Being American

My ancestors came to this country from Russia and the greater Eastern European region between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th.  They were all Jews.  I did a Family Tree DNA test a few years ago that came back 97% Jew.  Yep. I'm a Jew.  Jew, Jew Jewy Jew.  The other 3% was probably some Russian dude who raped my 4x great grandmother or something, who knows.  We are new to America.  New, being a relative term.  Certainly, there are immigrants who came to this country in the later part of the 20th century and the 21st, but we came recently enough that important pieces of our cultural identity, of Eastern European Jewry, still permeates our everyday lives.  Those are my people.  American Jews. I guess for the longest time I operated under the assumption that most white people were like me when it came to their American-ness, that their ancestry was REALLY English or Irish or Italian or Polish.  I thought that "white" was a category invented to deprive people of their ancestral culture under the guise of white supremacy and the devaluation of people of color, that most people could and SHOULD say what they were culturally instead of just identifying as white in an effort to dismantle an artificially created racial dichotomy.

Doing my husband's genealogy made me confront the fact that some people defy such easy categorization.  One branch of my husband's family came from France to settle Canada in the 1640s.  Another branch was British and settled the Massachusetts Bay colony, one even coming aboard the Mayflower.  Another branch was Dutch, settling New Amsterdam in the 1660s. Another branch of his family were Spanish rancheros in old California, the oldest one I have found born in Mexico in the 1740s.  Another branch was German, settling the Germantown, Pennsylvania area in the early 1700s. The more "recent" branches settled from Ireland in the late 1840s and from Germany in the 1850s.  His family has been in California before it was a state. His family has been in America/ North America since before there was an America, several of them fighting in the Revolutionary War.  In fact, some even fought in the French and Indian Wars (On both sides of that conflict).  In many, many ways I am jealous of all the history.  Jealous for the ability to know the names of ancestors, to see them written in books, that Wikipedia articles are written about them, that someone in his family has fought in every single war this nation has ever fought. It is a gift to have so much knowledge.

I know my people were Russian Jews.  That will probably be all that I will ever know.  Any distant cousins I may have had in the old country were invariably killed by pogroms or in the Holocaust.  Maybe I am descended from some great Jewish thinker, though probably I am just from tailors and farmers who lived humble lives in the ghettos they were forced to live in. My culture is the culture of Ashkenazi New York in the early 20th century.  Recent immigrants to this country have the shared knowledge, culture, pride and cuisine of their homelands, even if they don't know the names of their great grandfathers.   Black Americans descended from slaves will never know from which African tribe or country their people were from, but they share a beautiful and rich American Black culture that is unique and distinguished from more recent immigrants from Africa.  Indigenous descended people may have been removed from their cultures by force in some cases, but many can make the conscious decision to reconnect with their tribal Nations now if they so choose.

And yet I have heard my husband say that he guesses he's "just a big European mutt." It is a gift to have so much knowledge about your ancestry, far far more than most people I know, more than the descendants of slaves who will never know their real names, more than the nameless indigenous people who were slaughtered in the name of conquest, but what does it really mean that your 10x great grandfather on your father's mother's side was some British lord if it doesn't bring any kind of sense of identity or belonging?  When I thought about it at first, I found that concept profoundly odd in ways I couldn't quite put my finger on, and it made me sad.

People talk a lot about America as a nation of immigrants, though such a designation ignores both involuntarily transported slaves and indigenous peoples.  But I think it is also not quite accurate in other ways.  All white people came from somewhere else to be sure, but when their people came from that somewhere else so long ago, long beyond living memory, how are they to think of themselves as anything else other than "American," whatever that term is supposed to mean, other than white?  The rah rah America attitude displayed by a lot of people on the right I think is indicative that a lot of people latch onto whiteness when they lack any other strong cultural upbringing.   Thankfully, my husband doesn't have any of those inclinations, though there are certainly members of his family who do.  It isn't that I don't blame them, I think blame when it comes to white supremacist thinking is a really complicated topic but that ultimately regardless of upbringing people are responsible for their own behavior, but I do understand a bit better now how, lacking anything else to bind them to each other, some people choose whiteness.  The melting pot has melted away everything else. 

America is such a beautiful mixture of so many different kinds of people, like my husband is.  We need to find a way to uplift a concept of American culture that is not dependent on a known cultural background, which I think is how the language was used in the past, while also including those for whom cultural pride is everything.  Nobody should be asked to give up what makes them uniquely from their cultural group, but at the same time, those without an established culture should be able to say their heritage is "American" in a way that is more inclusive, positive, responsible, and aware of its history than is currently common.