Finneran: From Sea to Shining Sea
Friday, January 31, 2020
Tom Finneran
I guess that I’m a sucker.
I guess that I’m both woefully naïve and profoundly ignorant.
Here I am thinking that America is the greatest country on earth---diverse, dynamic, and free---and along comes yet another woke Ph. D. to denounce my willful patriarchal blindness. I guess that as an old white man, I’m forever an oppressor.
No thoughtful or reasonably well-read person would present America as the perfect society. Our nation’s history is rife with violence, racism, and sexism. But that same history is also filled with example after example of America doing better and better and better by its people and by its founding ideals. So much so, that it’s my belief that today’s America is the most integrated, least racist, and least sexist nation in the history of the world. Not that you would ever get that impression from reading the Globe or the New York Times……….
America today shows that we are not captives of the past and that we are constantly engaged in the fight for liberty and justice for all.
You can imagine my dismay then when I read rubbish which decries “cultural appropriation” as if it’s a horrific crime of violence. Cultural appropriation is a good thing not a bad thing. Let’s be clear about that. Admiration for some ethnic or cultural habit or practice---be it music or art or religion or architecture or food or clothing or policy--- should not be condemned as some kind of theft. Rather, it should be welcomed and enjoyed for showing classic American intelligence, tolerance, respect, and inclusivity.
First of all, we are free American citizens so might we just stop the incessant hectoring and leave each other alone? Secondly, mimicry of some ethnic practice is the highest form of flattery. Am I to be buttoned up in the relatively narrow world of Irish Catholicism? Must I be walled off from the gifts and talents of other nations and cultures? Certainly, I’m proud of the gifts of the Irish---a poetic, literate, humane, and brave race, but am I to be fenced off from the fruits and knowledge of African, Asian, or European cultures? On whose say so are we to be restricted to our own little ethnic identity camps? As Americans, we are free, free to learn, free to admire, and free to adopt those things we admire, be they Mexican, Thai, Italian, or Somali.
The cause of my agitation is the current nonsensical “controversy” over the white American author of a widely acclaimed book about a violent Mexican cartel’s pursuit and intended murder of a mother and child. Not that the whiteness or darkness of the author’s skin should have any relevance whatsoever to any reasonable person, but the thought police are on 24/7 patrol, always ready to pounce and denounce any perceived transgression of ethnic identity. They demand an ethnic conformity that is as racist as the Klan. That conformity insists that white men can only write about white men and that white women can only write about white women. Wow, that really opens up the world of human experience. Given such an absurd obsession with ethnic identity, I must ask if Shakespeare’s works are to be limited to white Englishmen? Has anyone told Ta-Nehisi Coates about the thought police and their new rules for acceptable writing? Henceforth, is his writing to be limited to the world of black men? He might gasp at the implication of such restriction. Or he might laugh.
I choose to laugh at such nonsense. I choose to see the brotherhood of man as including all men, all women, and all faiths, races, creeds, and cultures.
And I see the good of such a brotherhood, from sea to shining sea.
Tom Finneran is the former Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, served as the head the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council, and was a longstanding radio voice in Boston radio.
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