It’s time we reoriented the history of our country. Not rewrite it. Reorient it—because most of it starts with the assumption that this country began with Protestant English religious-freedom pioneers establishing colonies on the east coast, thus history is told from East to West.
That is a questionable assumption at best, and some would say an excuse for a nation that talks about inclusion while its national culture has created barriers against it.
The great American writer Walt Whitman refused in 1883 to take part in Santa Fe’s observance of its founding because, “We Americans have yet to really learn our own antecedents and sort them, to unify them. Thus far, impressed by New England writers and schoolmasters, we tacitly abandon ourselves to the notion that our United States have been fashioned from the British Islands only, and essentially form a second England only—which is a great mistake.”
American-born journalist and historian Carrie Gibson, who now lives in London, quotes Whitman in El Norte: The Epic and Forgotten Story of Hispanic North America. Unlike conventional histories, her book sees our national history from West to East.
Explorers and entrepreneurs from Catholic Spain were establishing settlements in this hemisphere a century before English Protestants started settling Jamestown and Plymouth as commercial ventures.
Gibson asserts that accepting the English-settlement version of our history is the root of some of our major social issues because it has led to categorizing people as lesser Americans. And she suggests part of the problem lies in our definition of “American.”
I am an English-German-French-Irish-Scottish-Canadian American. But none of that shows up on the census form I filled out last year. A lot of other Americans were hyphen people in the census. African-Americans. Hispanic-Americans. Asian-Americans. And others.
I have never self-identified with any hyphens. I don’t know a word of German. I had to take four semesters of French at the University of Missouri to pass three of them. I know no Gaelic languages. I don’t say “aboot” for “about,” or refer to my car’s trunk as the “boot.”
But we identify a lot of Americans with a hyphen and Gibson suggests none too gently that in hyphenating some Americans we are subtly saying, “not white,” and in doing so we are misunderstanding our history and, in effect, not recognizing one another as equals in citizenship.
Gibson was born in Ohio but moved to Dalton, Georgia as a child, just about the time many families from Mexico began moving in to work in the factories. She soon realized “that if my surname were Garcia rather than Gibson, there would have been an entirely different set of cultural assumptions and expectations placed upon me” although she, too, was an immigrant—from the North rather than the South; she too was Catholic as were many immigrants coming to Dalton. Her grandmother, from Italy, never spoke English well and still had many relatives in another country. The difference, she perceived, was that she and her family were “European” immigrants and our culture, as Whitman wrote, lived with the image of being a second England—-instead of being American.
And what is “American?” She suggests that many of us assume too much for ourselves and exclude others because we do not recognize the word.
It is convenient to we who call ourselves Americans to forget that the word derives from an explorer who never came to OUR shores. Amerigo Vespucci explored what we now call South America. Our continents first show up as America, with any designation of separateness, on a map of the New World drawn by Matthias Ringmann and Martin Waldseemüller in 1507, a century before Jamestown and a century-plus before Plymouth.
She finds it presumptuous to forget that the word “American” applies to everybody from Canada to Cape Horn. But those of us from the United States like to thing WE are Americans. Everybody else from this hemisphere is somebody or something else. The most common phrase used for those coming from the south is “Hispanic” as though everybody speaks Spanish, which is another erroneous assumption.
She points to another big difference. Gibson is two generations removed from her Italian grandmother. She is not identified as Italian-American, can’t speak Italian. But she asks, “Are you Hispanic if you don’t speak Spanish?” Many who don’t speak that language, however, are considered “Hispanic” no matter how many generations removed they are from their border-crossing ancestors.
That’s a nagging question. How many generations have to pass before someone is no longer African-American. If you’ve never spoken a word in the Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or Vietnamese languages, are you still Asian-American?
Gibson writes, “Like whiteness, being ‘American’ was designed at some level to be exclusionary; it was built on Anglo and northern European ancestry, Protestantism, and, for the most part, speaking English. There was no place for the Indians or the enslaved Africans, or even southern Europeans.”
There probably are places where cultural identifications are useful—in determining, for example, what parts of our culture are not doing as well as others and what the reasons for that might be.
But hyphens create deep and unnecessary divisions in how we see each other.
Perhaps society will solve these problems with the passage of time. But why should we wait for time to heal the wounds we continue to insist on inflicting on each other because we do not recognize that all of us are Americans, that our roots are not in northern Europe, but all of Europe? Or that many years ago, some who came here were Africans and others were Asians?
(For decades and decades, archaeologists have discovered evidence that the first people in our land came from Asia, thousands of years before anybody from England or other parts of northern Europe set foot in America. If we insist on identifying each other with hyphens, perhaps we should let descendants of the first peoples decide how the rest of us should be identified. Would the rest of us be satisfied with a designation that implies, “Not Asian?”)
Yuval Noah Harari, the author of the worldwide bestseller Sapiens says that mankind is nearing a tipping point driven by the third revolution that has shaped the history of Homo Sapiens. First was the Cognitive Revolution, about 70,000 years ago when our ancestors gained the capability of abstract thought. Second was the Agricultural Revolution about 12,000 years ago when our ancestors learned cultivation and food raising that led to longer lives and increased and diversified population. He thinks we are living in the third, the Scientific Revolution that began about 500 years ago. Harari theorizes we are headed toward a time when Homo Sapiens will be transformed into something different by science. Biological engineering, computing, and cyber development, he thinks, will lead to creation of “a new singularity, when all the concepts that give meaning to our world—me, you, men, women, love and hate—will become irrelevant.”
It will be the death of the hyphen. And none too soon.
Do we need to wait for centuries to pass before all of the things we let divide us become irrelevant? Do we need to listen to those who preach hatred of our fellow Americans or is it time to banish them to caves of their own ignorance where their bones might someday be discovered and puzzled over because of their narrowness?
-0-
