Some of you might read that word mixed and immediately thing potpourri or trail mix or Holiday popcorn tubs. If you do then congratulations for being part of the vast majority of Americans who don't automatic thing of the word mixed as part of a human attribute. Now please don't misunderstand me. I am not saying you are somehow more sensitive than other Americans that do see being mixed as a human attribute I am just saying that you are part of the majority.
First off I must say that America is now and has always been a mixed nation. America was founded to tolerate if not promote diversity. Religious diversity was the first thing that was carried over from Europe to the American continent. By the way, diversity is the same thing as being mixed. If I have a tub of random toys there is a diversity of toys in my tub. There is a tub of mixed toys.
But Religious diversity was not the only diversity that America was founded to tolerate and culture and nurture. Ethnic or National diversity as well. Consider thew almost corporate like efficiency by which our government nationalizes new immigrants. Immigrants are expected to pledge allegiance to a concept that is embodied in our constitution and our body of laws and in our form of government and ultimately in our way of life. This seems utterly obvious to any natural born American but to an Immigrant it is like being baptized. Becoming an American is like being born again. Any new Christian convert can testify that being accepted into the body of Christ is a dynamic experience unlike any other. He is in the world yet not a part of it. He uses all his worldly tools but with new purpose. In essence he has re purposed his humanity for the cause of divinity. And the beauty of it is that Jesus accepts the new convert just as he is.
Likewise an Immigrant to America brings all his baggage from the old world. He brings his way of life and cultural and national distinctness and he reinterprets it in an American context. He strips down the parts that don't work. He rids himself of his former burdens. He adapts and adopts new ways and becomes an efficient new interpretation of what he always was an ethnic native of wherever in the planet he came from. This adaptation of culture, ethnicity and nationality has promoted the importation of the greatest minds from around the world into America. It is also what makes us diverse or as I put it in the title of this rave, mixed.
I think what scares us though about being a mixed or diverse America is that we are afraid that with enough mixing America will cease to be a cohesive whole. We are afraid that we have reached a point that we can only tolerate but so much mixing and then we will cease to be what is familiar to us. But if we look around we can see an America that is very dissimilar to the America that our parents found familiar. Ask the elderly members of your family that grew up in America if you have any and they will tell you America has changed. This is what we are afraid of. We are afraid of change but change is what we are. Diversity and mixing is not about developing recognizable patterns, it is about remaining fluid and in motion. Why do we keep turning the cement? So that it will not become a solid. It is essential that America does not become solid.
Being mixed in America is being American. Even the most purest blood line in America has a stray thread branding it's family tapestry as unique. Often people look at the product of black and white racial mixing as just another shade of black. We do that because we have been taught that black is bad. We were taught this because we wanted to ostracize those that we had oppressed. We were afraid that if their numbers grew that thew would hurt us in kind as we hurt them. And so we had to define what them is. So now 100 plus years later we will call someone with whiter skin than most southern whites black because his hair kinks just a bit more than it should. Or we will call someone with a spanish sounding last name a Latino even if no Spanish has been spoken in his family for over 7 generations. We are afraid that because he has a mixed race bloodline that has traces of African who were oppressed elsewhere in the Americas that he will somehow unite with those of the same kind over here and their numbers will be larger than ours and they will exact their revenge.
But being mixed in America is being American. It is more than the parts. Being mixed is the whole. In applications that ask to delineate race and ethnicity the distinction is always made: One can classify his ethnicity as Hispanic but not his race as black or white. If he choose to put down a race he must omit the ethnicity of Hispanic. This fly's in the face of logic but it is because of this fear that I mentioned prior. But once again I remind you dear reader that it is an illogical fear because to be mixed is to be American. It matters not where the mixing occurs. It could be religion, culture, race, nationality or ethnicity it matters not because that is what it means to be American. That is what we do here. Our language is a Hodge-podge of dialects even the English that was imported from England is a Latinized form of English. Our religion is a mixing of religious ideas and traditions. Our race is mixed. Our form of government is mixed. Our land mixed. Our food mixed. Our weather mixed. Our music mixed. Our dances mixed and our culture mixed. What does it mean to be mixed? It means to be American.