"What We Lost, Who We Are"

I loved how the teuf-teuf explained to the little oiseau that a steam shovel couldn't be a little bird's mother. I didn't come to understand until years later that the hand- lettered cards in my books represented my mother's own quiet rebellion; she was reclaiming the language that had been forced out of her childhood.

Even though she was born near Brussels, Belgium, my mother had to go to the library to make sure the French in the note cards was correct. Since she was two, she'd lived in Milwaukee, where her GI father had brought her and my grandmother after the end of World War II.

His mother (my great-grandmother), a fierce woman whose own grandfather had come to America from Germany a century earlier, turned an icy shoulder to her Belgian daughter-in-law for being a foreigner. My mother had to speak only English "because it wasn't polite to speak a foreign language in front of people who didn't know it."

This was why when I was a little girl she insisted that I learn French and call my Belgian grandmother "Bobonne." The English word "Grandma," my mother's name for my dour great-grandmother, evoked painful memories of a harsh welcome to America.

"At least she doesn't have rickets," my great-grandmother had sniffed the first time she met my mother. Such intense dislike of anything foreign rang true to the mantra of old-stock English, Scottish and German Americans who held themselves above newcomers. By their rules, assimilation was a zero-sum proposition: you couldn't blend in and succeed unless you gave up who you were.

For white Americans, cultural identity was the price of economic opportunity. Today, this insistence on complete assimilation, together with its corollary that cultural and ethnic markers are dangerous, threatens the sense of unity that white Americans have long credited it with creating. It sterilized the quirks and habits, rituals and expressions that mark people as members of a group; in the process it eroded the sense of the little things that hold Americans together as a wider community.

Tremendously self-absorbed yet also astonishingly lacking in self-awareness, white America still knows itself best at its borders: when we are at war, maintaining trade barriers to cheap foreign imports, or raising fences against illegal immigrants. It is time to revisit the way we came to see ourselves. By leaving Americans of European descent without a positive way to define themselves, the old taboo against cultural markings forced us to define ourselves by exclusion: saying who we are not instead of who we are. This seeded the culture wars of the last two decades and left white Americans unprepared for a new wave of immigrants who do not look like our great-grandparents did.

Travelers love this joke: What do you call someone who speaks two languages? Bilingual. Someone who speaks many languages? Polyglot. One language? American. It's dark humor, funny because it is so accurate.

English is our unifying signature and underscores the isolationism that only a superpower can afford: if the world wants to talk to us, let it learn our language. To me, it also suggests that this country has not yet formed a national identity that is solid enough for many Americans to be comfortable outside of it.

What does it mean to be American? Individualism, consumerism and mobility are our totems as expressed by the suburb, the strip mall, and the superhighway. Celebrating individualism yet subverting it through a maddening sameness, white middle class Americans drive in their Fords and Chevrolets to or from their single-family homes in order to buy what they want when they want it. They identify themselves by allegiance to brand names: Schwinn bicycles, Barbie and GI Joe dolls, Nikes and Calvin Kleins. Culture is commerce; commerce culture.

White Americans replaced their old-country identities and those of others with ersatz ethnicities: hyphenated subgroups cobbled together from Americans who are descended from Europeans, Africans, Asians and Latin Americans. Whiteness is a sterilized version of a pan-European ethnicity that happily claims hamburgers, kindergarten, and spaghetti with meatballs as American.

It also imposes strange unities on nonwhites, who in turn have transformed these semi-arbitrary designations into symbolic power as well as political clout. African Americans, whose ancestors often came here long before many of the whites who now see themselves as the true Americans, don't need to wear dashikis to embrace symbolic ties to Africa. Asian immigrants have excelled economically, using to their advantage the way Americans have lumped them all together and created the stereotype of "honorary whites" with super-achieving children; this is even more ironic in light of the way many American cities embrace their Chinatowns as symbols of exoticism.

Latin Americans, who themselves represent varying mixes of European, African and indigenous Americans, come to the United States and discover that they are "Hispanic." Once the shock of the label subsided, Hispanics embraced it as a source of political power. If white Americans wanted to believe that Puerto Ricans ate tacos then let them, as long as they realized that Hispanic Americans voted and had cash to spend.

New immigrants are arriving today in numbers approaching a million each year. They are bringing white Americans face to face with the ambiguities and contradictions in our own identity. About 9 percent of Americans are immigrants now, far less as a percentage of the total than during the Great Wave of 1880­1920, but nearly double the 5 percent level in the 1970s.

This is happening amid a massive demographic change. According to 1998 quick-census figures comparing the population to 1990, the African-American population increased by 13 percent to 34 million people, or nearly 13 percent of the total population. The Asian population increased by 41 percent to 10.5 million people, or about 4% of the total. Hispanics increased by 35 percent to 30 million, or 11 percent of the total. American Indians, Eskimos and Aleuts increased by 14 percent to 2.4 million, just shy of one percent of all Americans.

