I was searching on Google for something regarding Little Kabul, the informal name for the part of Fremont, California where there are several Afghan businesses, and I came across this blog post from a Fremont resident, Tom Goette. Employing the popular “I’m not racist, but…” rhetorical device, the writer expresses his anxiety about “a bunch of transplanted cultures trying to co-exist with [mine] and relegating [mine] into utter obscurity” and attributes all kinds of bad behavior to people’s ethnicity.
I don’t know where he gets his assertion that “It was made clear in our most recent census that immigrants now comprise almost two-thirds of the citizens living in our town.” The census data indicates that in 2000 (which is the most recent census year that information is available for), 37% of the population is foreign-born, much lower than 67%, and it doesn’t mean that they are “recent immigrants.” My soon-to-be-90-year-old Nana is foreign-born, but she’s lived in California for upwards of 85 years. Whites are still the largest racial group, at nearly 48% of the population. This kind of hyperbole and inaccuracy is part of the writer’s obvious panic about “the Other” and resentment that his former position of privilege that he got merely by being white is no longer as privileged as it used to be.
The title of this post? “Hey, Andy, I Don’t Think We’re in Mayberry Anymore.”
Well, I have news for Goette: We never were in Mayberry. I have lived in Fremont all my life and my family has lived here since 1965. We are not recent immigrants, but we do look like some of the brown people in the pictures he peppers his blog post with. Growing up, I was friends with people of many ethnicities, some of whose first languages were not English. I think this enriched my life. Far from being threatened by people of many backgrounds, I think it they are part of the culture of the city.
I can see how people who can’t adjust are being left behind, though. Just today I was shopping at Trader Joe’s and an older man for some reason decided it was his place to tell a woman of South Asian ethnicity that she had too many vegetables in her shopping cart. (Yeah, what?) She countered that her salad was healthy.
“You need to eat a greasy cheeseburger,” the man told her. (At this point, this man was lucky he wasn’t talking to me because I would have told him that I didn’t think that my food was any of his business and I don’t see how it was his place to tell me what I need to eat, especially if he thought I need to eat unhealthily.)
“I’m a vegetarian,” the woman said pleasantly.
“I would starve in your house!” he answered. (Whereupon I hope I could have sputtered something like, “Well, it’s a good thing your manners have ensured I’ll never invite you over, sir!”)
The woman explained that her husband and children were not vegetarians, so she did cook meat for them — she just didn’t eat any herself. She was friendly and polite the whole time, when someone was putting his nose where it didn’t belong and criticizing her cultural practices. That’s the kind of cultural tension I most often see here, not the kind where the all-conquering brown people are rude, irrational, and destroying our very way of life. An older white man, bemused by the culture of his brown neighbor, tells a woman who very well may be vegetarian and, if not, very well may be a practicing Hindu, that she needs to eat a cheeseburger. It’s not the old man’s fault, really — he’s of a different generation and was most likely ignorant of what he was saying. (Though not minding your own business is a breach of manners no matter how old you are.) Who knows what kind of attitude were behind his statements.
But we don’t have to speculate what kind of attitude is behind Coette’s statements. It is plain to see. I just hope, for my city’s sake, that he’s right in a certain sense, and the kind of “culture” his blog post does represent is marginal and on the wane.
