Even after some of us have lived years in Mexico we keep our old prejudices alive and well. Actually as everyone who thinks for a minute is aware, each of us is our own culture, our own mix of background and genetic material and experiences of all sorts. Our thoughts drift through our minds, sometimes as whisps of cloud and colors, without words. Sometimes as streams of mood: resentment, love, joy. Sometimes we compose speeches to our bosses or poems or think about friends. We’re each a distinct part of an enormous human tapestry always in process. So there is no unified Mexican culture, really, or USA culture. There are just threads and ribbons woven together, some of us having more of some of them from one place than others. While jumping from one part of the tapestry across a wide expanse to another, we may be struck by obvious differences, if we move more gradually, we will notice that there are similarities.
Which gets me to cultural relativism. Cultural relativism means not judging other cultures by one’s own. It’s gotten a bad name in recent years, but it really shouldn’t have. In a book called Cultures and Organizations, Software of the Mind which a friend lent me, the author, Geert Hofstede, points out that some cultures have an easier time with being relative than others: that, for instance, cultures that are characterized by a high level of what he calls uncertainty avoidance have a harder time with cultural differences than cultures more comfortable with uncertainty and change. But the world isn’t moving towards one culture: multiculturalism is here to stay even as we grow closer and more crowded on the planet. To survive in this multicultural world, we have to learn to see past our own biases.
A favorite story of mine (I’m not sure favorite is the right word) that shows in a nutshell the power of cultural bias is the following. It takes place in Alton, Illinois, at the edge of southern Illinois, in those years a bastion of racism. When I was working at the state hospital in Alton, many years ago, a bunch of us happened to be looking out a second story window when a group of employees came walking across the lawn from the parking lot. They were a few minutes late. There were about five whites and one black guy. One of the people I was standing with said, look at that, blacks are all like that, they’re always late. He didn’t even see the whites who were with him. He didn't know that he was prejudiced. A lot of learning about other cultures involves learning about oneself and one’s own personal culture.
These days I realize I was lucky. I was brought up in a bicultural family. I didn’t always think I was lucky: I resented it for a lot of my childhood. I was born in 1943 to a Jewish father and a WASP mother…well actually, her mother was Irish Catholic, but she was brought up as an Episcopalian. My father’s parents were Jews who emigrated from Poland in the early part of the twentieth century, my grandfather to avoid fighting in the tsar’s army. He came first to settle before he brought over my grandmother. He was from a city, she was from a shtetl, a rural village. I don’t know if they knew each other before they were married or if it was an arranged marriage. I used to know, but I’ve forgotten. My grandfather then helped his sister, his father and my grandmother's sisters and brother to come to the US. My great grandfather became a fruit and vegetable vendor with cart and horse in Brooklyn. My grandmother’s brother and one of her sisters became tailors and ended up making luxurious coats. Her other sister married and moved to Missouri and ended up getting divorced, a great shame for my grandparents. They eventually forgave her and accepted her back in their house. My grandparents didn’t know English when they came. When they did learn to speak it, they did so with heavy accents for the rest of their lives. I didn’t notice their accents. At their house, which I stayed at often since my grandparents cared for me on weekends,, the adults spoke Yiddish most of the time. They also knew Polish and Hebrew and my grandfather knew German.
My mother’s father was a northern Baptist with deep roots in New York State. His family went back a couple of hundred years in the US. My mother’s mother´s family were fairly well established Irish who lived I think mostly in the area of New York City. They’d been around probably since the mid nineteenth century. She was fond of making the distinction that they were “lace curtain Irish.” My grandmother actually had a job: she was a proofreader. Ironically, both my grandfathers were printers though my mother’s father came to edit a local paper in western New York State. Also ironically, both family had connections to Brooklyn.
When I was born in 1943. Jews and Wasps weren’t big at mixing with each other. There was a great deal of prejudice against Jews who out of necessity tended to live close to each other and somewhat isolated. Prejudice was everywhere outside Jewish neighborhoods. There were Jewish quotas for admission to universities and graduate schools. Neighborhoods often had charters which kept Jews out. Resorts and hotels were often closed to Jews. So after my dad got out of the Army Air Force in 1945 or 1946 we moved to a Jewish neighborhood in the Bronx. My mother stood out like a sore thumb. She was slim and beautiful in a very goyish way with coppery hair and a somewhat aloof air. Most of the mothers were plump and wore pinafore aprons and sat out on the sidewalk warm afternoons talking with each other. My mother didn’t. She dressed smartly in tailored skirts and blouses and dresses from the department stores downtown. She read books sitting on the couch with her legs curled under her. Her friends lived elsewhere.
