"Why Can't We All Just Get Along?"

"Why can't we all just get along?" This quote came from the late Rodney King, in an interview after his televised, unprovoked beating at the hands of white police officers. Such a simple and oft-quoted sentiment, but does anyone really stop to consider its meaning?

I used to work with an immigrant woman, whose name I will not reveal. Let's just call her "Mona." Mona came to the United States from a Caribbean nation with her parents when she was a teenager, decades ago. In all that time, she was never able to rid her speech of a thick Latin accent. She would say things like "refriyerator" and "hoppy" (happy). She was fired from a previous service position because she was supposedly hard to understand. When she got upset, her accent got so thick even I had trouble understanding her, but most of the time she was completely intelligible. She worked very hard, constantly struggling to crush the production rates, and worked overtime whenever it was available.

There was another co-worker who I'll call "Juan." Juan was straight off the boat from another Caribbean nation, and could barely speak two words of English. In the short time he was there, his English got better, but he still had to rely heavily on murmured Spanish conversations with his Latin co-workers to understand a lot of what was going on. Despite this handicap, I was able to successfully train him in a fairly complex warehouse operation, and he went on to become one of our best workers.

To this day I still have a great amount of respect for Mona and Juan, because they embody the values which "oriyinally" made America great (smiley). All of my Protestant ancestors came to America to escape religious persecution -- the Ulster Scots from the Anglicans, and the Pfalz Germans from the Roman Catholics. They left behind well-established economic and social infrastructures and travelled across the sea to an empty, wild continent, filled with beasts and savages -- and other cultures, who all came here for one overarching reason: to get a fresh start. The specifics were different for each group, but they all wanted to be left in peace to till their soil or ply their trade to earn their living.

My Scotch ancestors found in the ridges of the Appalachians a land not unlike the Highlands they left so far behind in their long trek. The Pfälzers settled in the broad valleys between the outlying foothills, in lands very similar to the Palatinate forests and vineyards. The Gaelic language was largely forgotten, but the Pfälzisch dialect grew into Pennsylvania Deutsch. Pennsylvania Deutsch was widely spoken until the early parts of the 20th century, when -- seemingly of one mind -- Deutsch parents refused to teach the language to their children. The Deutsch had long fallen under persecution in the English-speaking communities in which they peddled their agricultural goods, because many of them were unable to speak English. The stereotype of the "dumb Dutchman" was perpetuated under the false assumption that the Deutsch were "too stupid" to learn English. So they killed their language, and their culture with it. Many people from my generation are just now beginning to recapture the lost roots of their Pennsylvania Deutsch heritage.


It was in a similar fashion that I lost another cultural trait, which was a primary reason for the insularity of the former Pennsylvania Deutsch communities. I was in my twenties before I learned that my parents were staunch racists. I could well remember the expansive repertoire of racial epithets my great-grandmother used -- frequently and profusely -- but I had never heard my mother or my father utter a single one in my presence. They had been raised in the same cultural insensitivity which had made their grandparents targets of prejudice, but with the expansion of cultural diversity well under way in America they decided that their children would not be fettered by the limited vision of racism. So by the time I reached adulthood, I was well-prepared to share workspace with Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and a profusion of cultures and subcultures from around the world. It never entered my mind that I should treat anyone differently because of the color of their skin or country of origin. They were all just people to me.


My point is that racism is an eradicable condition. Mona and Juan, mentioned above, earned my respect because of their strict work ethic, and were not denied because they were "not like me." If parents who forbade their daughter from watching Puerto Rican Panorama on Saturday mornings because they didn't want her to hear "that spic-babble" were able to raise that same daughter to embrace the entirety of the human race as equals, then so can we all teach our own children to do so. It's important to be proud of your own heritage, but not to the exclusion of the heritage of others. This is what makes America such an interesting and popular country. A thirty-minute walk through any major American city will expose you to at least three different world cultures. In New York, you will likely hear snatches of nearly every language spoken on Earth within the space of a day. Cultural heritage is part of your identity, just like it is part of the identity of the person next to you, and the person next to him, and the person next to her, etc. They're all just like you.