Pride is Prejudice: Column

From the time I was a small boy in Brooklyn, my father devoted a not inconsiderable amount of effort to stoking my ethnic pride. He'd regale me with heroic tales of Da Vinci and DiMaggio. On Columbus Day, he'd brave the (hated) Manhattan throngs in order to prop me on his shoulders for the parade, with its endless procession of banners celebrating the Marconis and Meuccis. And yet it wasn't long at all before I found myself perplexed by Dad's agenda. Was he seriously suggesting that the vowel at the end of Dimag's surname helped him collect a single hit during the famous streak? For that matter, if it was Da Vinci's Italian genes that gave us the Mona Lisa or the design for the helicopter, why weren't people in 15th Century Italy churning out helicopters and Mona Lisas left and right? Seemed to me that the role models Dad kept citing were merely exceptional individuals whose achievements had nothing to do with Italy, other Italians, my father, or me. Plus, this being the 50's, the heyday of the Mob, I sensed a more troubling dimension to Dad's entreaties. I recall asking, "But if I say I'm Italian and so was DiMaggio, isn't that the same as somebody else saying you're Italian and so was Capone? Why can't I just be me?"

I am especially mindful of such long-ago dialogues these days, given the proliferation of cultural forces urging deep immersion in our ethnic and racial backgrounds. There are those ubiquitous ads for Ancestry DNA. There are popular TV shows like "Who Do You Think You Are?" and "Finding Your Roots." Almost every college maintains an Office of Diversity, whose mission is to help students glory in their supposed origins and to promote relevant associations and even dedicated coursework.

Consider what's really happening here. We are taking hordes of people who may never have given that much thought to "who they think they are" and we're training them to de-assimilate: to feel bound to some of their neighbors but separate from the rest. And it's not separate and equal, but rather separate and superior, inasmuch as the entire point of exploring one's heritage is to take pride in it. I now give the floor to George Carlin, riffing on his own putative heritage, "Being Irish isn't a skill. Pride should be reserved for something you can actually do, not for something that comes down to DNA. You wouldn't say I'm proud to be predisposed to have colon cancer, would you?"

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But such retrograde thinking is no laughing matter in its social impact. At a time when American society is quite polarized enough already, we should not be extolling notions that, intentionally or not, encourage us to focus more intently on our differences. We need no added incentive to feel estranged from those around us.

Moreover, as implied in the question I posed to my father, pride and prejudice are fruits of the same poison tree: the mindless effort to correlate major personal traits with ethnicity and race. For if there is something inherent in being Italian that produced Da Vinci or DiMaggio, is there not also something inherent in being Italian that produced Capone or Gotti? When you exalt your heritage, you are embracing the logic of the bigot. 

Thus none of this is as innocuous as it may sometimes seem. We say we simply want to feel a spiritual kinship with people like us, but really how far is it from uplifting sagas about "people like us" to grim accusations about "people like them"? In a very real sense, pride is prejudice.

If I am your neighbor, am I less like you for the lack of forebears in Lima or Lagos? We both tend our lawns; we send our kids to the same schools. We wake up to the same lousy winter weather, shaking our heads at one another as we scrape the ice from our windshields. I am no more Italian than you are Swedish or Nigerian. We are each one of 300 million American countrymen in the here and now. That is the bond we should reinforce, not some abstract and anachronistic lineage that drags us back, on our separate paths, to nations if not whole cultures that no longer exist.

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This is not an argument for a bland, white-bread society. The basil does not need to stand off to the side and declare its independence from the soup in order to be recognized; its contribution to flavor will be apparent. The grand social Cuisinart of American culture has already processed bits and pieces of all constituent cultures, and will continue to do so. Every culture ends up "in there."

Each of us has the power to opt out of today's heritage-mania-to insist on being appraised on our own merits. One of Americana's bedrock ideals is reinvention, an unshackling from the chains of tradition. I am no more tied to being Italian than I am tied to being a barber, as was my grandfather. We must look forward, not backward.

In this case the past is not prologue; it is simply past, and ought be left there.

Steve Salerno is author of the book SHAM: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless. He blogs on social issues atwww.shamblog.com. Follow him on Twitter @iwrotesham. 

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