ETHNICITY:

Identity with or membership in a particular racial, national, or cultural group and observance of that group's customs, beliefs, and language.

Watching the horror and chaos in Haiti over the past week has given me pause to think about the rich ethnicity which exists in our own country. It is often a source of negativity by some, but for me it is a richness which we too easily deny. It would appear that in places like Haiti there is a monochromatic population for the most part. In the U.S. we would be hard pressed to identify the singularity of ethnic background of even a tiny community.

At one point we lived just a few miles from Hamtramck, a tiny city which was known as a Polish city right smack in the middle of metropolitan Detroit. There was some truth to its origin and its ethnic purpose in carving itself out from the larger city. But the reality was that it, too, was a multi-ethnic city, in spite of its attempt to isolate itself as being "Polish." I was a part of a group placing immigrants from a variety of origins in Hamtramck, partly because they would find there a population familiar to them in their homelands. The myth of monochromatic ethnicity was just that...a myth.

My wife has a staff of forty people in the facility where she is the Director. Those forty people represent fifteen different countries of birth, ranging from Korea to the Dominican Republic. Six of those people are native to Haiti, incidentally. Her staff is a mosaic of language, skin color and tradition. In that sense, it is a microcosm of the United States.

I like to use the word mosaic to describe our country. It is an art form which utilizes different sizes, shapes, colors and hues of colors, placed side by side to form a beautiful, larger art image. Many people use the words melting pot to describe America. But have you ever thought about the color of molten metal in a melting pot? It is gray...and that isn't the most beautiful color I can imagine.

I love it when we can celebrate our multiple ethnicities in our country. But it bothers me deeply when I hear complaints and rants against people who are supposedly "different from us." Who the heck is "us?" Even in the earliest days of our nation's settlement by people of foreign nations we were never monochromatic...it just happened to be that northern Europeans were the ones writing the history books, and their selfish bias dominated the project.

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Definition Source:The American Heritage® New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition Copyright © 2005 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
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