racial bonds.
A lot of people still feel that way, but with less cause than in legally segregated 1959. And one reason why that’s so, why assimilation should not be seen as a threat or weapon, is because of the way the African-American experience has permeated American culture since then. It always did, of course, but never more so than today.
And that’s the answer to Blow’s question. Assimilation works in both directions. I’d not be too surprised if Blow liked Johnny Cash. And I’m a fan of Diana Ross and the Supremes. (So I’m dating myself with my examples? So what’s your socalled point?)
To go back to my example of the mansion with many rooms, it’s as if we’ve added a bunch of new ones over the years, and each has its attendant beckoning us in. You’ll like it, he says. And you should try it. You might discover that he’s right — you like it. And while it’s too much to say you have a duty to try it, you might think it a matter of politeness to do so.
After all, the world sings our songs and dances to our beat. They can’t be all wrong.