Djelloul Marbrook

If we are the world, as we say we are, how is it possible to have a foreign face in America?

Not all immigrants come by this question the hard way. If you come
from Northern Europe or Slavic Europe, you may grasp the question in your head but not your gut, because the chances are you look enough like our received idea of how Americans should look to duck the bite of the question. Unless of course you’re Jewish and your forebears haven’t mixed with Aryans enough, by force or choice, to give you that accepted, that approved look.

Things change, for better or worse. When I was a boy Rudolph Valentino’s foreign face had been romanticized into at least as much acceptance as pizza or kielbasa. But the stardom of Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Jennifer Lopez would have been harder to imagine. Harder still the stardom of Samuel L. Jackson and Halle Berry.

If you have any trouble defining an “authorized” American, just study the people surrounding John McCain or the majority of people we regularly send to Washington to conduct our business. Study our advertising. Oh sure, there’s Naomi Campbell, a standout among how many beauties of North European origin?

I’ve never had one of those stunning minds that enunciates recognitions before everyone else, so I’ve had to come by these reflections the hard way, in West Islip, New York, as a child, in Manhattan and the Hudson Valley as an adolescent, in the Navy and in Rhode Island and the South as a young man, in Washington as a middle-aged man, and back in the Hudson Valley as an old man.

In the Hudson Valley I’ve studied the interaction of deeply rooted residents, summer people and retired newcomers. It has been shaped by fear, bigotry, money and accommodation. Newcomers with authorized faces have had a better time of it, as usual. The nativism that insists we look as we did when we had a famous spat with British look-alikes benefits the authorized newcomers to the point of tolerance, not acceptance.

Others have had it tougher, particularly Jews, African-Americans and Hipanics, because the virulent hatred hounding them has followed them everywhere they go. But the Irish, Italians, Poles and many others, have all suffered the sting of nativism and xenophobia. When they haven’t been cast as the Dark Other, they have been sufficiently “other” to license a distinct cold shoulder.

But the tension hasn’t been one-sided. Locals, as the rooted people are often called pejoratively, have good reason to fear and resent “outsiders.” It’s one thing for a person to say, as I often hear, I’ve lived in this town for forty years and I’m still considered an outsider, quite another thing to understand the reason for this. This is a good time in history to try to understand the reasons for disquiet. The huge disparity between northern wealth and southern poverty worldwide has caused the dislocation of large populations, resettlement, resentment and friction. In some cases colonialism is the direct cause, in other cases cheap labor. France and the United Kingdom have been trying to absorb great numbers of former colonials. The U.S. invasion of Iraq has dislocated millions of Iraqis, but the United States has resisted efforts to resettle many of them here. Hispanics, Asians, Africans, East Europeans and Arabs have all immigrated in large numbers, seeking better lives. The more social injustice and poverty, the more migration.

Urbanites seeking the peacefulness of the countryside bring with them a change in a way of life that no one bargained for, no one voted for. They represent, at the same time they bring new money, the slicing and dicing of farmland, the kind of transformation of rural America that in England drove the
poet John Clare mad. They represent impatience with local mores, they represent ways of doing things that don’t conform to traditions. Often they represent highhandedness and hifalutin notions of how things ought to be done. And, in spite of what every developer and his son swears to town boards as if it were gospel, the newcomers represent higher taxes, and with them a financial threat to the elderly and the young. The money they bring simply doesn’t offset the costs of the services they need.

And, of course, very often they look funny. They don’t look like cousins, the way our British oppressors did, and we persist in thinking that we ought to look like the British (who don’t look like the British anymore, either), even when the filmmakers and advertising people who perpetuate this image do not themselves conform to it. Their underlying assumption is that a North European look is more likely to make money for them and their clients than an unapproved look. It’s a nasty piece of business in a culture that prides itself on its multi-ethnicity.

I love the looks of Andy Garcia, Morgan Freeman, Rosario Dawson and Angela Bassett, for example, but they’re accepted versions of Americans, not authorized. Millions of us still can’t see our children married to people who look like them. We don’t like to talk about this, but we know it, and voters in Pennsylvania and West Virginia may just have voted on it.