Dislike at best, scorn, prejudice at worst went both ways. My parents had decided they would not bring me up in either religion, but rather would introduce me to both. Thus one of the first books I remember is one called One God and the Way We Worship Him. But I never really learned about either religion. I remember that the two families never mixed at family get-togethers, though my father could go to my mother’s families’ houses and vice versa. When they were angry at each other, my parents would each tell the other that it was the other’s family that was anti-semitic or anti-Christian. My mother was fond of saying that the general practice of circumcision was a Jewish plot. She said it with a smile. My mother’s brother and sister-in-law moved to a neighborhood where Jews were not permitted at all. My parents and I went just to visit once, and my aunt was asked if my father was Jewish. If he was, it wasn't a good idea to have him come.
I adored my father’s mother. She mattered more to me than my mother perhaps because I actually spent more time with her, because she was much warmer, full of laughter with me, not very critical. Pretty soon I realized that she didn’t really like my mother, nor did her daughters. Whenever it was time for me to leave, she’d say, “Don’t aggravate your mother.” I early took this to mean that my mother was brittle and easily rattled. She was, in fact. On the other hand, my mother would have to sit at dinners with all my father’s family or medical colleagues who were overwhelmingly Jewish and listen to the flaws of goyim: they were cold, unfeeling. They didn’t know how to cook real food, they thought they were better than everyone else, but Jews knew who were really smarter. She had to listen to people declare they’d never let their kids marry non-Jews. She had to listen to my aunt sob that her son wanted to marry a Catholic. My aunt and uncle saw that that never happened. My grandmother would say to me, “You’ll marry a Jew, won’t you?” I would remind her I would have to convert to Judaism. Judaism is inherited through the mother. “Not a problem,” she’d say. "We’ll all be with you.”
As a child I had no sense of being either wasp or Jew. On Jewish holidays, my father’s family would celebrate, the rituals all in Hebrew or Yiddish. My grandfather would translate for my mother and me. The questions asked at Passover: I was coached in English in what I was to say. I always wished someone would tell me what to say in Hebrew, but they never did. My parents did not allow me to stay home from school on Jewish holidays since I wasn’t really Jewish. Most of the kids in my elementary schools were Jewish so I got to hang out with the two or three other kids who weren’t and fool around and wonder why it mattered that I came to school.
On Christian holidays we were aggressively secular. For Christmas, no crèche, no cross, no wisemen, no church. For Easter, my mother would have family over, but there was no mention of the religious significance of the holiday except that my parents said that Christian anti-Semitism was at its most obvious at Easter since Christians blamed Jews for Christ’s death.
Until I was twelve or thirteen, I really wanted to be one or the other. It didn’t matter which, just so I could be on the inside of one of the walls. I felt conflict over the prejudices of both sides. I did learn early on that these prejudices had something to do with how people defined themselves, and that some people at least seemed to need to define themselves as better than other people and that prejudices against individuals or groups was a very common way to do it. And that they acted on these prejudices and caused hurt. At least some Christians and Jews hold on to their prejudices very tightly and that it makes it hard to really come together. But as religious absolutism loses its grip, people get along better. As nationalism loses its grip, they do, too, though that doesn’t mean people have to give up their identity. I think in the US tolerance has grown among younger people by leaps and bounds.
And what does this have to do with Mexico? Now we all need to learn that it is within ourselves that our negative views of cultures take root. Americans are not worse or better than Mexicans. Some of each group is better than some of the other in terms of decency and compassion. Some are worse. There are as many different kinds of Mexicans as there are Mexicans, there are as many different kinds of USAers as there are USAers. Then there are groups that are distinctly USA: southern Baptists, northern Baptists, liberal Catholics, Orthodox Jews. Chinese Americans. Urban people and rural people. Same in Mexico. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama need to learn what they believe about Mexico and why they so heavily favor military solutions to Mexican narco problems and why they think they have the right to impose their will on Mexico.
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