A dispatch from the Associated Press broke the news: ”One in five Americans are members of ethnic minorities as the Hispanic population jumped by more than 50 percent and the number of Asians in the United States doubled in the 1980s.”
Gosh, I hate to burst any bubbles, but who in the United States isn`t ethnic? Or a member of a minority? First the American Indians were pushed aside by the Spanish, French and English. There went the neighborhood. Those early interlopers gave way to a parade of others, and the news that the Asian population has doubled in the last decade only brings things full circle, since this continent`s Indians are thought to be of Asiatic origin.
Indians, by the way, are no longer Indians. They`re Native Americans on the official form-as if a lot of the rest of us aren`t. And black folks have gone from Negro to Colored to African-American. Just as White Anglo-Saxon Protestants have become Anglos. It`s not easy to tell what all of us are anymore.
One suspects that, with each passing generation and war, we`re all becoming Americans, period. At least that`s the way it`s always worked. The sophisticates assure us that the melting pot never worked and that this is really a Culturally Pluralistic Society-but the sophisticates may be too busy devising such terms to notice the remarkable mix of complexions they pass on the street, or the crazy-quilt culture that`s all called American.
It`s just not easy to pigeonhole Americans. According to the AP story,
”Nearly 10 million people said they were of a race other than the choices given on the Census form.” Attaway, Americans! We refuse to stay within the lines. Pity the story didn`t specify which nonconformist, if not imaginary, races were mentioned on those 10 million Census forms. The list would probably have been a paean to American creativity-and freedom of choice. For that matter, scientists are having an ever harder time finding anything scientific about the very concept of race.
This decade`s great menace (everybody seems to take a turn at this role, from the Irish to the Japanese) is the Hispanic immigrant. See the panicky rush to declare English the official language of the state, nation or maybe precinct. It might restore perspective to note that as early as the 18th Century a statesman as ordinarily farsighted as Ben Franklin was expressing similar fears about German settlers in Pennsylvania: ”They will so soon outnumber us, that all the advantages we have will, in my opinion, be not able to preserve our language and even our government. . . .”
Similar warnings have been issued about every new wave of immigration. Talk about a melting pot: By 1890, the foreign-born population of Chicago almost equaled the city`s entire population in the previous Census. At the time, immigrants made up a third of Boston`s population, and a fourth of Philadelphia`s. Four of every five New Yorkers were either immigrants or the children of immigrants. To describe such a society as bilingual would have been a vast understatement.
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How do you suppose the descendants of that polyglot admixture came to speak English without its having been declared the only official, certified language in these United States? Could it be that they realized that knowing English would be the way to get ahead in America? Or could it have something to do with the tremendous absorptive power of the English tongue?
Declaring a language official doesn`t make it any more or less a national tongue. See the mess Canada has worked itself into by trying to settle its linguistic divisions by official decree. No market is freer than that of language. Why try to subject it to official regulation at this late date?
The notion that English needs to be voted the country`s official language in order to save it reflects not only the usual xenophobia but a ridiculous lack of confidence in the American language, which is no longer exactly English, and hasn`t been at least since Mencken wrote ”The American Language.”
Yet the Great Language War goes not very merrily on. Puerto Rico`s Senate has just approved a bill making Spanish that island`s official language, doubtless in retaliation for various states` declaring English theirs. In a very American check and balance, the municipal assembly of the Puerto Rican capital of San Juan retaliated by declaring both Spanish and English official for city business.
There are few things one can safely say about ethnicity in America. For example, that it is important but not in the way many make it out to be. Being ethnic is a lot more complex than classifications on a Census form or news stories about who`s ethnic or in a minority, yet it`s also a lot simpler. Maybe you have to live here.