I took a long bath tonight. To read a novel for an ethnic-American literature class, and to procrastinate a bit on the more serious work I am mired in now (and am allowing myself a break from). The novel was not very good, but it was short and it was thought provoking, or at least re-provoking. It got me thinking again about my own ethnicity.
At the beginning of the course, we had a discussion about how those of us from a white European background have very little opportunity to learn about our ethnic heritage. There are at least two good counter arguments to this. The first is that, being the white European majority, learning about our heritage is the default, the stuff that everyone learns whether they like it or not, and that more specific studies of other ethnicities are necessary because they are traditionally neglected. Very true. But second and more interesting, I think, is the argument that the majority ethnicity of the US is not white European but a new ethnicity which I will call “whitebread American.”
Let’s face it, for most, we’re white and that is the end of it. Any connection to real European traditions or heritage is so tangential, diluted, and subconscious that it is hardly meaningful to think of us as European. (Not that any of these distinctions are particularly meaningful, when you get down to it.) So what is the culture of whitebread America? What are our values? Traditions?
We are the uprooted. The disaffected. There is a certain meaninglessness which some of us are driven to reconstruct into meaning and which others embrace. Our traditions are either absent or faux consumer versions of someone else’s. We’re too apathetic to be European. Our identity is built from the outside based upon inherited guilt rather than from the inside based on any sort of shared values.
There is a story here somewhere I think.
