DIFFERENCES
Even on the flight from Munchen to Charlotte, without being aware that I was doing it, I was sorting people out, sorting out my fellow Americans. On the flight the announcements were made first in German and then in English. The flight crew were mostly German and all spoke both German and English. I don’t think there were many Germans on the flight but the only way that I could tell for sure who was German was by listening to them speak German. The first time I was able to sort Americans out as fellow Americans was the very long line for holders of US passports only that zigzagged back and forth between barriers so that we had to pass each other, and inspect each other, again and again.
The first thing that I noticed about my fellow Americans compared to Germans on the flight from Hannover to Munchen was how informally everyone was dressed. From a European perspective we almost all looked sloppy or at least very casual, as if we had just gotten out of bed. This connected for me with the scattered landscape from the air with buildings of all kinds scattered across the landscape, a very informal landscape. But what I did not realize at the time, because I was too tired, was that I was making a large number of subtle, or not so subtle, judgments about everyone in line, putting them into various categories of American based on obvious and not very obvious distinctions.
Of course I could separate women from men, and I could identify people by race, and I could identify a number of people who appeared to come from noneuropean ethnic backgrounds, those who appeared to be recent immigrants, and I made subtle estimations of education background simply by listening to the way that people spoke to each other. I saw only a few hints of patriotism by whether people were wearing red, white and blue. I could only recognize a few people by whether they were urban or rural by sweatshirts with a Charlotte logo although I assumed without basis that if people were traveling to Europe they were either urban educated people or lower class people connected with the military in Europe. I couldn’t tell whether people were fundamentalist Christians or not, I couldn’t tell whether they were gay or straight, except by assuming that couples were straight, particularly those with kids, without being able to identify whether two men or women together were gay or not. I made my evaluations based on skin color, male or female, form of clothing and probably most of all by people’s speech patterns. And, of course, I didn’t do any of this consciously. It is only when looking back and wondering about my feelings at fitting back into American culture that I realize that I was making all of these judgments.
The obvious judgments, when I think about it, were language, age, sex, race, ethnic background and social class from a mixture of these obvious traits and I would probably have guessed wrong about a number of people. The other distinctions that divide us as Americans that I couldn’t guess at were gender (LBQT) and whether a person was a religious fundamentalist or not. I imagine that if I could have seen the bumper stickers as they drove away I would have learned a good deal more. If they had had a Trump sticker I would have immediately assigned all the markers of the Trump tribe to them, if they had had some kind of progressive statement about inclusion or fairness I would have assigned all the progressive values to them.
In any case, this was what was going through my unconscious response even in a fogged out state from the long trip. I was home again and these were my people.
One of the things that I also didn’t think about at all was how narrow each of these distinctions was and how much we were all alike, everyone in the line. We almost all spoke American English, not Indian English or English English, or African English. We almost all had children who went to American public schools or had gone to an American public school ourselves. We all felt comfortable within American traffic patterns, all shopped occasionally at the mall or big box stores, all watched similar shows on television, all had jobs within the American economic system, all were touched by similar advertisements, all wore similar clothes, all ate very similar food. We were all: Black, Indian, male, female, young, old, gay, straight, rich, poor very similar. In 90% of who we are and what we do, we are homogeneous Americans. Our differences, which are actual, are a very small part of the 90% that is the same.
I did vaguely recognize the sameness, our Americanness, but it was the much smaller differences that I actually was paying attention to.
When I look back at this I wonder about those differences. For example, the people who appeared to come from non European countries were all US Citizens with passports. But what made them different in any way from people in America from non European countries who are not US Citizens and don’t have a passport? Kathe, my wife, was in this category all her life. I accepted her as a person, with her German citizenship and her Germanness something we were both proud of. I accept Indian doctor friends in America who are prevented from becoming US citizens because of our immigration laws. But there is no distinction in feelings or intelligence or perceptiveness between non passport holders and passport holders. And yet we make this distinction which seems to me to be an artificial distinction that prevents us from accepting each other. The most important thing about a person is who she is is and not what he is. Yet we make that distinction.
And of course that applies to all the other subtle distinctions I was making with all of the people in the line. Is the most important thing about a person her feelings as she makes her way through the world, or is her skin color that matters? Is the most important thing about a person her feelings as she makes her way through the world, or the fact that she is a female? And that applies to all of the other distinctions I was making including the ones that I couldn’t even see like whether a person was gay or straight, a religious fundamentalist or an atheist. Were we all Americans, 90% exactly alike, or was it these small distinctions that not only separated us from each other but made it difficult to even accept each other as fellow Americans, and by extension, since the difference between an American and a Indian are so much smaller than the ways in which we are the same, why is it so difficult to accept people with small differences from different parts of the world as fellow human beings with similar feelings which are the most important part of either one of us?
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 