Assimilation, Resistance, and Points Between

Max’s Goldstein’s is the quintessential American Dream story.  This character from Bread Givers relates an immigrant narrative that is positive, hopeful, and utterly uncomplicated.  His tale is “rags to riches” or “pulling himself up by the bootstraps.”  He is a “self-made man.”  He epitomizes all these phrases that came up in class when someone was describing the American Dream.  All of Max’s success derives from initiative and hard work, from his willingness to belt out “Pay cats coals” to passersby regardless of the fact that he didn’t speak English and had the words wrong.  As he goes from this beginning to owning a chain of stores, he encounters no real obstacles to his achievement.  He doesn’t feel guilt or worry that he has betrayed anyone.  He doesn’t encounter criticism from his peers.  The dominant culture doesn’t oppose his success. 

Max’s narrative, examined alone, would support the myth of America as a place of endless opportunity for any who wash up on her shores.  However, none of the other examples of immigrant narrative are quite so idyllic.  Even other success stories are fraught with conflict – internal conflicting emotions, clashes with other members of the minority or cultural group, and discrimination or exploitation by the dominant culture. 

As I read through these narratives, from immigrant to minority to myriad points between, I began to formulate some questions. 

*Does economic success imply that a person embraces the (dominant culture) values inherent in the American Dream?  Are economic success and assimilation practically synonymous? 

*Can an individual – minority or immigrant – who has “made it” (financially, education, etc.) still claim to be resisting assimilation or opposing the dominant culture’s values? 

*By such criteria, wouldn’t most of these minority and immigrant authors we’ve been reading be considered assimilated?  Why might an author have to have experiences at least partial assimilation in order to write about these themes?

*Do any of the texts present an absolute resisting voice, a position of completely refusing to assimilate?  Is that even possible? 

*Is the dominant culture ever represented realistically in these narratives or does it become a caricatured enemy?  Why?

Minority narratives are where I instinctively turn first if I go in search of resistance or opposition to the dominant culture.  Forced participation shapes the entire history of African-Americans’ and Native-Americans’ interaction with this country’s dominant culture.  Thus I would expect to find the greatest evidence of opposition within texts such as the excerpt from James Baldwin’s No Name in the Street and Bambara’s “The Lesson.”

What I find in the pieces by Bambara and Baldwin are anger and guilt both resulting from partial assimilation or from others’ perceptions that they have “sold out” or adopted the American Dream.  The character Miss Moore in “The Lesson” says and does things that indicate resistance, yet the information that the narrator drops about her complicate this somewhat.  Miss Moore’s “nappy hair and proper speech and no makeup” mark her as different from other members of the community she lives in.  She is college educated and “always looked like she was going to church, though she never did.”  Miss Moore has probably participated in an educational system strongly tied to the dominant culture.  She speaks more like members of the dominant culture than like the minority children she interacts with in the story.  At first I thought her actions and ideas were meant to encourage the children to resist dominant culture values.  Now I’m not sure.  When she shows the kids the very expensive toys at F. A. O. Schwarz, is she merely pointing out injustices in order to incite resistance?  Or is her message to Sugar, Sylvia, and the others that they, too, can afford a thousand dollar toy sail boat if they pursue education? 

The second variant would be the stereotypical immigrant message of believing in the American Dream, and I don’t think Miss Moore would be espousing that.  She seems to feel she has succeeded when Sugar understands that democracy should mean “an equal chance at the dough” and when she calculates that the cost of one of these toys is enough to feed a large family for a while.  I can never quite sort out all of Miss Moore’s probable feelings toward the dominant culture and the American Dream mythos.  I do believe hers is a complicated position somewhere between resistance and assimilation.

Baldwin is also somewhere between these two extremes.  His fame and financial status separate him from his old friend, but they do not necessarily mean he’s embraced the American Dream or dominant culture.  After all, it is Baldwin, not his friend, who opposes the involvement of Black Americans in Vietnam.  He feels guilty at his success, feels conspicuous and hated by everyone while riding through the Bronx in a limo driven by a white man.  His friend, who works for the post office and is building a new house on Long Island, could just as easily be seen as the assimilating one.  As Baldwin remarks, “They, too, had made it.” 

Baldwin seems the more the resistant of the two.  His fierce anger signals his resistance – he calls European Americans barbarous and condemned.  These are not the opinions of someone who holds any positive feelings for the dominant culture.  Like the narrator of “The Lesson,” he is also distrustful and condescending toward someone (the friend) who he thinks has assimilated.  (The comparison I intend is with Sylvia’s dislike of Miss Moore.) 

So Baldwin is resisting and his friend is assimilating, right?  Well . . . every time I think I have this sorted out, I spot another passage which complicates the distinctions.  For example, Baldwin comments that he has changed but his friend’s family is the same as they’ve always been.  If they are in the process of assimilating by building the house and so on, how is it that they have always been that way?  I won’t even pretend to be able to unravel all of these complications I’ve spotted.  I think noting the complexity is the important point.  These minority narratives which I expected to be the most clearly opposed to the dominant culture show all sorts of internal conflict and intra-community conflict about assimilation.  This complexity can also be traced, to varying degrees, through narratives by Afro-Caribbean, Mexican-American, and non-Mexican Hispanic writers. 

