Random After-Class Angry Thoughts

If you don't have a hyphen, you're not special.
If you don't have a hyphen, you have no culture to call your own.
If you don't have a hyphen, you can't claim pride of your ancestry, because your ancestors were conquerors and murderers and slave-drivers and to hold them up as an example would offend those who have hyphens.
I would like to have a hyphen, but I will never get one.

My friends have them:

Korean hyphen--
Chinese hyphen--
African hyphen--
Mexican hyphen--
--American

But I am only American and that's all I'll ever be. There is no option for European-American, only White, and everyone knows they were the bad guys of history. If I were, perhaps, not pale and grey-eyed, I could claim some other label-- maybe even that small part of my heritage that crossed the Bering Strait when it was above water-- but I am pale and grey-eyed and almost blonde and therefore I am White.

My brothers, at least, have dark hair. Their eyes-- because they are lucky-- are brown. They're “ethnic.” I am nothing.

I could claim cowboys and apple pie as my own, I suppose, but the majority of cowboys were Brown or Black and anyway they killed Indians, and I've never made an apple pie. Apple pies are good, though. Unlike cowboys. Who anyway were copies of the vaqueros south of the border, who in turn came with cows from Spain... but that was so long ago it doesn't matter.

Centuries have a tendency to erase distinctions.

Centuries ago, not many but enough, my ancestors came to this land in a boat from who knows where and gave up their names, their foods, their languages for.... something. Something which we are informed does not exist for White America, though we should respect this something that belongs to other people like the Chinese-- they certainly have it. We gave it away before we knew it was valuable.

And now we are told to respect this thing that others have, this culture. They don't deserve to be judged by our standards, as whatever we have is flawed and theirs is a noble people in slow recovery from our depredations: we have no right to place ourselves on the same level. Our parents slaughtered Native children and owned Black slaves and excluded hopeful immigrant Chinese and detained Japanese in internment camps in the desert; they are blameless.

The Irish might have suffered, once, but now they are simply White and just as guilty as the rest.

We read now of the Chicano movement, the crisis of cultures in collision: I look upon this with jaded grey eyes. Do they realize that in time the distinction of their hyphen will fade away and they will become homogenized, assimilated, lost as my ancestors were lost? In the end, to be the same is the same as being nothing. This is all to which we are told to aspire.

In time, the whole world will be hyphen-less. Perhaps then the sins of my forefathers will be forgiven.