The Wall Street Journal recently ran a feature titled, “What I Learned on My Summer Vacation.” Five different writers described their memorable vacations.
I thought that the essays would be uplifting and lighthearted, but they were the opposite. They seemed to be an attempt by the Journal to be edgy and avant garde.
The first essay was especially awful but is worth summarizing to show what passes today for literature and erudite thinking about race. It was titled, “Sometimes You Have to Finish That Burger.” The author is Junot Diaz, a professor of creative writing at M.I.T., who is described as a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist.
The essay is about Diaz’s vacation as an 11-year-old kid with his parents in Maine, where he claims to have encountered racism, or, maybe in a case of creative writing, the essay is an embellished version of the experience.
He also discovered on the vacation that his parents were divorcing. His low opinion of Whites is matched by his disrespect for his father, or “Dude,” as Diaz refers to him.
Among other negatives, Diaz says this about Dude: “My pops was a real piece of work: an old school ex-military pro-dictatorship type who would have given the Great Santini pause.”
As the epitome of hipness, Diaz refers to his family vacations as “vacays.” And he writes sentences like this: “At an abstract level, I was hype.”
Diaz and his parents had emigrated from the Dominican Republic and had settled in Sandy Hook, New Jersey. He contrasts Sandy Hook with Maine: “Places like Sandy Hook with lots of people of color, I had no problems with, but Maine was white America—and white America made me super nervous. Despite being in-country for five years I was still very wet—with an accent. Always seemed as if every run-in I had with the larger America beyond my neighborhood rubbed racism in my face.”
Although I’m old enough to remember when “Eyetalians” were referred to as wops and dagos, I reflect on my boyhood differently than Diaz does on his. My poor grandparents had emigrated from Italy and spoke broken English. My parents were bilingual and spoke Italian whenever we went somewhere with their parents (my grandparents). Yet I can’t remember racism being rubbed in our faces whenever we ventured beyond the Italian neighborhood of St. Louis, which, by the way, was known as Dago Hill.
Racism wasn’t even rubbed in my face when I worked over the summer in high school at an exclusive country club, where Blacks, Jews and Italians weren’t welcome as members.
As a lowly porter and janitor on the clubhouse staff, I was the only non-Black employee on an otherwise all-Black staff. There were some racial (and class) undercurrents, but the WASP members didn’t rub racism in any faces, whether the faces were olive or black. In any event, the members didn’t know that their daughters were going out with me at the end of my workday, after they had lounged at the pool all day.
There is certainly nothing wrong with personal stories and facts about past and current racism in America. Such writing can be cathartic, unifying and enlightening, if put into proper historical context and done in a balanced, non-racist way. My personal library has plenty of books on the subject.
But that’s not what Diaz does. He subscribes to the voguish but tired practice of wearing victimhood on his sleeve and coming across as if his racial/ethnic group is the only group that has encountered racism or ethnic slurs—as if so-called “White” ethnic groups didn’t encounter the same, such as Italians, other southern Europeans, Irish Catholics, other “papists,” and Jews.
Diaz also seems to subscribe to the contemporary racial rule of not saying anything negative about one’s own racial/ethnic group but saying negatives about another group.
Italians have not always followed the rule. The “Godfather” movies are a case in point. They were based on a book written by an Italian and were directed by an Italian, but they didn’t whitewash the dark side of Sicilian immigrants, and, specifically, the Mafia. In a similar vein, Italian prosecutors in New York went after the Sicilian mob with a vengeance and didn’t blame poverty and discrimination for their criminality.
Of course, the fact is that all ethnic/racial groups have criminal and racist elements, as I experienced when living in a barrio of San Antonio. Mexican gangbangers cursed and shot at me one time for being different, my car was stolen another time, and my wheels were stolen still another time. On a visit to Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, three friends were thrown into a disgusting jail cell for being gringos and not having enough cash to pay off the crooked cops. It took two days to get them released.
More recently, and far, far worse, was the horror that took place on November 4, 2019, about 70 miles south of the Mexico–U.S. border. That’s when nine members of a Mormon family were slaughtered on the way to a wedding, apparently by a Mexican cartel. The Mormons were residents of the isolated La Moral community, and some of them held dual citizenship. Gunmen opened fire on their three-car convoy. Three women and six children were killed, with some burned alive in one of the cars.
But those examples pale in comparison to the trauma experienced by Diaz in being ridiculed at a restaurant in Maine. He claims that a White kid at a nearby table pointed out in a loud voice that Diaz was eating a hamburger for breakfast.
Diaz characterizes Maine as “whiteness supreme” and goes on to say, “My family couldn’t so much as show our brown faces in a rest stop or a motel pool without being stared at, and God forbid we dared to speak in public with our accents, or worse yet with our Spanish. Someone actually cursed us out at a gas station and it got to the point that every time we had to stop I just wanted to stay in the van.”
My experiences in Maine were quite different. In the early 1980s, probably around the same time that Diaz and his family were vacationing in Maine, I voluntarily attended a racial sensitivity seminar in a rural part of the state. In the evening, I went out drinking with two Black women from the seminar. The locals welcomed us warmly and didn’t exhibit a whiff of prejudice.
That shouldn’t be a surprise. After all, going all the way back to when Maine became a state, its citizens were anti-slavery and pro-emancipation. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” while living in Maine, Lincoln’s first vice president was an anti-slavery Mainer, and the state was the terminus of the Underground Railroad and a safe transit point for slaves wanting to escape to Canada.
An estimated 70,000 Mainers fought in the Civil War, and about ten percent of them died in battle. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain was a famous survivor. He and his volunteer regiment, the 20th Maine Infantry, gained fame for their courageous bayonet charge down Little Round Top on the Second Day of the Battle of Gettysburg. Chamberlain would later become governor of Maine.
As these examples show, the history of race in America is much more nuanced and complex than Diaz’s simplistic, shopworn and divisive brown-versus-white view of Maine and the United States.
Mr. Cantoni resides in Tucson and can be reached at [email protected].