Though census figures indicate that the white population grew by 6.6 percent to 223 million, or 83 percent of the populace, this figure includes white Hispanics (the census asks about both race and Hispanic identity, since Hispanics can be white, black, indigenous or mixed). In states like California, whites are giving up their majority status. The 2000 census will most probably confirm these trends, making it clear that America no longer looks as white as white Americans imagine it.

In face of this demographic change, the last decade has been characterized by intense debate over what it is to be American, intensifying at times to open conflict. A harsh set of 1996 laws withdrew government social services from legal immigrants, including those who paid taxes to support those benefits. Worse, the laws denied immigrants due process and forced retroactive punishments on those who had committed petty crimes, even when they had already paid their debts to society.

In Arkansas last year, a local tax assessor denied a Dominican couple and a South Korean immigrant a property tax credit because they did not speak English; they sued. A California group, the European American Issues Forum, declared itself to be the first group to fight hate crimes against whites; it convinced the state legislature to declare October "European-American Heritage Month."

In the fall of 1999, students at New York's City College demanded the resignation of the head of the board of regents after he was quoted calling Dominicans and Mexican immigrants "uneducated Indians from the hills who needed remedial classes."

Thankfully, public sentiment does seem to have reversed from the heights of immigrant-bashing that surrounded the 1994 elections; activists are now working to roll back the 1996 laws.

The current debate over whether new immigrants will acculturate often openly cites race. Pat Buchanan famously argued that a million Englishmen would make better Americans than a million Zulus. The expatriate British writer Peter Brimelow argued in his book Alien Nation that America is fundamentally a white nation and that the new immigrants are destroying national character.

Ironically, it is only easy to question new immigrants' ability to assimilate if we hide our own past. From the distance of generations, it is easy for white Americans to forget that our own ancestors' assimilation was traumatic. Even my great-grandmother's dislike of things foreign was disingenuous, since she and her brothers still spoke German, though only in private after the Great War cast all things German into disfavor.

Though the French scholar Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835 praised America as "a society formed from all the nations of the world," American history has been a long series of ethnic slurs, with each group denigrating the newest to arrive. As early as 1753, for example, Benjamin Franklin wrote that the German immigrants arriving in America were "the most stupid of their nation," though they were hard working and good farmers.

My great-grandmother's German-speaking grandfather had come here from Schleswig-Holstein in 1848, when Germany was not yet unified and America was still deciding whether it was a German or Anglo nation. For much of the nineteenth century, daily newspapers in fifteen cities and the majority of books here were published in German.

In 1880, the Great Wave began: a four-decade flow during which twenty-six million immigrants arrived here from Southern and Eastern Europe. Many of them --the Irish, the Italians, the Slavs-- were deemed to be "unassimilable." Among these were my father's grandparents, who traced their roots to a Croatian enclave in what is now southeastern Austria, to Polish Galizia and to Bohemia.

A backlash ensued as immigrants reached 15 percent of the U.S. population. In 1921, Congress limited immigration to 3 percent of the existing number of each country's population in the United States as counted by the 1910 census. America did not re-open the doors until more than three decades later, after we had won a second war against Germany; if anything proved that an immigrant had assimilated it was death in combat.

By the time we removed racial characteristics from our criteria for citizenship in 1952, Americans were becoming part of the world again, opening the way to an ethnic revival. When the World's Fair came to Brussels in 1958, my mother spent the whole summer with her family in Belgium; she still has the pictures of herself under the Atomium, that giant model of the atom as a symbol of human capabilities.

My great-grandmother died in 1960, freeing my mother's family from her xenophobic opinions. Not long after that, my American grandfather became the Belgian honorary consul for Wisconsin. As a college student in the 1960s, my mother studied French, this time with the blessing of her parents, who told her she could make good money as a translator. There weren't enough books to go around in French class; she met my father when they ended up sharing a text.

In 1965, Congress re-opened the gates to new immigrants, ending the exclusion of Asians, abolishing the National Origins Quota System, and setting a new emphasis on reunifying families. In the 1960s and 1970s, the old "melting-pot" metaphor of many sources blending into one was re-cast as a monolith that was undermining the ideal of a pluralist society.

Assimilation had failed in that a simple "American" identity was simply unavailable, as Nathan Glazer and Patrick Moynihan argued in their classic work, Beyond the Melting Pot (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1963 revised 1970). Ethnicity, they argued, was and would continue to be the defining factor in American life. In New York City, this was certainly the case, but the heartland didn't quite catch on.

Celebrating the 1976 Bicentennial in grade school in the Midwest, I absorbed mixed messages about immigration and ethnicity and not much at all about race other than that slavery was wrong. Identifying oneself as part of an ethnic group instead of simply "American" was bad, although we did honor our immigrant ancestors on a symbolic level.

