Where do you come from?

While the recent national political discourse has focused upon the issue of gay marriage, our local political discussions have focused more upon issues of ethnicity. Elizabeth Warren, the Democrat candidate for Senator, has been lambasted by critics for identifying herself as having Native American heritage. Warren's great-grandfather (or possibly great-great grandfather) was a Cherokee, which means (according to critics' statistics) that she is 1/32 Cherokee. That Warren listed herself as a 'minority law professor' in the Harvard Directory thirty years ago has led her critics to argue that she utilized her Cherokee heritage to unfairly further her career. A more generous interpretation suggests that when faced with an equal opportunities form, Warren thought that 'white Caucasian' did not sufficiently reflect her ethnicity.

After more than half a year in America, we continue to reflect upon the prejudices that we brought with us to this country. Americans tend to be white Anglo-Saxon protestants who drive big gas-guzzling cars, eat fast food, destroy the economy, and strain at the waistbands of generously sized clothing. Faced with a picture of an obese white person chowing down on a burger, you'd say 'American', right? Except it's not what we've seen and it's not correlated with the people whom we've met. I recognize that Cambridge might be a demographic exception to the rule, but I haven't yet found any evidence that the 'rule' exists.

We've been thinking about this a lot over the past week or so. When I worked as a teacher in London, I was committed to anti-racist education. I've been interested that the girls' school doesn't appear to have any kind of anti-racist education policy (this was a lengthy, although under-utilized, policy at the school where I taught). The girls' school is multi-cultural and multi-lingual. In Iola's kindergarten class, children's home languages include German, Korean, Arabic, Mandarin, Urdu, Spanish, Portuguese, and Haitian Creole. There are fifteen children in her class. We didn't have a choice over which public school the girls needed to attend (public here equates to 'state schools' in the UK): a place was allocated within Cambridge on the basis of our family's income. The school district seeks to ensure that all schools have a socio-economic equivalence. We were not asked about our ethnicity and one of the reasons that there is no evident anti-racist policy within the school is that everyone is seen as an immigrant. If you spend time talking to anyone in this area you soon here stories about their family's heritage. One of our friends can trace her family history back to the Mayflower, but most are far more recent. The children don't seem to call one another names based upon their perceived ethnicities and things seem very harmonious within each girls' classes. It's just that Black and Hispanic students are far more likely to drop out of High School, are over-represented in relation to behavioral problems and learning difficulties, and are almost unrepresented in relation to the highest paying jobs within the US (when one thinks about the one-percent, one thinks white. It is only in the 99-percent that one finds ethnic diversity).

For a micro-sociological snapshot, I've been reflecting on our weekend. On Friday night, Iola attended her Taekwon-do class, which is mainly taught through the medium of English with some South Korean words. I was embarrassed that Iola had to be disciplined for misbehaving with her best friend, Abdullah. During the lesson, I chatted to one of the mothers who had emigrated to America at the same time that we did. She had come here from South Korea and we talked about the linguistic advantage that I had had coming from an English-speaking country. Then we watched the lesson for a while and laughed about the advantage that her daughter had over Iola in being able to follow the instructions of the entire lesson (and to throw a few more practiced punches). That evening we picked up the car that we share with Dey, a neighbor from Puerto Rico. The car is owned by our friends, Maria and Greg, who are currently living in Spain with their three children. They're American, but the children are bilingual Spanish so they are spending six months in Europe attending a Spanish-speaking school and doing a lot of skiing. On Saturday, we took Iola to a birthday party. Her friend, whose father is German, was 6. In the afternoon, we had a lovely time eating ice-cream in another neighbor's garden: her father emigrated here to escape the concentration camps during the Second World War, her husband is Italian-American. In the evening, friends came over to watch 'Bringing up Baby' and to eat popcorn and pizza. Karen is an American academic who specializes in comparative literature, speaks four more European languages than Nathan and I, and is writing a book about Wittgenstein's influence upon Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. Her children are bilingual and attend the nearby French school. On Sunday, we packed a picnic and met up with Jan and his family. Jan moved here from Denmark after studying his PhD in Oxford, England. Then I spent the late afternoon talking over the fence to my next-door neighbor rather than mowing the lawn. She has just returned from a trip to her birth town in China and volunteered to help Maya with her Mandarin classes next fall. She's lived in the house next door for nearly twenty years.

So, our life now seems very multi-cultural and in many ways it is. But, there are glaring systemic differences as soon as you begin to look at our community from a more abstract perspective. I am a member of a local gym. It's a really nice gym - smells good, women-only, up-to-date equipment etc. etc. It is also philanthropic and a percentage of our membership costs go towards providing free exercise opportunities for poorer communities within Boston - this is important to many of us. If you look around when you're exercising, you might notice that the majority of members seem to be white and, when you look through the marketing materials, you might notice that the communities in Boston that we contribute towards tend to be Hispanic - this disparity troubles some of us. Then, while you're reflecting upon these things, you might notice that the people who invisibly keep the gym smelling nice by cleaning up after us all are all black. While we've been living in Cambridge, I haven't seen any black police officers. The teachers in my daughters' school are nearly all white (although the students are not). The church that I occasionally attend prides itself upon having a Hispanic minister - despite the multi-cultural demographics of the congregation this is seen as special, rather than normal.

In Cambridge, we all want to think about ourselves as being immigrants. If we didn't physically emigrate here, then we tell the stories of our parents, or grandparents, or great-great-great grandparents who did. Our children stand up together in their classrooms each morning and make the Pledge of Allegiance ('I pledge allegiance to the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands. One nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.') It's the use of that word 'all' that troubles me. The American focus is upon equality of opportunity and I'm not fully convinced that this is the best way to address the systemic inequalities that surround me and my children. Elizabeth Warren is lambasted for apparently cheating in terms of the opportunities available to her, there is little discussion about her perceptions of her identity or whether there should be positive discrimination to Native Americans who practice law. There was a time in the UK (and I might be romanticizing here) when the focus was upon equality of outcome. I'm not saying that was perfect, but I miss that thinking. I believe in a meritocratic system and I support equality of opportunity, it's just that I think that there needs to be greater attention to the fact that we're not all starting in the same place. All of us here have interesting stories to tell when you ask us where we come from, it's just that not all of us have the same opportunities to get where we might want to go.