June Jordan’s “Report from the Bahamas” follows the author’s internal struggle to define her relationship to the dominant culture.  She certainly sees herself as outside the dominant culture, as different from the white/European-American tourists who “don’t belong” in the Bahamas.  She criticizes the slant on history produced by focus on whites and the slant to Women’s studies that comes from all or most of the studied authors being white or European.  She polarizes the issue – white vs. everyone else when she asserts an absolute correlation between money and race.  She writes, “We are not white after all.  The budget is limited.” 

In the selection by Jordan, as in several of the others, including the poems “Blond White Women” and “Immigrants,” the dominant culture (or Americans of European descent) are not portrayed realistically.  The characterizations amount to no more than crude stereotypes.  If Pat Mora’s poem accurately depicted Americans (the verse itself does not even make the distinction white, European, or dominant culture – it uses only the term American) then we would all be blond-haired, blue-eyed, patriotic, football fans who regularly eat hot dogs and apple pie.  “Blond White Women” similarly refers only to a small segment of individuals in the dominant culture. 

It’s easy enough for me to see that the poems are setting up stereotypes as an accessible and powerful thing to react against.  I was more surprised to also see this happening in the fiction and nonfiction selections.  Jordan, for example, is equating class or financial status with skin color, making no allowances for poor whites and affluent minorities.  Thus portrayed, conflicts with the dominant culture become only a backdrop for the conflicts going on within an individual or within a cultural group.  Jordan’s most striking commentary has to do with Olive, the maid who cleans her room.  The author is aware of being at least partially assimilated into the dominant culture (she teaches at a university) and of the gulf of difference between her and Olive.  She’s interrogating the notion of assumed unity or implied sisterhood based solely on skin color.  And to more effectively write about this, I think she deliberately vilifies the dominant culture.  That way Wasps or whites or European-Americans are an assumed enemy and the author is free to examine intra-cultural issues.  I think this strategy is also present but less obvious in the Baldwin and Bambara pieces.

Some of the selections by Hispanic writers also vilify or stereotype the dominant culture in order to address other issues, but they seem to be less angry or indignant.  I primarily see this in Junot Diaz’s “How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie.”  I was disturbed by an impulse within the class discussion to take some of the adolescent narrator’s assertions at face value and then, also, apply them and explain how they are true to life.  The narrator characterizes whitegirls as being by far the most promiscuous.  What the discussion failed to pick up on, I think, is this strategy of vilification.  The narrator admits that the whitegirls are the ones he wants most.  He admits to hiding the “pictures of [him]self with an Afro” and loving the girls’ white skin more than his own.  I think it’s likely that there is an undercurrent of guilt here, influencing the narrator’s comments.  It’s guilt similar to what Jordan and Baldwin tackle, similar to what Miss Moore seems to be experiencing.  Guilt, it seems, is one of the prices of assimilation or desire for assimilation.  Diaz’s narrator is assimilating or desiring to assimilate by dating members of the dominant culture.  This is likely to be resisted on both sides, something that’s also dealt with in Gary Soto’s “Like Mexicans.”  Soto’s story is different, however.  In “Like Mexicans,” European Americans aren’t really stereotyped or vilified.  This possibility is undone by the grandmother’s loose term for anyone who is different – “okie” – and by the fact that Soto marries a woman from another minority or immigrant group rather than someone from the dominant culture.  

I even noticed a tendency to portray the dominant culture negatively in previous student writings form this course.  In a 2003 midterm, RH wrote that the dominant culture “gets to hold up” American laws and notions of equality and claim that things are fair when they aren’t.  In another 2003 midterm, GH write the following: “Resistance is a way of minorities staying strong and showing that they are equal and have no need to assimilate because to assimilate does not mean to be better.”  Statements such as that beg the question, “Who thinks it IS better?”  Do we believe that the entire dominant culture (rather that be all Wasps, all whites, all European Americans, or some variant on these designations) thinks everyone should assimilate and be as much like them as possible?

Reading these passages from other students’ writing made me think that perhaps we have no way of talking about immigrants or minorities unless we sometimes let European Americans (or the dominant culture or choose your terminology) be the villains of the American race/class/immigrant drama.  If they are a two dimensional “bad guy,” perhaps we’re free to focus on other aspects of the situation.

Assimilation and resistance seem at first to be a neat dichotomy within American Immigrant Literature.  I thought we could (and were) identifying characters and authors who are either all about assimilation or all about resistance.  But nothing in literature (or in race/culture/society) is ever that perfectly polarized.  It’s not black and white, so to speak.  There is much gray area.  The assimilation and resistance distinction turns out to be analogous to another distinction we’ve been working with.  The course suggests a contrast between minority experience and immigrant experience and between minority narrative and immigrant narrative.  This contrast works perfectly to introduce some fundamental differences and basic information as well as a way to organize the progression of the course.  But we’ve had to work at complicating these distinctions and analyzing the many points in between to move any of the ideas forward.  I think assimilation and resistance work the same way.  Focusing on the points in between is what yields more startling and difficult insights. [AS]