"We" is not always inclusive

Marianne Williamson on the Larry King Live, as part of a panel of Oprah's XM stars, said that this generation is the "we" generation (versus the 90's "me" generation).  Perhaps, more accurately, it is the "us and them" generation.  There is a new revival of community, but only in relation to the other.   I saw and wrote about this in response to 9/11 -- the bonding of New Yorkers tainted by the threats and discrimination of anyone who looked like a terrorist, which meant brown skin, thick wavy jet black hair, large eyes, lush lips, and prominent noses.   Sound vague?  You can picture it, right?  But reading it, I also picture an African American, a Latina, a Roma.  Such is stereotyping and discrimination:  usually way off the mark.   The "we" generation, turning back the clock on segregation, this time often voluntary, a mark of pride and solidarity.   We are coming together in small groups of opposition.  Red versus blue.  Black versus white.  Brown versus yellow.   Community is good until it becomes an island, a prison. 

In my classes, students of mixed races often will choose one ethnicity with which they choose to identify, choosing a community and bonding that would be denied if the other parts of them were fully embraced.  The other separates.  "We" only becoming a inclusion of something that is like "me," familiar, a mirror, unchallenging, unquestioning, reinforcing my own self-image and self-centeredness.  

I get it.  As I continue to struggle with my own identity, ever changing, ever challenged, I remember my longing for a community that was large and accepting that I could be swept up in without having to prove myself or pass some litmus test of coolness or knowledge or skill.  In writing my senior thesis about adolescents in the American novel, I read versions of adolescence from the margins and envied this other world where the characters could find a likeness, a home.  I was mystified how those on the margins seemed to want to be in the white mainstream while those in the mainstream longed to get out and be on the fringe.  I wanted to be like Selina dancing at the Barbadian wedding in Brooklyn or Esperanza playing in the Monkey Garden with her neighbors on Mango Street, not wandering the streets alone like Holden.    

In the segregated city of LA (a statement many Angelinos would deny), I continue to walk that line of belonging and not, of trying to be beyond center or margin.  Maybe I am fooling myself.   I am blessed with wonderful friends, a fairly diverse group of friends, I think.   Yet, when I enter my school, I am distinctly the outsider.  There is a bonding that I will never be granted as long as I am not Latina.   Or the idiomatic Spanish expressions that spice up any meeting or lunchroom conversation.  I love the variety.  I enjoy living in a city where I can hear five different languages in one trip to the store.   Yet, how can I, the white girl, laugh with their inside jokes in a faculty meeting about how white people are?   How do I explain that the disconnect between my Eastern European immigrant parents, my solidly working class family and the educated white privileged perception imposed on me is not so different than the disconnect between the wetback, illegal immigrant perception many have of all Latinos and actual Latinos?   Is one more unjust than the other?  Is it possible to compete in suffering or wrongs?  What would be the point?   The only injustice is not allowing your "me" and my "me" to be fully realized,  not letting your "we" and my "we" have equal opportunities and respect, and not letting your "me" and my "me" to be a "we" despite our many differences.