I intended to write a commentary on Mount Everest this week. I mean I am writing a book with a character who hails from New Zealand and Sir Edmund Hillary, the man on the island nation’s five-dollar bill, is one of the first two men to summit the world’s tallest mountain. My youngest son is named after him. I discourage my Edmund from any thoughts of summiting that tall peak. There are other paths to glory. That essay will have to wait for another day.
My next-door neighbor emailed me an article about Cornell West going all in on Ta-Nehisi Coates. This was a rassling match I couldn’t resist. I knew it would be as titillating as those trips to the quarter peep shows me and that Niger Martin used to make back in the days when The Great Speckled Bird was still a thing (old school Atlanta reference). West on Coates. Black on Black crime at its finest.
I should have known better. Typical West acting out about Barack Obama’s failure to invite him to his first inauguration. Like the peep shows titillating but ultimately unsatisfying. I did find something of interest though. An excerpt from the latest work by a white woman passing for an indigenous person- Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. I’d go into the details but believe me she is passing herself off as an indigenous warrior. Somewhere Cochise must be rolling over in his grave and muttering to himself is she for real.
I live in an upside-down world. Passing, the phenomenon James Weldon Johnson pondered in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man has transformed from an attempt by certain fair skinned Blacks to avoid racism by pretending to be white into a modern hall of mirrors (old school Orson Welles reference) where everywhere you look there are white people pretending to be BIPOC. I look one way and by God, I see Rachel Dolezal. Look, over there Donald Trump’s favorite indigenous, Pocahontas, I mean Elizabeth Warren. And in the far corner Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. As that Niger Martin used to say man, please.
And what the hell is BIPOC anyway. Sounds like a mammy made attempt to acknowledge racism affects more than just Black people. You think?
I understand Dr. West’s indignation. I could go in Coates myself. But I would not have attacked him for his approval of the Obama presidency. I would have went in on his pompous, pretentious, overwrought writing style.
Anyway, gentle reader. Was that good for you? It was good for me. I mean as Cool Karl used to say. We started at the same time. Here we go.
Ah, diversity, a subject I could riff on for days and never get tired. I’ll start this week by kicking it around a little bit about Mrs. Dunbar-Ortiz’s excerpt from her latest book posted on a website I shall not name to avoid generating clicks for the pompous, pretentious, overwrought prose I read there. You gotta love academics. Like Radio Free Europe perhaps we should start a campaign of subversion titled Academic Free Writing.
Don’t believe me. Perhaps a few sentences form the excerpt to Mrs. Dunbar Ortiz’s will argue my point:
“Americans thus internalized a propensity for traumatic, righteous violence, and a quest for total security, which came to characterize a series of future conflicts. Violence against Indians, replete with demonizing colonial discourse and indiscriminate killing, established a foundation for virulent national campaigns against external enemies across the sweep of American history.”
Maybe it’s me. Maybe academic writing is an acquired taste. But I can’t imagine Dr. Anna Grant (old school HBCU reference) of Morehouse College fame penning these sentences. Good writing ought to be above all else clear and informative. And don’t Indians hail from South Asia.
Anyway, the gist of what Mrs. Dunbar-Ortiz had to say is this is a settler nation with a few white immigrants at its core who draw immigrants in for seasoning through a process called Americanization. She has some valid points. As far as I can tell she is revisiting territory she explored in her work An Indigenous People’s History of the United States. But didn’t Dee Brown already write this book and gift it with the painful title Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.
I was heart-broken after reading it. Dee Brown’s work is why I cannot claim slavery is America’s original sin. Not after reading so many disheartening chapters about the indigenous struggle against the European settlement of North America. Bury My Heart gets its title from something said about Crazy Horse and refers to Wounded Knee Creek.
The last chapter is on The Ghost Dance. A spiritual phenomenon popular amongst certain indigenous tribes at the end of the war on natives in the west. People danced in hopes of dancing their lives into a whiteless (and no spellcheck I did not mean witless) existence. For their troubles the dancers were massacred- for dancing.
Academics and activists try to put a better spin on conquest by using such terms as settler nation. I prefer conquest because inherent in the word is the brutality and cruelty visited upon this continent’s indigenous people. And what happened to this continent’s indigenous people was cruel and brutal. But North America is not going to be given back.
And even if it were, the damage has been done. Spin does not help this continent’s remaining indigenous population.
Mrs. Dunbar-Ortiz goes on to quote a Vietnamese scholar who says Southeast Asians must critique whiteness, must call out white people for their war. I’ll stop with that. What I don’t get, and I suppose I don’t have the intellectual chops to understand is if the Vietnamese people refer to what we call The War in Vietnam the American War, and they do; is that not calling it an American conflict? And isn’t that what it was?
I am not Vietnamese, and I do not claim to speak for the Vietnamese people, but I also don’t buy that one Vietnamese academic who sits in an American ivory tower can either. Being paid to be angry. It must be nice work if you can get it.
Now let me see. Lien, a young Vietnamese woman who used to be my pharmacist sat down and did an interview with me a year ago. She told me America is her dream country. Pharmacy school is a difficult achievement in Vietnam. It is much easier to get into a school of pharmacy in America, so she came here to pursue her dream of becoming a pharmacist. She passed the pharmacy exam not long after we talked and is now a practicing pharmacist. Lien and her Vietnamese husband who is also a pharmacist are living what I can only assume is a good life here. She told me you could only rent in Vietnam, but you can buy in America. This is now her home.
T, a young Vietnamese immigrant whose acquaintance I made right before the pandemic closed Georgia, sat in my office several times and talked to me about her life. She told me she loves Vietnam. It will always be her home, but she doesn’t want to live there anymore. The cost of living is too high because of foreigners in her country. America presents her with more chances to have a good life.
She is married to an American. She had to take a test to come here. She didn’t make the cut the first time. Her father she insisted she try again. She made it. This where she wants to live. For the opportunities.
Tan (pronounced Thumb) is a Vietnamese immigrant who had been living here thirty years when I met him. We used to talk quite a bit before he moved to Houston to be near his daughter. He wants her to be a pharmacist. He told me it is hard to be forced out of your home. His story is different from T and Lien. I miss him.
I’ll stop right here. I’ll keep down this rabbit hole next week. Every immigrant has their own story and their own reason for being here. It was that way in 1920 and it’s that way in 2020. Please respect those reasons enough to listen to their individual stories rather than covering them with ideology.
Dee says hello. Her and Jennifer and her dad are about to embark on a trip up 85 North. There her story will end.