What in the world is going on in the world? Judging by recent reports, Americans have been detribalizing while Europeans appear to be retribalizing.
The tulip-lined charm of The Netherlands, for example, was shattered this week by the assassination outside a radio station of maverick politician Pim Fortuyn, who was described widely as a rising star of Europe’s anti-immigrant far right.
Europe is particularly rattled that Fortuyn, 54, happened to meet his misfortune just nine days before his party was expected to win a significant bloc in parliament.
Europeans had begun only a day before his death to breathe easier because another anti-immigrant politician, far-right-winger Jean-Marie Le Pen, had handily lost Sunday’s presidential election in France.
That Le Pen, a longtime leader among France’s immigrant-haters, could advance to the runoffs at all shook up Europe’s political scene, which has struggled to live with another far-righter, Joerg Haider, whose anti-immigration Freedom Party shares power in Austria’s coalition government.
A new populist extremism is feeding off population anxieties. More than a decade of massive immigration from countries across the Balkans and the Middle East has led to friction, especially when the non-white newcomers are less white and less Christian than their new country’s traditional population.
“No European country today seems immune against the populist stench that is strong enough to pollute political debate and weigh negatively on the democratic tradition,” laments La Libre Belgique, Belgium’s leading French newspaper.
By contrast, America looks like a model of tolerance and inclusion, despite our turbulent history of ethnic and racial squabbles. Even after the terrorist horrors of Sept. 11, Americans generally have avoided a sweeping backlash against immigrants and our debates about immigration and civil liberties have remained remarkably civil.
Instead, I see immigration anxieties playing themselves out in a national dialogue in the media, but, so far, not so much in our politics. This dialogue is exemplified by two current polar-opposite books by commentators whom I am fortunate enough to have debated a few times on television and off: Richard Rodriguez’s “Brown: The Last Discovery of America” and Patrick J. Buchanan’s “The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization.”
For years, Buchanan has bristled in his syndicated column and two famously unsuccessful presidential campaigns about the growth of immigration by non-Europeans and “the slag heap of multiculturalism.” In this spirit, his book cites projections that show white Americans becoming a minority by mid-century. As his book title suggests, Buchanan sees western civilization threatened by what’s often called “the browning of America” by new minorities. He doesn’t offer many remedies, except to stop all immigration into the United States for an unspecified cooling-off period.
Rodriguez, a San Francisco-based editor for Pacific News Service, offers a far more hope-filled and, to my way of thinking, realistic view. In lyrically written essays, he glorifies the “brown” that Buchanan fears. It cannot threaten America’s way of life, he tells us, because inevitably and indelibly cross-cultural sharing and interracial mixing is our way of life.
In hopes of “undermining the notion of race in America,” Rodriguez offers something to outrage racial and ethnic loyalists of all political extremes. He worries that the political right is not as ready as many claim they are to get rid of affirmative action, but he also worries that the political left is not ready to come to terms with moving beyond a regime of racially based affirmative action.
He is amused and encouraged to meet self-described “Blaxicans,” “Hin-Jews,” “Negropinos” and at least one “Korean-African-Baptist-Buddhist.” Like pro golfer Tiger Woods, they feel freer than ever before to declare and openly explore all of their ancestries.
He was similarly amused, he once told me, to interview a white hate-group leader over lunch in southern California where, when asked what he would like to eat, requested “Mexican food.”
As an African-American who has seen a whirlwind of cultural and attitudinal changes in America since the 1950s, I sometimes have to run to keep up with Rodriguez’s forward-rushing vision. Nevertheless, I feel just as reassured as he by the eagerness with which newcomers still want to be become American. Just check out the waiting lists at schools that teach English as a second language. Even when the elders resist, their kids eagerly embrace the world of Big Macs and MTV.
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My generation was the first in my family to grow up in schools and neighborhoods with white kids. My son grows up with every kind of kid. He tunes into Latin hip-hop on our way to have kabobs and rent an East Indian movie. His world is going brown. He and his friends don’t seem too anxious about it. I hope that we, the elders, don’t screw it up before they get their chance to straighten it out.
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