Malcolm to Malcolm: integration vs assimilation and progress
Part of my personality is to enjoy integrating disparate things, almost to a fault. I say almost to a fault because I'm blindly fond of this aspect of my personality. For example in high school, I wrote a version of Macbeth that consisted almost entirely of lines from Shakespeare's other plays, in order to kind of turn the play inside out and examine certain lines and certain characters at various points in the play. (For example, after Lady Macbeth says of Duncan, "Had he not resembled my father as he slept, I'd 'a done it," Macbeth replies with Caludius' speech from I.ii of Hamlet, "Thou must know thy father lost a father, and that father lost, lost his...") I think this was eleventh or twelfth grade, so dortz probably remembers it. Were you in it, Laura? I think at least Patrick and Nick (?) and Bee were.
Anyway, in addition to making me sometimes harder to understand, I think this aspect of my personality is also responsible for my blanket bias in favor of integration, especially when I think about it selfishly. I want to know everything. I want to experiment with the best and weirdest of every available genre of object at all times, to be able to come out with optimal, or at least interesting, solutions at a moment's notice, for any situation. When I cook, I like to step back to some shadowy set of 'first principles' so that I realize that it makes perfect sense to use Thai spices on a peanut butter sandwhich. I'm trying to pull together an after-work workout I can do at home, for strength balance and flexibility, and I find myself mixing yoga, hula, pilates, belly-dancing, and t'ai-chi. I want to know all the myths of the world and all the stories ever told and all the words that any wise men have ever spoken so that I can try to see the world from as many different angles as possible. So when people debate 'integrating'/'assimilating' verses sticking fast to their cultural identity, I selfishly cry, "integrate! integrate and tell me your stories!" But at the same time, I approve in principle of organizations like high school/college clubs for certain culture groups, like the black student union or the asian culture club, because they can then put on shows for the rest of the school or encourage the library to buy more books about their culture, etc., which I can then watch/read. I also generally approve of affirmative action, and think of integration as an end in itself, a good for all but especially me.
I bring all this up because yesterday I started reading the Autobiography of Malcom X (I'm only about 2/3 of the way through). As you know, he was in favor of separate nations for whites and blacks, since whites own the country, and the only way to gain power in a white country is to join white organizations and assimilate into white culture. And he's right, whites do run this country - the government, the media, the economy - rich white males in fact, and it's a question for minorities, for women, for the poor, how to gain power without losing their identity. (I don't mean to minimize the importance of blacks by that statement, though - blacks have been screwed over far more thoroughly than women, who have been screwed over badly enough.) In his view, all integration is at best assimilation. Some of the things he says are kind of stupid and crazy, like that the skin color variation in African-Americans is completely due to slaves being raped, and that otherwise all African-Americans would be dark as night; and that darker is better. (Africa encompasses something like 94% of all existing human genetic variation, and there are a huge variety of skin colors there. There are very few places where people are literally "black", though of course a lot of slaves were taken from those places.)
But I feel great strength in parts of what I understand to be his position (sorry for that confusing hemming and hawing): namely, that people need power bases besides the Man's. In fact, one of my college professors maintained that the Black Panthers really started threatening the government not when they learned judo and started stockpiling weapons, but when they started free neighborhood school breakfast and lunch programs. I've been meaning to read more about the Black Panthers for a while, and it's kind of inexcuseable that I haven't - so I can't legitimate that claim with a 3rd-party source, but for the time being I file it with the pseudo-evidence. Malcom X also describes how the March on Washington was cleverly subverted by the government from a planned angry demonstration to a peaceful, integrated "picnic", which is true. I'm drawn to organizations like ACORN not only because their work is so essential in the short-term to the survival of the impoverished, but also because sometimes I wonder if George Bush is slightly possibly right, and we need independent, competing charities to make sure that everyone is served, and served well; even in the idealistic democracy of my dreams, I imagine we'd still sometimes be subject to the tyranny of the majority, and would need independent organizations to raise special-interest money for these small gaps. But don't get too excited by my saying that - right now, ACORN is busy trying to keep people from freezing and starving to death in the god damned richest country in the world. Their current work should mostly be taken over by the government. I'm just saying that even a perfect world would probably include independent charities, but things probably more along the lines of The Fresno Opera Club or the Spokane Barn-Dancing Committee.
