When I was doing my thought experiment about the several racial groups that live in America, I neglected the Indians. There are only about 3 million of them left.
In my fantasy, I could imagine tracts of land on which all the Blacks would live, or all the Hispanics, etc. But for the Indians, with their tribal connection to their land, --all those sacred hills and dales, etc-- all I could come up with was a kind of disconnected archipelago, such as their reservations are now.
But I realized this was a failure in my commitment to diversity. Take Europe, where tens of millions of religiously and culturally alien...I mean diverse...foreigners...uh, I mean, immigrants...are now residents of all the ancient Euro states and cities. German is full of Turks. Spain has a million of the Muslims it spend 800 years expelling. Italy is full of, well, everyone. It's great. We need more of it. Vibrant and multicultural. That homogeneity was so boring and, well, racist.
So what gives me the right, I asked myself, to deprive our AmerIndian brothers and sisters, hermanos/as, of this joyous experience? (Although they might gamely reply that they've been having this joyous experience for a couple hundred years already, thank you very much.)
So I decided to create a fantasy country for them, AmerIndiana, where all the tribes would live together, in inter-tribal diversity: Navajos and Seminoles, Mohawks and Cree, Blackfeet and Sioux, etc. It's all very nice to care about the particularity of each tribe and their land --as it would have been to care about the particularities of Europeans...or hell, of Whites...-- but this needs to be let go of in order to appreciate the Brave New World where Apaches and Nez-Perce and Comanche and Crow and Ojibway can live on the same block and appreciate each other's fascinating diversity up close. And besides, what's important is their greater unity asNative Americans Indians, transcending tribalism in a, well, trans-tribal inclusive tribe. Thingy.
Some wag suggested that I import a couple million Chinese or South Africans to spice up the mix, but that would be, well, too good for this world.
In my fantasy, I could imagine tracts of land on which all the Blacks would live, or all the Hispanics, etc. But for the Indians, with their tribal connection to their land, --all those sacred hills and dales, etc-- all I could come up with was a kind of disconnected archipelago, such as their reservations are now.
But I realized this was a failure in my commitment to diversity. Take Europe, where tens of millions of religiously and culturally alien...I mean diverse...foreigners...uh, I mean, immigrants...are now residents of all the ancient Euro states and cities. German is full of Turks. Spain has a million of the Muslims it spend 800 years expelling. Italy is full of, well, everyone. It's great. We need more of it. Vibrant and multicultural. That homogeneity was so boring and, well, racist.
So what gives me the right, I asked myself, to deprive our AmerIndian brothers and sisters, hermanos/as, of this joyous experience? (Although they might gamely reply that they've been having this joyous experience for a couple hundred years already, thank you very much.)
So I decided to create a fantasy country for them, AmerIndiana, where all the tribes would live together, in inter-tribal diversity: Navajos and Seminoles, Mohawks and Cree, Blackfeet and Sioux, etc. It's all very nice to care about the particularity of each tribe and their land --as it would have been to care about the particularities of Europeans...or hell, of Whites...-- but this needs to be let go of in order to appreciate the Brave New World where Apaches and Nez-Perce and Comanche and Crow and Ojibway can live on the same block and appreciate each other's fascinating diversity up close. And besides, what's important is their greater unity as
Some wag suggested that I import a couple million Chinese or South Africans to spice up the mix, but that would be, well, too good for this world.
3 comments:
Speaking of diversity, did Ex Cathedra see that the capitalist food industry has put out a new cookie: »Oreo celebrates gay pride with rainbow cookie«?
Rainbow on the outside, white on the inside -- as Isaac Newton reveal'd.
I feel so accepted.
That's what happens when the higher love demands validation by the Demos in a cookie formula.
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