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Contents of this page: Polyculturalism
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I grew up in south-eastern Queens in a neighborhood called Richmond Hill. The people there were immigrants, the children of immigrants, or the children of children of immigrants: Italian, Irish, Polish, Spanish, African, German, French, Scottish, Native American or some odd mixture of all the above. I, for example, have Irish, German, and French ancestry. I had friends who could boast five or six different nationalities. God knows how many nationalities their children can rattle off today, or their grandchildren will be able to make claim to tomorrow: ten, twenty, or a hundred.
A common question I heard growing up was: What are you ? It was always a question that was asked when you met someone for the first time, following rapidly behind simple basics like name, age, religion, and favorite music. I remember a kid named Steven Swabb who had no less than seven countries coursing through his blood. Blood from seven different lands giving evidence of activities carefully avoided by history books in favor of more polite stories of war.
To some extent, the more nationalities you had the more impressive you were during introductions. And, of course, on occasions of failing self-esteem, you could identify with more heroes, call upon a longer list of accomplishments racked up by athletes, scientists, artists and explorers who shared your nationality.
Though the question, What are you? was common, I cannot now think of any special impact it ever had on relationships between people. Perhaps that was because we were almost all, like the most typical type of dog found barking in our yards, mutts.
Where are you from? What are you? What are you? I have grown tired of these questions after all these years. I am still asked them regularly. Less and less, do I know how to answer. Most commonly I say that I was born in New York City. Before that I am not quite sure where I was, what I was , or if I was.
I like to think of myself as part of the Diaspora that began 40 thousand years ago when humans first left Africa and spread into Europe, Asia, Australia, the Americas, and all points in between. My home is this earth. Though that even seems to be too narrow.
Identity is amorphous. How should I define myself? By where I have been? By what I have known? By where I am going? I am uncomfortable with any association that divides the greatest whole.
I only feel comfortable with the idea that I am at once an individual, and at the same time, part of everything. This is a contradiction. I know. But I think of the words of Walt Whitman: Do I contradict myself? So be it. I am large enough for contradictions.
As of this date, the earliest evidence of human life has been found in Africa. Fossilized bones were found there in recent years that were dated as being 150,000 years old. One hundred and fifty thousand years is approximately how long human beings in their present form have existed on this planet. Any human being can trace their ancestry back to Africa. In essence, all human beings alive today come from Africa. All human beings are basically cousins.
Human beings took different paths as they gradually left Africa and spread to different parts of the world. Humans spread to parts of Asia and Europe. They moved from Asia into North America. They began to inhabit South America and Australia.
The populations that settled in the different parts of the world became mostly disconnected from each other. They were isolated from each other, and communication between people was very slow or non-existent for thousands of years. As people learned to ride horses, build boats, etc..., they began discovering each other again. People started going to different parts of the world to explore and live.
Within recent history, the past 500 years, people have been meeting other people from whom their ancestors had been separated from for millennia. Many of these encounters, perhaps most, have involved hostility, war, and exploitation. All of which persists today. We hear much about the negative, and destructive things that occur between groups. Yet there are also other things happening. People also have intermixed and continue to intermix with others considered to be of another race, or ethnicity. In a very real sense they are intermixing with their long lost relatives, bringing together distant relatives into newly formed families. People, once considered separate and different are discovering that they are, in fact, the same.
This is particularly obvious in the Americas and the Caribbean where people from many parts of the world have settled. Some of these people cling to the idea that they are a part of a small isolated group. They do not recognize their long forgotten cousins and try to maintain the integrety of the subgroup they imagine themselves to be apart of. The subgroups might be African American, Irish American, Italian American, Latino, White, etc.... But others can see that humans are fundamentally humans. They cross over artificial boundaries to join together. Cultural artifacts such as religion, music, and language, are blended, and transformed.
Many families today are made by people who are from different places in the world. In one family there can be the blood of many nations and continents. In two or three hundred years it will be very difficult to point to one person and say they are from this or that part of the world, from this or that nation. Eventually all people may come to think of themselves as earth people, beings of this planet.
Today, it is possible to travel to other parts of the world in a few hours, and to communicate with people in a few seconds. What sense does it make to divide people into separate groups like nations when people from different nations interact with each other on daily basis.
What each person does everyday has real effects on people all over the planet. On the simplest level think about the clothes you wear, the foods you eat, and the machines you use. How many of those things originated from other parts of the world. Think about the stories of human experience that you read about or see on television. Think about the music you listen to. If none of these things are so alien that they cannot be used or understood by you, then why view the people they originate from as different?
Race is a concept that has always been used to subdivide the whole of humanity, but concept of race is not found universally in all cultures nor in all periods of history. When it has existed, it has meant different things to different people. For some it has meant family lineage, and for others it has meant nation or ethnicity. Contemporary notions of race originated in Europe a little over two hundred years ago. More recently attempts have been made to give it a definition grounded in genetics.
Attempts to classify members of the human race into subspecies or races have always been problematic. Family lineage is obviously a narrow and meaningless classification, though it is capable of engendering tremendous loyalty. This form of classification, more accurately understood as clan, can be seen in classical Greek literature, and is still alive in some cultures in parts of the world today. Other people have equated race with national citizenship, but the use of nation as a racial divider begs the obvious objections apparent to any half rational person. National boundaries are artificially established and can easily change after a war, civil conflict, or the dissolution of governments. This type of classification was and is favored by people with a fascist mentality. The most obvious example would be Hitler's Germany.
