Standing in an AutoZone filled with pasty white men I watched as one of the most striking Native American young men that I have ever seen come into the store. It was the richness of his color with its stark difference to my sun deprived gaunt appearance that made me shudder. The metaphor was striking to me… Me, the nutritionally deprived stereotypical WONDER bread (the bread of us older folks) and he demonstrating the thick, textured fullness of a bygone era, long assimilated out of generations of ethnic immigrants who arrived with their foreign tongues and thick accents.
I imagined what his life would a have been had he been allowed to mature with a respectful homage to his people and their ways of life. I found my stomach tighten with thoughts of the many years of cultural genocide that took place at the hands of men with white emotionless expressions demonstrating a depraved ethnocentric sense of superiority in the obliteration of any or all who appeared or embodied “difference”. I look away from the young man not wanting to make him any more self conscious than he appears. I feel shame for my lineage and our refusal to change our ways and learn the vast lessons of the narratives that arise from “difference”.
It is similar with African Americans, Asian Americans and individuals of Latino descent. It is as if we want to deprive the richness of their appearance, their dialects and their narratives making them as white bread deprived as we have become. We criticize people for not speaking English so much that I have yet to encounter a family who has allowed their own children to grow up speaking their native language. And despite the fact that our constitution allows for “freedom of religion” I have yet to come across a verbose Christian who doesn’t try to shame me for my Hindu and Native American practices.
I prefer the richness of color now because the ghostly shells that now take residence in the souls of white men, regardless of their original ethnic heritage, are disheartening. This sentiment was further engraved in my soul as I took a spot in the whirl pool after doing my lap swim. There, 5 aging men sat stoically avoiding contact with each other, their faces grim with what I can only assume was a sense of loss. Now resigned to the fate of aging, white men who bought into their own ethnic superiority over “others” deemed inferior faced the karmic reflection of the injustice done to so many. They had lost their status and been relegated to having to live the rest of their lives devoid of the truth inherent within their own truths. They had chosen to create and maintain the practices towards others that now imprison the perspectives of their lives.
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