Sep 17, 2023
I promised God, as you recall, after I got a second chance to be alive, that I would write the things I most feared to write. This essay is in that category. We are in a time - a manufactured time, I would argue - in which it has become taboo to talk about, let alone explore, ethnic, religious, racial or national heritages. This is a change from the recent past. When I was growing up in deeply multicultural, multi-ethnic California and attending a richly integrated public school system, the legacies left to us of the impact of Native American tribes, of Mexico and its long history of colonizing, and then of Mexican-Americans leading and influencing, our state; the histories of waves of Chinese, Jewish, Portuguese, Japanese, Filipino and African-American immigrants, all of whom shaped California's economy, literature, music, schools, and other institutions; were studied formally from K through 12 and into college, and these legacies and histories often were celebrated. We celebrated