I remember being ten or eleven years old and standing in front of a buxom blonde cashier in a small Catskills town during World War II. She was smiling benevolently at me while thumbing through my ration stamps, looting them for her friends. I was a summer kid. It was okay to do this mean thing because you weren’t doing it to someone who counts. Who was I going to complain to? The local cops who had grown up with her? I left the market crying. I hadn’t filled my shopping list because I no longer had the right stamps. My money wasn’t as good as that of the people she’d grown up with. To make matters worse, I had a crush on her.

That’s the sort of thing that happened between the rooted and the newcomers, and the more your face deviated from the authorized standard, which could be seen in all the Pepsi and Camel ads, the sharper the slight was apt to be. Some of us were doomed never to look like Kate Greenaway bucolics.

Things have changed, but not that much. The Vietnam war had something to do with it. The children of the poor whom we sent to fight and die there had to work out their own accommodations, and when they returned, those who did, there had been spilled blood and agony to bond them. The authorized face no longer meant as much to them, because foreign faces had died with them and sometimes even saved their lives.

The town I was talking about changed remarkably after that monstrous war. The veterans didn’t have much sympathy for the old prejudices, which, in the new scheme of things, seemed to them quaint.

Histories of that town have been written without much if any attention to its anti-Semitism. There are now so many newcomers they even get elected to the town board. Their money has painted over many a qualm and prejudice, and it’s now entirely possible that too little attention is paid to those qualms. After all, outsider money was buying a change in a way of life nobody but the outsiders wanted. True, outsider money was needed because local economies that had thrived in the 19th Century were no longer vital, but much beauty, accomplishment and peace of mind was being destroyed.

Now even the newcomers, beholding the changes their influx has wrought, are inclined to bemoan the loss of miles of farmland filled with food-producing bees and unpolluted vineyards and orchards. The bees are the latest loss, and that’s a story more urgent than global warming and much less discussed.

All this tension between urbanites seeking a breath of fresh air, as they used to put it, and the rural communities they changed was heightened not only by cheap fuel but the assumption that there never would be an energy crisis. Schools were consolidated on the same assumption. Mega-malls with parking lots as big as landing fields were built on the same assumption, destroying town centers. Public transportation was neglected. New means of transportation, like light rail, sail-assisted ships and lighter-than-air transport, were ignored. And then to conduct the Cold War and now to conduct the ill-managed war against
terrorists the infrastructure necessary to support this impractical automotive society has been neglected and is falling apart.

This brings a new kind of crisis to rural America. It can’t afford to bus
its children to hell and gone. It can’t afford to cover fifty or a hundred miles a day in pickup trucks. It can’t afford to drive long distances to mega-malls. It can’t afford the high prices transportation costs create. It can’t find enough work. It can’t afford insurance. It can’t pay the taxes necessary to pass homesteads on to children and grandchildren. And it may never be able to afford to do these things again. The people who commute from the exurbs and far suburbs are finding it too costly. Wages are stagnant. Inflation is rising.

The clash between newcomer and old-timer has been overtaken by more urgent considerations.

Perhaps the high cost of transportation will bring industries and jobs back to America. There are signs of it. Our steel industry, for example, is reviving. Canada’s manufacturing sector is reviving after years of decline.

But it will always remain to us to define and then redefine the face of America. We are racial profilers, whether we admit it or not. And we Americans are hardly the only ones. We don’t need to suffer the obloquy of this squalid failing alone. It’s an equal-opportunity affliction besetting all of humanity. To redress it, we should be as aware of the perpetrator’s fears as we are of the victim’s misery.

We should take each other’s prejudices seriously, whether we love them or love to hate them, because our culture doesn’t change as quickly as we claim it does and it’s possible to do it irreparable damage.

I don’t wear one of those authorized faces. I can pass for any number of ethnicities, none of them North European or Slavic, and so I know how it feels when someone believes he or she can get over on you because you don’t look like his cousin. But I also have North European ancestors, and I know xenophobia is not as easy to deal with as a felony crime.

While I thank my stars I’ve lived to see so many previously unaccepted and unauthorized faces gracing my life, I also suffer the heartache of understanding how it feels to be encroached, pushed out, covered over, dissed. I remember my consternation when some people professed not to understand what African-American youths meant when they said they had been dissed. What was not to understand? The lingo? How far a linguistic leap was it from diss to disrespected, dismissed, discounted?

It’s a two-way street, this business of prejudice, and with our ill-considered conviction that all development is good, all development is progress, we are losing much of value, because you can scurry over problems only to have them bite your behind.—DM