Herban Sprawl

There was a piece in yesterday’s paper about a mother who had moved her family out of Washington, D.C. into Maryland so they could go to school without all the distractions of an urban neighborhood. It was a good idea in that her kids liked their new school and were doing well. There was one hitch in the whole plan. Turns out the school and town had some real issues with racism. Suddenly, her daughters, who were churning out good grades and enjoying the extracurricular activities, were the subjects of racial taunting and waving of the Confederate flag. They got kind of subdued after that, but they kept on keeping on. The last straw was when they saw someone outside their house, taking pictures.

The school tried to bring about some peace, but the flag-waving continued. One mother went so far as to declare that the Confederate flag was part of her son’s heritage.

I want it understood up front that my family had no part in that mess from 1860-1864, nor did they have any part in the Jim Crow nonsense. They were busy harvesting olives and grapes in the north of Italy, and growing fruit in the groves of Sicily. They were raising goats and farming in the mountains near Trieste. They didn’t get here until just after the turn of the last century. So what I am about to say is colored by their experience.

When they got here, like other immigrants, they learned quickly that they had to learn to speak English in short order, and in order to not be kept on the bottom rung forever, they had to leave behind their culture.

I want to focus on that idea of leaving behind a culture in order to be able to function in a civilized fashion in a civilized society. My grandfather was in the position of leaving behind a heritage of Tuscan literature, art and science – he could quote Danté and even named my mother for a Danté character. He could sing the entirety of Rigoletto. He left behind the art of Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael, not to mention the scientific feats of Gallileo and Brunelleschi’s dome. This was the heritage he had to leave behind in order to become Americanized.

The heritage of the Confederate States of America is a much less honorable one, when you look at what it really stood for. There are those who insist it had nothing to do with slavery, but rather states’ rights. Well, yeah, and the states’ rights they particularly wanted to preserve included the use of slaves to run to massive rice plantations, cotton plantations, tobacco farms, sugar cane plantations…

So now you have this group of people who were descended from those too poor to afford slaves defending a heritage that has highly questionable morality, especially in the sense of Christian morality, which is usually part of the argument for some strange reason. From the vantage point of an outside observer, it looks to me like the only heritage those people want to preserve is the tenuous one that helps them believe they are better than their black brethren. Hmm That doesn’t feel very Christ-like to me.

And to help them demonstrate their superiority, and to cling to their heritage, they terrorize a couple of black girls who are going to school, doing their homework, playing in the band, and doing all the things a normal high school kid should be doing.

These are the same people who loudly proclaim that immigrants need to “talk ‘merican.” (I’ll leave the argument for whose English for another time!) They despise bi-lingual signage and complain about welfare for immigrants. Uh, the immigrants I see around town are all gainfully employed, but again, that’s for another time.

Attilio Pisaneschi had to leave behind his heritage of a beautiful language, the art, music, literature and architecture of Italy. Unlike some of the folks whose heritage involves the inability to accept that they lost a war over slavery, he got over it and made sure his kids spoke English correctly and went to school. His grandkids are college graduates.

Sometimes you just have to leave your heritage behind – like the polyester leisure suits, patent leather platform oxfords, Confederate flag belt buckles and Elvis sideburns.