For a project on Ellis Island we were instructed to tell the class where our families had come from. Belgium and Austria (never mind Poland) notwithstanding, I became "French" on my mother's side and "German" on my father's. The end of the melting pot did not lead to authentic identity but instead to a distorted approximation at best.

In three generations, the turn-of-the-century "unassimilables" --like the Wukovitses who became the Wuckers-- blended in. Painful as it was, my family could do so because we looked like our neighbors. We became "white," reaping the privileges of being "true Americans" but also losing the ability to talk about who we really were.

A young Black Studies professor recently recalled to me what happened when he asked ethnic studies undergraduates to scribble quickly a list of things that made up their cultural identity. The black and immigrant students had no trouble drawing up lists, but the few white students in the class stared at blank pieces of paper: metaphors for an area of their lives that had been left empty.

The great paradox of white American ethnicity is this: what we share is that we are ashamed to express an ethnic ethnicity. In surveys carried out in the 1980s, the sociologist Richard D. Alba found that many white Americans do consider themselves to have an ethnic identity, but that they fear to express it for fear of seeming "less American."

White Americans' discomfort with ethnicity goes back much farther, to the days when it marked people for prejudice; no immigrant wanted to appear to be the last to arrive and thus the lowest one on the totem pole. The culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s made it even harder to speak about whiteness by tingeing it with blame and guilt for slavery and the brutalities of the wars against the Indians.

To assert whiteness implied condoning white supremacists and hate groups. This ironically made it much harder to create a bridge in the cultural wars: moderate voices from white Americans who could speak constructively about their own identity and thus do not need to define white America by attacking people who are different.

The newest wave of immigrants do not look like the white Europeans who came here at the turn of the twentieth century. Nor do they feel that holding on to their old identities make it impossible to become American.

For new immigrants, cheap phone calls and airfares have made it easy to stay in contact with the old country; the resulting transnational communities may appear to suggest that immigrants are not embracing America. But the same technology makes newcomers more likely than ever to be familiar with America when they arrive.

Many countries have constructed life-lines to their American diasporas. Now people can belong to two places at once. In El Salvador, eleven percent of gross national product comes from money sent home from Salvadoreans living in the United States. The Dominican Republic's President, Leonel Fernandez, who was raised in Manhattan, has urged Dominicans living here to become American citizens. The Dominican-born Chicago Cubs slugger Sammy Sosa is as much a hero in his homeland as he is in the United States.

Despite the new immigrants' strong ties to their homelands, they are indeed assimilating here; possibly even faster than did the Great Wave white Europeans. A recent National Immigration Forum study finds that within ten years of arriving in the United States, 76 percent of immigrants spoke English proficiently. At the turn of the century, one in four immigrants could not speak English; today, only 8 percent of immigrants over five years old do not speak English.

Intermarriage, a strong indicator of assimilation, is very high among second- and third-generation immigrants. In 1990, more than three quarters of immigrants who had lived here for forty years were naturalized; of the entire foreign-born population four out of ten had been naturalized. Within twenty years of arriving in the United States, 61 percent of immigrants owned their own homes.

Pop culture is perhaps the best evidence of how well new immigrant groups are successfully Americanizing -- and shaping America at the same time. After Puerto Rican heartthrob Ricky Martin exploded onto the music scene with his Grammy Awards performance, the covers of a at least half-dozen mainstream glossies showcased America's Latin craze. Members of the hip-hop band Fugees, named for Haitian refugees interned in camps at Guantanamo, are openly proud of their Haitian and Jamaican roots, yet deftly pay tribute to the decades of American pop music that they meld into their hit songs.

Just as white Americans have long done with Negro spirituals, jazz and other black forms of cultural expression, we've co-opted the music of groups who don't look like us. What better demonstration exists that culture is best used a means of exchange, not division?

When white Americans do preserve our own cultural markers, it is on a symbolic, private level. In my home, not studying French was never an option. Even after we moved to Texas, where Spanish was far more useful, my brother and sisters had to learn French first. My last year of high school I saved money from my part-time job in a cheap clothing store to pay for a trip to Germany and to Belgium, where my many second cousins greeted me, la petite Américaine.

While I was there, Bobonne's mother Bonnemaman died; at the funeral I stood with my Belgian relatives and looked at the huge bouquet of flowers that my parents had sent via FTD. Those flowers were "From America"; as my cousins pointed out, just like me. There, across the Atlantic, I began thinking about what it meant to be from America.

American families like mine cannot retrieve what we lost in the assimilation process. But we can learn how to think about what our own culture is, who we are, and why. We can make it clear that there is an encompassing American identity: a civic culture and a shared ideal of freedom.

Being from somewhere else does not contradict becoming American; it reinforces it. Our ancestors' rejection of our past, though understandable, did us a disservice. We will compound it if we push newer immigrants to make the same mistakes that we did.