Important Lessons from My Mother

My mother was a remarkable woman.  A child of the Great Depression, she grew up in a company-owned coal town in rural Pennsylvania.  She grew to become a gracious woman who was clear thinking, well-informed, determined, and who always had a kind word for others.

Most people today don’t know what is meant by a company town.  These small towns were owned by one company.  The company which owned the coal mine in the area also owned the town:  the homes, the shops, and community center — yes, the entire town except for churches.  To live in the town, one needed to work in the mine.  A portion of a miner’s salary was dedicated to housing in a company owned house.  These homes were all the same:  two-story two-bedroom homes.  It didn’t matter the size of the family.  Everyone had the same house.  The mine also paid employees in the company’s own currency.  That currency could only be spent in company-owned stores and businesses.  The company’s currency could be exchanged for US dollars, but the rate of exchange was very poor.

At the child of immigrants from the Slovak Republic, my mother grew up in “back-town.”  That’s where the Eastern European miners lived.  Front town and what was named Front Street was where, as my mother would say, “the bosses” lived.  The bosses were all WASPs: White Angle-Saxon Protestants.  There was a sharp class division between the bosses and the Eastern European immigrants referred to as a group with the name, “hunkies.”  The term “hunkie” was pejorative in that era and derived from “Hungarian” but meant any person of Eastern European descent.  My family were hunkies.

When I was older, my mother told me stories of the discrimination she and our family experienced, including the grade school paddlings she received for not speaking English during recess. As I learned more of her experiences, it made sense to me why she never referred to herself as an American.  She was born in the US.  It was my grandparents who immigrated.  But she also always said she was Slovak.  Americans:  they were other people.  The Americans were the bosses who lived in “front town”.   Yes, for all of her life, my mother understood “Americans” as people different from us.

To be American …. Well, most people think it has to do with the national anthem or the flag.  Symbols aren’t cultural identity.  Instead, identity and nationality are rooted in shared values. The most obvious American value is that of independence. Being a self-made individual, free to chart one’s own course, to not be responsible to others:  that’s American.  Related to that is our value for our privacy and our own space. This is a value reflected in home ownership, each adult in a household having a car, and maintaining our individuality in our interests.  Competition is an essential value as well.  Americans believe that competition will lead to the emergence of the best of everything.  Americans also look down on “losers.”  It doesn’t matter if one is in second place or last place:  you’re a loser.  Americans also believe that people should be direct, speak their own mind, and say what they believe is true.

What’s really interesting to me is that as I’ve learned more about racial identity, I’ve come to understand that these are the core values of whiteness.  In her book, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism, Robin DiAngelo lists the values I stated in the last paragraph as constituent of being white.  Yes, what we commonly think of as being “American” is essentially what it means to be white.  One characteristic is very significant:  independence and individuality.  White people don’t see themselves as part of a group but as individuals who freely chose their fate.

Social psychologists understand that cultures can be categorized into two groups:  individualistic or collectivist.  Euro-American cultures are cultures which are individualistic.  That means that identity is personal and focused on the individual. (As Paul Simon once sang, “I am a rock. I am an island.”)  Every other culture in the world is collectivist:  the group, the family, the clan, the tribe is the source of one’s primary identity.  In collectivist cultures, a person’s sense of self is part of the group.  (Have you ever wondered why Asian people organize their names with the family name first and the individual’s name second?  That’s because the family is the primary identity in traditional Asian cultures. The individual is always part of the family.)

I learned many things from my mother.  One of the most important things was to gain an understanding of what it meant to be a white American.  Clearly, my family has white skin. Because of that, we may have a history of prejudice due to immigration, but it’s not the same as racism. Yet, my mother chose to identify as something other than the dominant American culture.  She never forgot the deeper connection rooted in our heritage as Eastern European people and immigrants in this country.  The pride she took in her cultural identity helped me to understand essential aspects of race and enabled me to know important parts of myself.

While Mom has been gone now for several years, her wisdom continues to inspire me. Her refusal to identify as an American provided me with an opening to understand what it’s like to experience oppression from the dominant culture.  That’s enabled me to be more open to people whose life experience is different from mine.  In that, Mom gave me something very unique and special. On this Mother’s Day, I continue to hold her with great love and affection for so many things she did which helped to make me the person I became.