While home over the weekend, Daughter Babs talked about the anti-immigration reform protests at the Capitol in Austin the previous week. She has a part-time job with the Texas Psychological Association which offices right across the street from the Capitol grounds.
Babs is in a seminar that focuses on how to counsel people of different ethnic groups. The professor leading the seminar is Mexican-American and fiercely proud of her heritage. They had an interesting discussion about these protests and the reaction of the graduate students in the seminar to it.
The professor, of course, emphatically supported the protests and said it was because she was Mexican. Babs related that the students challenged her, pointing out that both she and her parents were born in the USA and were citizens of this country. She responded by saying that each of them must identify strongly with the country of their origin, as she did with Mexico.
Not so, they replied. Babs said, "my family comes from England, Ireland, Scotland, Germany and Switzerland, that I know of. How can I identify with just one of those countries? Who could identify as a Nordic-European? I'm an American. " The other seminar members agreed--and the professor was very surprised.
Note to Congress: perhaps we need to get the old Melting Pot off the shelf and fire up the heat under it.
3 comments:
Don't let Cliff Kirkpatrick hear you say that! Remember this latest WCC meeting? America and our culture is THE evil at work in the world today. Islamo-fascism takes a back seat to American exported values in the peril ratings, according to the WCC!
(And notice that this America bashing comes from some of the staunchest 'feminist theology' supporters...huh? Who has done more for women than America and her values...Saudi Arabia?)
Now that being all off my chest, I will admit that the 'meltig pot' idea is shaky at best. It depends upon what we are melting people into. If we mean our consumerism and shallowness of pop culture, then away with the melting pot! But, if we mean the merging of national and ethnic identity into one common good and one common societal purpose of prosperity and freedom, count me in!
Also, as Christians, are we not really ambassadors of another country anyway? (Or at least another Kingdom!)
Turn up the heat! Although instead of a melting pot, now I think I like the analogy of a bread oven with the Christian Church being the leaven to raise the whole loaf.
Hmmm-- I think time has something to do with it. My grandmother grew up in the German Reformed Church in Ohio. She and other German-Americans in her area definetly felt the heat during WWI. My other grandmother lived in a Russian-Jewish section of NYC from the minute she landed in this country until her death. I think ethnic groups--Irish, Eastern European Jewish, Mexican--that arrived in large numbers within a few decades of each other feel their ethnic identity pretty strongly for a couple of generations, until their grandchildren are native English speakers and marry "out".
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