Pie All Around
Four words about the guy who picked the spot for April 10’s immigration protest: Give him a raise.
It was just too perfect. Los Angeles’ Olvera Street and the adjacent La Placita look more Mexican than any part of Mexico I’ve had the pleasure of seeing – the architecture, the restaurants, the statues, the shop signs. The apt question was not, ‘Do these protesters deserve to be Americans?’, but rather, ‘Can you believe this place is in America?’
The protest had the atmosphere of a carnival, vertiginous and loud. No one was crying; no one was scared. Giant blue globules of cotton candy floated past like low-flying storm clouds. A helicopter thumped overhead. Rosaries jangled like flecks of sunshine in a sea of lolling flags.
Halfway down Olvera Street I launched into conversation with an avuncular man who stood hocking umbrellas in front of a tiny wishing well. He wore a sombrero, which was also for sale. His eyebrows twitched like fishing lines when he spoke.
“Why the long face?” I asked. “Protests are supposed to be fun, aren’t they?”
“Protest or no, I wish it would rain,” he said, looking skyward. “That way I would sell more umbrellas.”
“What could be more American than that?” I wondered aloud.
My (shocking) confession for the day: I am utterly and irrepressibly white.
My family comes from Sweden, and as Henry Ford might have said: You can have any color Swede you want, as long as he’s white.
I say this not out of shame, or pride – it is simply reality as I have known it. That reality also includes growing up in a mostly white Midwestern town, a mostly white church, and a mostly white school. My life until moving to Los Angeles, it is fair to say, was mostly white.
Please don’t get me wrong; I haven’t a racist bone in my body. I’ve always made every attempt to surround myself with a diverse group of friends, ideas and lifestyles. Put simply, racism seems pathetic and old-fashioned to me, something for people with too much time on their hands.
Yet no matter how anti-racism I purport to be, I am nevertheless conspicuously white, and as such, I went to the protests with a few predictable expectations. I expected to be a little out of place, and a little overwhelmed. I expected to feel a sense of intellectual curiosity. I expected to feel some sympathy for the protesters’ cause.
Instead, and much to my surprise, I found myself feeling jealous.
These were people who had something to stand up for, something they believed in from the bottoms of their souls. People who were willing to face the repercussions for leaving their jobs and schools to fill the streets – and why? Because they knew they had no choice; they knew their cause was bigger than their own lives ever could be.
I realized then – lost in the echo chamber of chants and applause – that I didn’t have any cause like that. They had a passion in their eyes that I might never know. They were fighting for their neighbors, their families and their dignity. They were fighting for their fair share of the American pie, and that is something – as a Midwestern Swede – that I’ve never had to do.
People say that food tastes best when it’s free. In the case of American pie, I suspect it probably tastes a lot better when you have to fight for a slice.
