Ethnocentrism

Tomorrow is the height of ethnocentric celebration in Boston, Massachusetts. A famous, perhaps infamous, parade flows down Broadway in South Boston. Drunkenness is the popular mental state of the day. Hooligans inevitably get involved in fist fights. Frankly, this event represents the lowest denominator of bog Irish culture. 

This rabid ethnocentrism evolved out of an horrific history of colonial English heartlessness, famine and forced diaspora. In Boston, the horror continued as Anglo-Americans greeted the starving Irish immigrants with clubs, strong-armed enlistment in the Union Army, the worst slavish labor in exchange for a pittance wage. The Irish, like the Latinos of today, were the beasts of burden of their day. 

I am sickened when Irish-American politicians try to be encouraging by suggesting that today's immigrants should expect to go through the same gauntlet of upward mobility that they suffered. That this is the "American Way". In other words, they are admitting that American culture is one of institutionalized ethnocentric exploitation. This belies the hollowness of the word "freedom" when touted by the likes of George Bush.

I grew up in a home divided by ethnocentrism. My mother and her mother were Russian-speakers, immersed in my grandmother's Belarus peasant heritage. My mother's alcoholic father was Lithuanian, and his ethnicity was cursed frequently by his widowed wife. My father was an American mongrel. His father was the son of an Irish immigrant and an Anglo-American. His mother was first-generation American from a German-Dutch family of Catholic-convert Jews. 

Our small city (one square mile) was in the 1950's and 1960's the most densely populated in the United States with over 50,000 people, mostly immigrants and their first-generation American offspring. There were several synagogues, several large Catholic parishes, several Protestant congregations. That city was bound together by its working class homogeneity, not by one ethnicity. While each ethnic group had its own club, church or other institution, the city held people together. The first topic of introduction was a person's Chelsea provenance, which trumped any other personal characteristic. Citizenship, not ethnicity, was the glue. 

The recent wave of well-meaning multiculturalism has deteriorated into a Balkanizing ethnocentrism. When this is challenged by a universal human rights issue, like homosexual rights, the new American refuge for homophobic people is their ethnicity. The courts in Boston upheld the right of the Irish-American groups which sponsor the Saint Patrick's Day Parade on city streets to exclude self-identified homosexuals in organized groups. This is overt, state-supported, ethnocentric bigotry in the public space. 

There is a vast difference between being at peace with my accidental ethnicity, imposed on me by birth, and somehow endowing that ethnicity with some sacrosanct meaning. To do the later is simply a form of racialism, which is institutionalized all over the planet with the aid of religion in most cases. A rational human being understands the place of ethnic conditioning in his/her life. A rational human being does not see some holy significance that the new Pope was an Italian born in an Hispanic country. So what? He is simply a human being who can evolve beyond his ethnic conditioning ...or not.