More recent attempts to scientifically subdivide the human species based on genetics have resulted in absurdity and failure. The reason is simple. Within any particular population group there is a high degree of genetic variability. Any two individuals within a race may show more genetic difference than any two categorized as being from different races. This variability makes it impossible to categorize any large group of people as a particular race. In fact, most scientists today reject the concept of race as a meaningful way to think about human beings.
In spite of the many absurdities and problems that have plagued its existence, race remains as a concept firmly implanted in the minds of many people living today. Ideas can be very powerful without needing to be correct. Just as at one time people erroneously assumed the earth to be a flat disc, many people today persist in the belief that the human species can be rationally subdivided into races. This ignorance contributes to, at the very least, a lack of empathy for other people, and at worst, racist hostility and prejudice.
What is the ethnicity of a person like myself? I have asked myself this question many times and can never come up with a satisfactory answer apart from concluding that I am a human being. It is not my intention to be flippant in concluding this. The fact is that in the past I have had trouble trying to identify myself with a particular ethnic group. People who are said to share an ethnicity have a common and distinctive racial, national, religious, linguistic, or cultural heritage. I will run down each of the ethnic markers with reference to my life, and we will see what results.
Racial distinctions:
As I discuss in another section of this article, race is not a legitimately distinguishable feature of any person or group. Most biologists have abandoned the idea. It is too difficult to isolate characteristics which are not shared by some people of all imaginable racial configurations. Race is not a meaningful concept outside of politics where it is often used to isolate groups of people in order to control, exploit, divide and oppress. No help in finding my ethnic identity here.
National distinctions:
The people that I am descended from arrived in the United States over one hundred years ago from several different nations. I was born in the United States. The United States, of course, is a multi-ethnic nation. My situation with regard to nationality is complex to say the least. I do not think the mere citizenship in a nation can define one's cultural identity. This is especially true of a nation like The United States
Religious distinctions:
I was born into the Roman Catholic faith, but I have not been to church in years and no longer consider myself Catholic. Though I have some religious feeling, it comes from a mixture of the many religious traditions I spent time exploring. I have never completely embraced any one set of religious beliefs. Religion could hardly give me an ethnic identity.
Linguistic distinctions:
I am a native speaker of English, but so many people in the world speak English, that it could not be used to determine ethnic identity of anyone. To complicate things further, I can communicate in two languages. If I used language to determine my ethnic identity, then at the very least, I would be bi-cultural.
Cultural Distinctions:
There are many ways to live as a human being. Whatever way a particular individual lives, there is no doubt that outside of common biological imperatives shared by all, the individual learned how to live that way from culture in which they were raised. They were assimilated into a social milieu. Not everyone, however, is raised in an encapsulated cultural environment.
What is my cultural heritage? First, how does one inherit or receive culture? Culture is transmitted from person to person, passed down through generations, and, very significantly, shared across cultural barriers. Like many people born in New York City, I have lived with, worked with, and learned from a rich variety of people. It would be impossible for me to lay claim to any one culture exclusively without cutting off many important aspects of my character.
As a result of being raised in this environment, unsheltered and unrestrained, I have inherited aspects of many different cultures instead of one distinct culture ( if such a thing still exists in the world). If I were to compile a list of the cultural influences in my life the list would be quite large. This situation is not unique to me, and I would like to suggest that as we all progress through time in the coming centuries, it will become the common experience of most, and perhaps all, people.
I would like to see more people develop a meta-awareness of the many cultural influences on their development, and of the multiplicity of cultures that are a part of their daily existence. We live in a world that is intricately connected. We cannot close ourselves off from the problems of this planet, nor should we close ourselves off from its richness and benefits. I invite you to recognize that you participate in a global culture. All it takes is a little openness and awareness.
What occurs to you when think of culture? Often it is viewed as something that is passed along, researched, or rediscovered. This is true, but it is only half of it. Culture lives. Culture changes. Culture transforms. And it is through people that culture moves, not through culture that people move. Without the living breath of humanity, culture would cease. But if you could bring a group of people into the world deprived of any culture, they would soon make one.
Much is said about preserving that which is passed down through time. Much time is given over to remembering our heritage. Some people would like to feel that all there is in life needs only to be learned. You are born a vessel which is to be filled. You are stamped at birth as such a thing, and that you should be when you die.
I prefer to think of people as cultural agents, as agents of change, rather than repositories of some dusty cultural archeology . We need to be more aware of the infinite mutability of life. We should teach our young, and teach ourselves, that we are creators. We must be artists.
Out of chaos came form, but chaos was not left behind. It is just ahead, and waiting for us! It is waiting for us give it new form, and draw again from its infinite complexity and the beauty therein.
The many cultural influences that enter us during our lives are transmuted by our consciousness with or without our awareness. What emerges is not a recapiculation of the past. It is not an identity that has been recovered, nor an affirmation of a static ideal. What emerges is something new, and entirely unique to ourselves. Awareness of this can make each of us an artist, a singer of songs. Songs that are unique , and yet representative of all humanity.
We are, and are not, the multitude of cultural influences that have passed through us. We are and are not those influences that will come. From the chaos that is life, we gather up a form. This form serves for a moment and then passes. We do not need to cling to any identity set down in writing, preached from a pulpit, determined by a few genes, or circumscribed by a political border. What we need I cannot tell you, but it is there now, and will not be the same tomorrow. Explore the other. Celebrate diversity. Foster it. Make it your own.
All essays were written by John Korber unless otherwise noted. It would be nice if you informed the author/s of any intention to reproduce the content of this site in whole or part.
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