If you’re still calling yourself multicultural, you’re not — yet.
If you’re still translating their words into yours, you’re still trapped inside you. If you’re still comparing their foods to yours, you’re still sightseeing. If you’re still changing their currency into yours and comparing their incomes to yours you haven’t entered their worlds — yet.
The reason many US citizens think all their fellow citizens are ethnocentric is because those of us who aren’t ethnocentric are already out there, wandering the world, fitting in, and when we return you don’t recognize us as one of you. Because we’re not.
Toto, I don’t think we’re from Kansas anymore. But, where are we from?
Arabs thought I was from the US because I treated them with the respect the Europeans didn’t. Asians knew I wasn’t English or Australian because I asked and listened when they answered but, most couldn’t place me — Swiss? Europeans thought I was Canadian or a British colonial because I spoke well and had no discernible national perspective. Africans were stunned when I treated them as equals and demanded they treat me as their equal.
And back in the US everyone assumed I was a foreigner, from some strange country in which everyone spoke English as a second language with a slight accent but…what kind of accent? I couldn’t be from the US because I didn’t speak American or react with American instincts to the things I heard and saw, and I knew so much about other people and other places.
You don’t see us, the liberated among you, because we don’t speak or act as you know we would speak and act if we were really Americans. You have no idea how many multicultural Americans there are because you don’t think we’re Americans.
So, don’t be so down on Americans. We can learn. We can be open. We can fit in, and we are, millions of us aren’t from Kansas anymore.
The danger in becoming truly multicultural isn’t in losing your identity. You haven’t lost it. You’re still you. The danger is in losing your home, losing the chance of a home, losing the acceptance of those who occupy the place you might want to call home; because you’ve learned to have an open mind, to question all things and consider all problems from all angles, to see below the traditional dust covering things, to see the truth others won’t admit or are too culturally blind to see.
The danger is you will accept the world and, in doing so you will lose the world’s acceptance.
Try it. You can, without leaving the United States. In fact, if you can open your mind enough, you can do it without leaving this page, close your eyes and imagine it for yourself:
New Yorkers won’t accept Texas Baptists, who won’t accept sacrilegious San Franciscans, who won’t accept people who shoot deer in Wyoming, who’ll accept anyone who’ll leave them alone, which excludes Michigan’s Muslims, who must institute Sharia or kill those who get in their way, especially New Yorkers who live for the things Muslims hate.
There, without leaving the page, you grasp the problem, the circle of intolerance. Each little America is intolerant of each other little America, not to mention places outside America. To accept them all risks being rejected by them all.
That is the grand danger in becoming truly multicultural, because everyone, everywhere exists within a culture that is more or less blind to all others, and opening your eyes doesn’t just make you the man in the crowd who is aware, it makes you the man of whom the crowd is aware.
