I happened to catch this on Viewpoint with Eliot Spritzer last night, and I thought it was really powerful. Zafar is right: What, exactly, do American Muslims have to do before they’re American “enough”?
Harris Zafar, national spokesperson for the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community USA, and “Viewpoint” host Eliot Spitzer discuss the possibility that the gunman behind the mass shooting at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wis., actually intended to target Muslims and whether a rise in anti-Muslim sentiment is linked to political rhetoric.
“The Republican primaries were ridden with such incidents where Mr. Santorum, Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann repeatedly spread this message of fear of Muslims, fear of Shariah law,” Zafar says. “It’s really given us this impression that we’re not American enough. No matter how many generations we’ve been here, we’re just not American enough.”
Well, we all learned in grade school that America is the big ‘melting pot’ where immigrants from various parts of the globe came together to create our culture. This does seem to have changed during the 20th century into an America where we have diverse cultural islands trying to peacefully coexist next to each other. I’m not saying this is a bad thing but it will be difficult to define where the cultural boundaries can stay distinct and where they must bend to the larger society. For example, in Latino communities where people don’t feel the need to speak a common language with those in their adopted country. Or in the case of religious minorities who purposely dress dramatically different from the rest of their countrymen – choosing to keep themselves visually separated every moment of the day.
If you’ve chosen to come here why do you want to be so separated from the culture of your adopted country? To what extent do you want to contribute to the society and join into it or are you just wanting to live amid and benefit from it? These are legitimate questions. And I’m sure I’ll be labeled a bigot for even bringing up these non-PC issues.
In the old days, immigrants had an array of resources to help them assimilate: Churches, settlement houses, fraternal organizations. They’re not there anymore. One of my friends is an English-as-a-second-language teacher in an inner-city school, she says the parents learn from the kids with varying degrees of success.
In my part of the city, lots of people speak Spanish. But they’re from Puerto Rico, which, last I heard, was part of the United States. They ARE speaking the language of their country.
My grandmother and her sister came over on the same boat. My grandmother worked as a shopkeeper and a cleaning lady in a Polish neighborhood, and never learned to speak more than a bit of broken English. Her sister, who worked in an office, spoke impeccable English. Sometimes it’s just a matter of opportunity.
Notice that Puerto Rico has chosen to remain a territory and not to join the United States. If they want to keep their native language, so what? And if I visit there, like any foreign country, I will brush up on their language so I can communicate. It’s basic courtesy.
Also, there are a plethora of opportunities to take ESL classes in most communities in this country – and many of them are free.
Among the Eastern European community of my ancestors, while the adults may never have caught on to English they insisted that their children did. There are areas of the US where the US born kids don’t speak English and the solution has been, teach school in Spanish. Not the best choice. Should we set up schools in Chinese, Japanese, Hindi, Arabic? Instead, let’s help them all learn English. And how terrific that they will then speak 2 languages. Wish we all could.