Minority/Majority....
Feb. 8th, 2014 03:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osodecanelaI'm still a hyphenated American.
I grew up in a neighborhood in Brooklyn where everyone was either right off the boat, or their parents were. It was so much an ethnic minority neighborhood, when I was little, I thought accents were part of the aging process. If you were 40 or older you had one and the older you were, the thinker the accent was. If you were really old, you didn't speak English at all. I really thought it was all part of aging. While my parents were both born in this country, and learned English as children, it was still the second language for both of them. While my father was in his dying process, the amount of Yiddish I heard him speak not just with my grandmother, but with his cousins and other relatives who were all also fluent English speakers was a little surprising to me. I was used to him using it with my mother when they had things to discuss they did not necessarily want us to know. Towards the end, it wasn't just speech peppered with occasional Yiddish words, but whole conversations. Pop wasn't losing his English, but there were times when what he needed to say, and whom he needed to say it too, just made more sense to him to say it in Yiddish.
My practice has very much evolved over the years to be one where I get to work with other immigrant communities. At least 2/3 of the folks I see are like me, people who are hyphenated Americans, either immigrants themselves or their children and grandchildren. People who chose to come to this country for a better way of life. A better opportunity. An ability to live the American dream.
I'm a little sappy and maudlin at times. The Coke commercial that aired at the Superbowl this year left me not just misty, but actually with tears. To hear America the Beautiful in over half a dozen different languages, to see people of all ethnic and racial backgrounds working to live their part of the American Dream, got me really choked up. That it incensed so many xenophobes on the far right saddens me, and yet I cannot say it surprised me, though I wished it did. To see people in that commercial that looked like me, people with whom I can share a sensibility, a passion, a dream, a desire for something better, people who will bring and contribute something different to this country spoke to me.
The comments that were flying around the right-wing blogosphere after that ad aired, pledging to never again drink a Coke, makes me want to go out and grab a six-pack. And I rarely ever drink the stuff.
I grew up in a neighborhood in Brooklyn where everyone was either right off the boat, or their parents were. It was so much an ethnic minority neighborhood, when I was little, I thought accents were part of the aging process. If you were 40 or older you had one and the older you were, the thinker the accent was. If you were really old, you didn't speak English at all. I really thought it was all part of aging. While my parents were both born in this country, and learned English as children, it was still the second language for both of them. While my father was in his dying process, the amount of Yiddish I heard him speak not just with my grandmother, but with his cousins and other relatives who were all also fluent English speakers was a little surprising to me. I was used to him using it with my mother when they had things to discuss they did not necessarily want us to know. Towards the end, it wasn't just speech peppered with occasional Yiddish words, but whole conversations. Pop wasn't losing his English, but there were times when what he needed to say, and whom he needed to say it too, just made more sense to him to say it in Yiddish.
My practice has very much evolved over the years to be one where I get to work with other immigrant communities. At least 2/3 of the folks I see are like me, people who are hyphenated Americans, either immigrants themselves or their children and grandchildren. People who chose to come to this country for a better way of life. A better opportunity. An ability to live the American dream.
I'm a little sappy and maudlin at times. The Coke commercial that aired at the Superbowl this year left me not just misty, but actually with tears. To hear America the Beautiful in over half a dozen different languages, to see people of all ethnic and racial backgrounds working to live their part of the American Dream, got me really choked up. That it incensed so many xenophobes on the far right saddens me, and yet I cannot say it surprised me, though I wished it did. To see people in that commercial that looked like me, people with whom I can share a sensibility, a passion, a dream, a desire for something better, people who will bring and contribute something different to this country spoke to me.
The comments that were flying around the right-wing blogosphere after that ad aired, pledging to never again drink a Coke, makes me want to go out and grab a six-pack. And I rarely ever drink the stuff.
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no subject
Date: 2014-02-09 01:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-02-09 05:43 am (UTC)The company has never commented on it, but the fact that Coke Zero tastes so much like Coke Classic, it's clearly that flavor formula with non-nutritive sweeteners. It's largely a guess that Diet Coke is the "New Coke" flavor balance with the same substitution, since I honestly don't remember what "New Coke" tasted like.
Frankly I'd prefer it if they used sucralose instead of aspartame and acesulfame-K, but that's me.
no subject
Date: 2014-02-10 01:35 am (UTC)Wow, it would have never occurred to me that a child could perceive the world that way. :)
no subject
Date: 2014-02-10 05:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-02-10 05:34 am (UTC)Now though, the reporters ignore all those that are reasonable and agreeable and they do a big story on some grumpy crank busybody on any topic.