A Time For Questioning
We are bombarded daily with different ideas, different opinions and different ways of looking at the world. A White Supremacist calls for the enforcement of English only laws in the United States. An African American conservative republican calls for the removal of all “illegal” immigrants from United States soil. An African American community organizer becomes President of the United States and tells the nation that it is time to shed the old way of doing things, the old way of thinking, the old way of looking at the world. While the President has not exactly made it clear what he means by this, I want to suggest that embedded in his message is a call for change about how we, as United States Americans, look at ourselves. In doing so, we are being asked to adopt a deep line of questioning about who we have been, who we are, and who we will become.
We are a deeply divided country of opposing world-views. Because humans are deeply rooted in our suspicions and our self-identified passions (be they place-based, language-based, ethnic-based, gender identity-based, and so on), we have an extremely difficult time un-rooting ourselves from what we know. What we know makes sense to us. We grew into our personal world-views over a slowly cultivated period of many years. Our grandfather told us not to play with the black kids down the street. Mom told us not to talk to that Latino kid over there. Dad told us not to even wave hello at the Asian kid that just moved in next door. Behind these lessons is the idea that those “others” are all different, and they don’t share “our” way of life, our culture, our world-view. Harboring these suspicions leads to a paralyzing and, in the end, catastrophic result of racial and socio-economic class tensions that are difficult to untangle. The dominant group in these environments usually benefit from tensions among the less fortunate members of the population who have to fight for basic rights and recognition.
However, all along history there has been a fight by excluded communities for the expansion of a dominant culture’s world-view. Why so? Because after a while, people who are not recognized, who are not receiving equitable justice, who are being exploited and criminalized, or who are being cast in an outsider’s light, end up fighting for the right to be heard, to be recognized, and to be accepted as they are into the mainstream community in which they live. Sometimes it takes civil war for this to happen, as it did in the United States over the issue of slavery. Sometimes it takes loud, civil disobedience, as in the Civil Rights Movement and the quest for Indian freedom from the British Empire. But what about in times, such as ours, when either of these models don’t seem likely, or even desired? What do we do when so many of us, LGBT, Latinos, immigrants of all kinds, Muslims, African Americans, Asians, Pacific Islanders, and so on want more than ever to be accounted, recognized and included in the concept of a United States American? How do we push for change? How do we discuss, openly, with the dominant world-view of our neighbors, about such a frightening topic as the inclusion of our different world-views? The dominant world-view owner would say that to do anything of this sort would mean that the United States American way of life, that the very nature of being a United States American would disappear. We are asking too much. We are asking they throw out what they know, what they are accustomed to, or what they have been raised to believe all their lives.
The reaction is the same everywhere, in any country, when push from the minority group reaches the majority. The United States is certainly not alone in this matter. However, I truly believe that the United States already has the recipe in place for this change to occur. In moving forward, the question for this country will not be whether or not we allow one more Latino to become legal, or one more African American to attain a high executive post, and so on, but whether or not we will take this opportunity to change the way we look at ourselves and examine our strongly-held beliefs about our minority communities. This is our moment to figure out how to create a groundswell of world-view growth. It’s time to expand our own personal concepts of the world we live in. Since its very inception, the United States has been more than what has been offered in history and official government documents. Since its creation, the United States declared itself a nation of “free people.” Nowhere in the Declaration of Independence does it say that the United States would be established for any particular ruling, dominant class or world-view. After 300 years, isn’t it time that we question our leaders about the world-view from which they pass laws? Isn’t it time that we ask ourselves why we feel so strongly about keeping only to our social, culture, ethnic or language group? If we are to truly become a vibrant, successful community, I am convinced that it will not happen if we continue to separate ourselves among the traditional turf lines that in the end pit us against each other. I am interested in helping the great American experiment fully realize the democracy it put in place in 1787.
Tags: constitution, cultural change, democracy, hispanic, latino, latinola, latinolanow, louisiana, lucas diaz, new orleans, puentes director, social change