But obviously, ultimately more important than charities that organize and distribute resources are corporations that generate resources, as well as the government and the media, but it seems like the latter two can fall into the hands of anyone with money. So really, we're talking about owning the means of production. What I've always thought when I've considered this, and what I also saw recently in The Head Negro in Charge Syndrome, is the making of paralell institutions, black-owned businesses and Hispanic-owned businesses and women-owned businesses, etc... Some of you are probably asking, what the hell is the difference between a black company or a white company or an Asian company? There is a difference, and there can't not be a difference until we've had white companies and black companies all working around through and against one another, at which point integration is possible. Because integration is partners sharing and exchanging, whereas assimilation is the minority getting eaten by the majority.
So I believe in affirmative action, and I believe in selectively favoring minorities and women at the moment, to make integration possible. Assimilation that pretends to be integration results in crap like Kwanzaa, or making Haunukkah into a pseudo-Christmas. They're empty symbolism. Integration could look more like Black History Month... which is fucking going on right now, isn't it? I seriously didn't realize. Holy fuck, I feel stupid. I'm going to gape stupidly for a moment.
Ahem.
I've also been thinking about integration on both a national and global scale in terms of the old complaint that people are becoming more similar as technology makes faster communication possible. I think I was graphically introduced to this in one of the Jurassic Park books, by the mathematician-guy, who was possibly named Dr. Malcom or something? Ian Malcolm? Let's pretend he was, to make him brother to Malcom X. He had a speech that was something like, species die out when they lose variation, because they cease to have the raw material necessary for adaptation. The human species is becoming more homogenous and knit closer together because of printing, telephones, air travel, and the internet. We'll eventually all become the same, some crisis will come upon us, and humans will die out, the end. But it's an old notion and we've all been hearing it all our lives. I think it's a big god damned lie.
When people come out with this idea, they usually are holding some idea in their heads of some time when no one ventured more than 40 miles from their home town, and when they did go far, they were astonished! at the differences! of the next down! so crazy! But I wonder, I really wonder, if that hick-like astonishment isn't really more astonishment at the novelty of travelling rather than astonishment at the novelties in the next town themselves. I mean, if you never travelled, you never saw new faces or new landscapes. Going to the next town involved assimilating thousands of trivial differences and possibly no major ones. The guy at the blacksmith's shop had red hair instead of brown! So crazy! Or whatever. But everyone dressed in coarse wollens, everyone lived off lentils and gruel, everyone shivered in the winter. When we think about the customs of, say, medieval times, we're mostly struck by the fucking broad similarities from town to town and country to country. The one interesting thing that happened in the Middle Ages was the explosion of new languages.
I was reading Travels with Charley, Steinbeck's account of his drive around America, and he complained that all the regional accents were disappearing. And it's a common lament that globalization and various forms of mass communication are destroying regional accents as well as entire languages. But those regional American accents that Steinbeck was pining for were only the work of a few hundred years. Peter pointed out to me last night that some of the regional accents were created by people from different countries of origin settling in different places (the Minnesotan accent, for example, has clear antecendents in Scandanavian languages and arguable antecendents in the Ojibway language), but there were plenty of places with very similar mixes of nationalities that developed noticeably different accents, like Virginia and Delaware, or Montana and Nevada. Harkening back to my last paragraph, I also noticed in my trip this summer that a lot of the old silver mining towns in NV, like Tonopah, were strikingly similar to the copper/etc mining towns of Montana, like Butte. There were some surface differences, and people sounded different, and the restaurants were slightly different, but the look of the town, the structure of the streets, and the way it settled into the landscape were remarkably similar.
I think there's a human capacity for constant change and adaptation and segmentation. I feel no horror at all at the idea that all the Scandanavians might fuse, and we will utterly lose all but an historical sense of Swedish identity. Or that in 500 years, France might disappear into the dusty pages of history books. Do we currently mourn that the Abyssians are gone, or the Mayans, or the Prussians? I mean, that those identities have no contemporary meaning? We're overjoyed to learn how these people lived and their myths and technology and art and whatever else we can recover of their view of the world, but we're not sad that they're no longer among us. We're sad that our records are patchy, but I'm ready to throw caution to the wind for currently existing cultures, who are being documented nicely in the information age. Come, immigrants and drown out American culture with wacky-doodle!
Also, speaking of the information age, I feel that the internet proves that people are ready to create new kinds of cliques and societies wherever they go. The lightening-fast speed of the internet hasn't homogenized information, but given you a bazillion disreputable and random sources to investigate. Any fool can tell you about his day or babble at you forever, like me. New ways of talking and thinking result.
