OUR SEARCH FOR ROOTS; I: THE NEW ETHNICITY:
McCarthy, Abigail
OUR SEARCH FOR ROOTS I: THE MEW ETHNICITY Abigail McCarthy I puzzle over the new ethnicity. It is, I know, a search for roots. "To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need...
...But she wrestled with tremendous problems...
...She was a philosopher, he acknowledges, whose social and political thought had reached a remarkable maturity...
...Slavs, gutsy, lusty, and liberated from deodorants-and so it goes...
...Rootedness, then, depends on an attitude toward the future as well as an affirmation of the past...
...If you want to be ethnic, you have a choice of ways: moderate, or marginal, disaffected or core ethnic...
...I have blood cousins of Swedish, French (and probably American Indian), English, Polish, and Italian background...
...And she held that rootedness was most difficult to define...
...Intensely Jewish, suffering torments in the affliction of the Jews in Germany," she could still fault the history of her people, Israel...
...Differentiation is necessary to our well-being...
...She was thirty-three...
...It is at once a remedy for alienation and the politicization of the powerless...
...it arouses the feral gods...
...Many ethnic groups were already modified by a common history before they came to the United States...
...They were "hyphenated" in the countries from which they came-like the Serbo-Croatians, the German-Russians of the Ukraine, French-Swiss and German-Swiss, French-Canadians...
...A devoted believer in Christ, she refused baptism...
...The English language, as both Scott and Shakespeare remind us, is compounded of Saxon and Nor-(Continued on page 91) Abigail McCarthy (Cont...
...It is necessary for him to draw well-nigh the whole of his moral, intellectual, and spiritual life by way of the environment of which he forms a natural part...
...What then is our search...
...The Slavs are many peoples who share a common source for their languages...
...Every human being needs to have multiple roots...
...And in her political thinking she appears as a stern critic of both Right and Left...
...Latins, to their ethnicity by acting passionate, irrational, and lachrymose...
...One such critic, Justus George Lawler, has written: "Anyone with a sense of history who scrutinizes critically the current preoccupation with ethnicity can only be dumbfounded at the peculiarly re-barbative examples of national or ethnic traits that have been dredged up from the cloaca of prejudice and racist mythology...
...The French were once Bretons, Normans, Burgundians, Provencals, people of separate cultures and tongues...
...So witlessly have the new ethnicists embraced the slurs of the oppressive culture that Blacks are now supposed to feel they are witnessing to negritude by speaking a dialect compounded equally of the speech patterns of earlier servitude and of present deprivation...
...to be continued) (to be continued...
...But perhaps it is necessary today, so many yean later, to remind ourselves just who this legendary young woman was, whose "soul was incomparably greater than her genius," as T. S. Eliot reminds us in the preface...
...But a spiritual and intellectual heritage, like faith, comes ex auditu...
...This must be true of millions of Americans...
...Simone Weil was three things in the highest degree: French, Jewish, and Christian...
...Is the new ethnicity the right path or a byway...
...This participation is a natural one, in the sense that it is automatically brought about by place, conditions of birth, profession, and social surroundings...
...The Need for Roots is the last passionate statement, an appeal really, of an extraordinary human being to her own country and to humanity...
...Intemperate, perhaps, but thought-provoking...
...And only the living past is worth recovering These are the criteria she gives us for evaluating our own current search...
...I cannot be anything but moderate or marginal in my ethnicity without denying or denigrating people with whom I share a physical heritage...
...As a development it followed so close on the heels of the black power movement as to be certainly both reaction and imitation...
...She spent the early months of that year writing, and in August of that year died, still an exile-partly because she refused to take more food than the official rations of ordinary people in her occupied country...
...A human being," she wrote, "has roots by virtue of his real, active, and natural participation in the life of a community, which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations for the future...
...Diversity implies a certain strength in a society...
...Unlikeness is a way of participating in society" (Greeley...
...Blood is a dangerous bond to invoke...
...man words reflecting conquest in English history-swine in the sty and pork on the table, deer in the forest and venison at the feast-as well as a Latin-ate legal vocabulary and mystery-evoking words of Celtic origins thus a testimony to the multiple sources of the people we call English...
...For most white Americans today outside of certain urban enclaves ethnic identification is a matter of choice...
...For ethnicity has a way of suddenly melting away...
...Even many of the Irish who first came to Minnesota after a generation or two in Canada, like my great-grandfather, who was born in Halifax, were more properly Irish-Canadian, I suppose...
...Spiritually, we Americans are in much the same plight as were the French in 1943 when she wrote The Need for Roots...
...But as we approach the Bicentennial in need of spiritual regeneration how can we find our common roots-that natural participation in the life of a community of Americans "which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations for the future...
...Because, for example, as my great-grandparents and grandparents were immigrants of Irish origin over a century ago I have always thought of myself as Irish-American as did my parents and proudly so...
...Its critics have assailed it as artificial -a search for a new constituency by former civil rights leaders-and as an unhistorical effort to create a bond among the disaffected in our society...
...By now, Simone Weil has become a legend," said the reviewer for The New Yorker when the book was published in English in 1952, "and her writings are regarded as a classic document of our period...
...it makes for an interesting, multi-faceted people and for creative tension among them...
...moreover, its streams get diluted and tangled...
...But my children are part-German...
...It is perhaps in recognition of this fact that Father Geno Baroni, who had dedicated himself to urban ethnics, said in a recent statement that it was necessary for all Americans to be sure of their identities and gave President Lyndon Johnson as an example of one who was sure of, and who constantly affirmed, his identity-thus equating regional roots with ethnic ones...
...my children have cousins of Egyptian and RussianJewish ancestry...
...She had been asked by the Free French in London to write a memorandum suggesting how the regeneration of their defeated country might be brought about...
...To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul," wrote Simone Weil...
...The Bohemians who settled on farms in the Midwest had no thought of common origin with the Jugoslavs who came to this country to work in the mines, for example-at least in the immigrant generation...
...Lyndon Johnson's identity, like that of his German-American neighbors on the Peder-nales, was Texan-a matter of place and environment, "the environment of which he forms a natural part," in Si-mone Weil's words...
...In other words, Simone Weil was herself a living example of how complicated our roots can be...
...Irish, bibulous, credulous, and uxorious...
...at the same time more truly a lover of order and hierarchy than most of those who call themselves Conservative, and more truly a lover of the people than most of those who called themselves Socialist...
...She saw clearly the faults and spiritual weakness of France...
...comes from literary and cultural transmission through family and milieu...
...It is allied with the struggle of the native and immigrant Spanish-speaking for justice, and, in some sense, encompasses the reassertion of the claims of the American Indians to their rights...
...Father Andrew Greeley is quoted as saying in a speech in Chicago (November 20, 1974) that "ethnicity is an option, not an obligation...
...We hope to root the uprooted...
...As we have seen above, Simone Weil did not think of national origin as the first source of roots, since she thought of the nation as a recent historical phenomenon and each people is the result of successive waves of conquest...
...Italics mine...
Vol. 102 • April 1975 • No. 3
