nonsense 24/7

❌ False

✅ True

from the Lavender and Red Union, a group of communists who wrote this in 1975.

My grandparents after immigrating didn’t consider themselves Korean-American or French-American. They were Americans. That they were also Korean and French was important but unrelated. Their American identity needed no hyphen or asterix next to it because the idea of being American included the idea that’d you’d been somewhere else before and you brought that place with you.

At one point, we moved away from the melting pot metaphor into the like “Great American Mixed Salad,” where instead of melding into one big soup, all the ingredients remain distinct but come together to form a unified taste. I get the metaphor, I like the metaphor—I think it’s weaker poetically but that’s a separate matter—but there’s something beautiful about the melding. Our ingredients come together to make something new. You can scoop out the chunks you don’t like, but you’ll never undo what they did to the broth.

I know the dark side of everything I’m saying. I know the promise hasn’t been kept. I know the promise in and of itself is horrific to some people, the great American conglomerate swallow up everything in its path. I know this land wasn’t some terra nullius tabula rasa for us to take and mold as we pleased, no harm, no foul. I know, I know, I know, I promise that I know. I also think there are ways these ideas can and have been beautiful, meaningful, important, aspirational in the best ways, ideals that guide the actual nation we have towards that North Star of a more perfect union. You can love a place without excusing it. Those ideas can survive people trying to torture them to death. Abolitionists were as American as slavers, and later we enshrined in the constitution that those we’d enslaved were just as American too, and we used that amendment to outlaw racial segregation in public schools, to legalize interracial marriage and later gay marriage, to affirm the federal right no abortion. Until we took that last one away. I know.