I also don't think that if humans interbred we'd end up with a bland dark-beigish human being with brown eyes, either, or some other boring homogenous creature as the Malcoms and Hitlers have thought. I think we'd get new, exciting, beautiful people with characteristics we haven't yet seen, or at least seen together. It doesn't seem to me that when equals mix, we get mash: that's what happens when a less powerful group is subsumed by a more powerful or numerous one.
Anyway, in addition to making me sometimes harder to understand, I think this aspect of my personality is also responsible for my blanket bias in favor of integration, especially when I think about it selfishly. I want to know everything. I want to experiment with the best and weirdest of every available genre of object at all times, to be able to come out with optimal, or at least interesting, solutions at a moment's notice, for any situation. When I cook, I like to step back to some shadowy set of 'first principles' so that I realize that it makes perfect sense to use Thai spices on a peanut butter sandwhich. I'm trying to pull together an after-work workout I can do at home, for strength balance and flexibility, and I find myself mixing yoga, hula, pilates, belly-dancing, and t'ai-chi. I want to know all the myths of the world and all the stories ever told and all the words that any wise men have ever spoken so that I can try to see the world from as many different angles as possible. So when people debate 'integrating'/'assimilating' verses sticking fast to their cultural identity, I selfishly cry, "integrate! integrate and tell me your stories!" But at the same time, I approve in principle of organizations like high school/college clubs for certain culture groups, like the black student union or the asian culture club, because they can then put on shows for the rest of the school or encourage the library to buy more books about their culture, etc., which I can then watch/read. I also generally approve of affirmative action, and think of integration as an end in itself, a good for all but especially me.
I bring all this up because yesterday I started reading the Autobiography of Malcom X (I'm only about 2/3 of the way through). As you know, he was in favor of separate nations for whites and blacks, since whites own the country, and the only way to gain power in a white country is to join white organizations and assimilate into white culture. And he's right, whites do run this country - the government, the media, the economy - rich white males in fact, and it's a question for minorities, for women, for the poor, how to gain power without losing their identity. (I don't mean to minimize the importance of blacks by that statement, though - blacks have been screwed over far more thoroughly than women, who have been screwed over badly enough.) In his view, all integration is at best assimilation. Some of the things he says are kind of stupid and crazy, like that the skin color variation in African-Americans is completely due to slaves being raped, and that otherwise all African-Americans would be dark as night; and that darker is better. (Africa encompasses something like 94% of all existing human genetic variation, and there are a huge variety of skin colors there. There are very few places where people are literally "black", though of course a lot of slaves were taken from those places.)
But I feel great strength in parts of what I understand to be his position (sorry for that confusing hemming and hawing): namely, that people need power bases besides the Man's. In fact, one of my college professors maintained that the Black Panthers really started threatening the government not when they learned judo and started stockpiling weapons, but when they started free neighborhood school breakfast and lunch programs. I've been meaning to read more about the Black Panthers for a while, and it's kind of inexcuseable that I haven't - so I can't legitimate that claim with a 3rd-party source, but for the time being I file it with the pseudo-evidence. Malcom X also describes how the March on Washington was cleverly subverted by the government from a planned angry demonstration to a peaceful, integrated "picnic", which is true. I'm drawn to organizations like ACORN not only because their work is so essential in the short-term to the survival of the impoverished, but also because sometimes I wonder if George Bush is slightly possibly right, and we need independent, competing charities to make sure that everyone is served, and served well; even in the idealistic democracy of my dreams, I imagine we'd still sometimes be subject to the tyranny of the majority, and would need independent organizations to raise special-interest money for these small gaps. But don't get too excited by my saying that - right now, ACORN is busy trying to keep people from freezing and starving to death in the god damned richest country in the world. Their current work should mostly be taken over by the government. I'm just saying that even a perfect world would probably include independent charities, but things probably more along the lines of The Fresno Opera Club or the Spokane Barn-Dancing Committee.
But obviously, ultimately more important than charities that organize and distribute resources are corporations that generate resources, as well as the government and the media, but it seems like the latter two can fall into the hands of anyone with money. So really, we're talking about owning the means of production. What I've always thought when I've considered this, and what I also saw recently in The Head Negro in Charge Syndrome, is the making of paralell institutions, black-owned businesses and Hispanic-owned businesses and women-owned businesses, etc... Some of you are probably asking, what the hell is the difference between a black company or a white company or an Asian company? There is a difference, and there can't not be a difference until we've had white companies and black companies all working around through and against one another, at which point integration is possible. Because integration is partners sharing and exchanging, whereas assimilation is the minority getting eaten by the majority.
So I believe in affirmative action, and I believe in selectively favoring minorities and women at the moment, to make integration possible. Assimilation that pretends to be integration results in crap like Kwanzaa, or making Haunukkah into a pseudo-Christmas. They're empty symbolism. Integration could look more like Black History Month... which is fucking going on right now, isn't it? I seriously didn't realize. Holy fuck, I feel stupid. I'm going to gape stupidly for a moment.
Ahem.
I've also been thinking about integration on both a national and global scale in terms of the old complaint that people are becoming more similar as technology makes faster communication possible. I think I was graphically introduced to this in one of the Jurassic Park books, by the mathematician-guy, who was possibly named Dr. Malcom or something? Ian Malcolm? Let's pretend he was, to make him brother to Malcom X. He had a speech that was something like, species die out when they lose variation, because they cease to have the raw material necessary for adaptation. The human species is becoming more homogenous and knit closer together because of printing, telephones, air travel, and the internet. We'll eventually all become the same, some crisis will come upon us, and humans will die out, the end. But it's an old notion and we've all been hearing it all our lives. I think it's a big god damned lie.
When people come out with this idea, they usually are holding some idea in their heads of some time when no one ventured more than 40 miles from their home town, and when they did go far, they were astonished! at the differences! of the next down! so crazy! But I wonder, I really wonder, if that hick-like astonishment isn't really more astonishment at the novelty of travelling rather than astonishment at the novelties in the next town themselves. I mean, if you never travelled, you never saw new faces or new landscapes. Going to the next town involved assimilating thousands of trivial differences and possibly no major ones. The guy at the blacksmith's shop had red hair instead of brown! So crazy! Or whatever. But everyone dressed in coarse wollens, everyone lived off lentils and gruel, everyone shivered in the winter. When we think about the customs of, say, medieval times, we're mostly struck by the fucking broad similarities from town to town and country to country. The one interesting thing that happened in the Middle Ages was the explosion of new languages.
I was reading Travels with Charley, Steinbeck's account of his drive around America, and he complained that all the regional accents were disappearing. And it's a common lament that globalization and various forms of mass communication are destroying regional accents as well as entire languages. But those regional American accents that Steinbeck was pining for were only the work of a few hundred years. Peter pointed out to me last night that some of the regional accents were created by people from different countries of origin settling in different places (the Minnesotan accent, for example, has clear antecendents in Scandanavian languages and arguable antecendents in the Ojibway language), but there were plenty of places with very similar mixes of nationalities that developed noticeably different accents, like Virginia and Delaware, or Montana and Nevada. Harkening back to my last paragraph, I also noticed in my trip this summer that a lot of the old silver mining towns in NV, like Tonopah, were strikingly similar to the copper/etc mining towns of Montana, like Butte. There were some surface differences, and people sounded different, and the restaurants were slightly different, but the look of the town, the structure of the streets, and the way it settled into the landscape were remarkably similar.
I think there's a human capacity for constant change and adaptation and segmentation. I feel no horror at all at the idea that all the Scandanavians might fuse, and we will utterly lose all but an historical sense of Swedish identity. Or that in 500 years, France might disappear into the dusty pages of history books. Do we currently mourn that the Abyssians are gone, or the Mayans, or the Prussians? I mean, that those identities have no contemporary meaning? We're overjoyed to learn how these people lived and their myths and technology and art and whatever else we can recover of their view of the world, but we're not sad that they're no longer among us. We're sad that our records are patchy, but I'm ready to throw caution to the wind for currently existing cultures, who are being documented nicely in the information age. Come, immigrants and drown out American culture with wacky-doodle!
Also, speaking of the information age, I feel that the internet proves that people are ready to create new kinds of cliques and societies wherever they go. The lightening-fast speed of the internet hasn't homogenized information, but given you a bazillion disreputable and random sources to investigate. Any fool can tell you about his day or babble at you forever, like me. New ways of talking and thinking result.
I also don't think that if humans interbred we'd end up with a bland dark-beigish human being with brown eyes, either, or some other boring homogenous creature as the Malcoms and Hitlers have thought. I think we'd get new, exciting, beautiful people with characteristics we haven't yet seen, or at least seen together. It doesn't seem to me that when equals mix, we get mash: that's what happens when a less powerful group is subsumed by a more powerful or numerous one.