"Comply Or Die" #racialprofiling #assimilation

I have written a bit about this history in prior posts, I apologize for the duplication within the initial theme. Headed a different direction, however...

In the current national “comply or die” environment, Super Bowl halftime show did it--sent my mind back to when I was a little kid and my siblings and I would ask my great-grandmother why my grandmother “looked like an ‘Indian””. She always had the same answer, sternly expressed, “You are French Canadian. FRENCH. CANADIAN.” So we stopped asking.(We ARE of French Canadian descent, with the first family member arriving on a ship with Samuel deChamplain, but there's more to the story.)

To solve this mystery, I had some of those genetic heritage DNA tests completed. The expensive ones informed me that the around 7-10% of my heritage that was not Western or Eastern European was a combination of South Asian and a mix of Mexican, South American, and Caribbean ancestry. Learning this, I was sad that no manifestation of cultural evidence from those regions of origin survived in my family, and I was upset that my ancestors did not pass any traditions down to me and my siblings.

I had no right to feel deprived though, because at the time my great-grandmother had given birth to the first of her seven babies in Michigan, the KKK was prolific. A climate of “assimilate or die” was apparently well entrenched, so I can imagine a French-speaking Catholic family with brown children needed to tow the assimilation line for survival’s sake, as their minority status was minority enough to put them at risk of elimination. Many of her French-Canadian ethnic group had already experienced ethnicity-based expulsion from Canada. (The curious reader may want to study up on the plight of the Acadians from 1755-1762.) I may owe my existence to my great grandmother’s “all-white-but-dark-white” narrative about our family’s origins.

Fast forward over a century later, “assimilate or die” has been replaced by “comply or die”—or at least “comply or be detained, and then likely die”. The numbers of peoples are too great and dispersal of different races and cultures too broad to demand wholesale assimilation. Too many people from too many cultures have embraced each other in love, acceptance, and respect. People are coming together to resist social constructs’ divisiveness and to better learn and experience what it means to love their neighbor, doing so in great numbers, no longer having to tow the line of assimilation, but rather cultivate and maintain commitment to holding the line on human rights on the behalf of each other, not insisting upon dominating the cultural landscape but embracing the liberty to share space for free and peaceful expression of culture for all, for “We The People”

I owe it to my ancestors to keep resisting racial profiling, the terrorizing of neighborhoods, and the construction of more “detention centers” that are devolving into concentration camps. We were not created to worship or grovel at the feet of the filthy relic that is white supremacy. We were created to love our neighbors. We were created to love our enemies enough to stand against their evil intentions, snatching them out of the very flames they insist on feeding, for they know not what they do.

Lord, help us do what we must to honor our true heritage, in respect of our ancestors, and for the sake of our posterity. Amen.