Thursday, November 15, 2007
Barack Obama and Dick Cheney are cousins. The new governor of the deepest South state of Louisiana is an East Indian American. The majority of dollars spent on hip-hop music come from white kids. Interracial dating and marriage are no longer a big deal to most Americans. Many, if not most, big cities now have Chinatowns, Koreatowns, all sorts of "-towns," and their borders are increasingly blurred. Those self-appointed anti-immigrant Minutemen at the borders are widely seen as extremists fighting an already-lost battle.
Here in the Bay Area, "multiculturalism" is as pervasive and visible as anywhere on Earth, or, at least, "diversity" is. People have strong opinions about these terms, as anyone who's ever sat through a training program or other forum on these issues well knows. "Under the Dragon" is a new photo essay on how diversity can play out in the real world of the Bay Area in this era of blurred ethnic identities, shifting allegiances, economic friction and other dynamics that have rapidly rendered various historically and politically correct positions moot. It's hardly all smooth sailing, though.
"We blend, intermingle, amalgamate, and forge ourselves into unexpected alloys," write photojournalist Lonny Shavelson and co-author Fred Setterberg. "Yet at the same time, we isolate ourselves in enclaves of the familiar, protect privilege, and struggle preposterously to resist change." But, they also add, "The Bay Area today is a place where people come together, often inadvertently, to confound narrow expectations about race and culture."
Thus, to choose just a few of the book's examples, many shown in bright color photographs, a Filipina takes the role of a Hindu deity in a celebration; Afghani teens adopt Latino cholo mannerisms; there are gatherings for black cowboys and Buddhists; white people dance Indian Bhangra and play Indonesian gamelan music; San Francisco's traditional Day of the Dead parade becomes a multiethnic "Burning Man in black" and its St. Patrick's Day parade features a Chinese Lion Dance performed by an African American; an Iranian psychologist volunteers via a Jewish organization to counsel Cambodian refugees; Latino converts to Islam sing in a "Muslim Tabernacle Choir." And so on and so on.
Few if any of us really seems to know what this cultural mishmash all means. These authors are content to describe the blending and borders and let Shavelson's pictures, mostly with brief descriptive captions, speak for themselves. This is probably both wise and a reflection of the fact that both authors are white - as is this reviewer - and that may have led to heightened caution in a controversial arena.
One implication here is that race is becoming ever less relevant while "community" becomes more so; and those community borders become more porous with time. Immigrants traditionally close ranks against a foreign culture when they first arrive, but over time, those lines blur. Thus, as the authors ask, "Who can keep track of which identity predominates from day to day, from hour to hour?"
Some certainly try to preserve their discrete identity. A dance teacher from the Punjab notes disapprovingly of some young would-be dancers, "Those boys cannot be Indians from Fremont. They must be from Union City." But perhaps more seriously, the economic barriers are often at least as important as the ethnic. A black educator from Oakland engagingly asks, "So when you talk about diversity and opportunities, I am asking are we really looking at equality? Or are we playing at it, calling it diversity?" Not far away, over one bridge, is Marin County, where intentionally or not "it seems that the changes of the past three decades have been repealed and the bygone era of white dominion has somehow persisted."
The book traces another theme, the commonality of tragedy in the past of many immigrants - so common, in fact, that the authors call this dynamic "terrible and ordinary." Their term is a "refugee culture, framed in bloodshed, death, eviction from longstanding homelands, and evacuation to an unfamiliar country." Cambodians, Afghanis, Guatemalans, Tibetans, Vietnamese, Bosnians and many others share some variation on slaughter and outright genocide, within a generation of their coming here. But unlike others, many of these people do not mix with other nationalities. Thus many "refugees share a common experience of suffering. And yet they remain invisible - even to one another."
Bigotry, of course, is very much alive. The sheer number of different cultures existing in this area probably works both to heighten it and smooth it over, depending upon the case (gay people, an identity which cuts across all ethnic lines, with varying visibility, are portrayed only in a couple photos of gay Asians - a Vietnamese beauty contestant who laments that only Filipinos are seen as truly beautiful). But the mixtures certainly require heightened sensitivity and tolerance. As a Hayward judge embroiled in a racially charged case between a Mexican American and a Persian - who was mistaken by all involved for an Afghan - says, "Cultural awareness around here is not just some politically correct horsepucky. It's real ... there's always a hierarchy in racism."
Perhaps the most hopeful message and image of "Under the Dragon" is that cultural and ethnic blending often happens without "bland-ing." That's something of a repudiation of the long-standing image of a melting pot where the bright borders of culture blur into dull gray, or more likely white. It's not happening, or at least not too much, except perhaps at higher socioeconomic levels - which rankles some reactionary critics and, of course, those Minutemen. Whether teens and adults adopting other cultures' mannerisms is mostly a surface affectation, or even a "good" thing at all, remains unclear. The words and images in this compelling book seek to illustrate both how a true rainbow nation can work - and where we still have a long way to go.
Steve Heilig is a writer in San Francisco.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/11/15/DDJMT1QL4.DTL
This article appeared on page E - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle