White Guilt To The Maximum

The convenience store across the street from where I lived in staffed, and I assume owned, by people who seem to be recent immigrants to the U.S. I never thought much about it until last night.

As I approached the cash register, an agitated woman cut in front of me.

"I can't find anything else I want, so you can just forget it," she said. I realized later she had been trying to buy a $1.19 bag of popcorn kernels and was mad that the store has a $6 minimum for credit cards.

The cashier, a dignified older man with an accent and ethnicity I've never quite been able to trace, shrugged. This only seemed to make the woman angrier.

"This is illegal, you know," she said, apparently in reference to the $6 minimum. "This is America. We don't do things like this here."

That, of course, made the cashier angry. He and the woman shouted at each other for about 30 seconds. He said something about having to make a living. She said something once again about this being America and she "didn't know where he was from," but he should have to "play by our rules."

What she said upset me, and I felt even worse when I saw it really upset the cashier. I apologized on her behalf and said not everyone believes the things she does. For all I know, the cashier could have been an illegal immigrant, but I really don't care. The idea that the woman felt that being white gave her the authority to tell others who is and who is not American bothered me.

The cashier tried to shrug it off and called the woman a redneck, but after I had paid and thought the episode had blown over, he said something like "I was born in this country. My grandfather fought for this country. I have three degrees - I am not an idiot. Why does she feel like she can talk that way to me?"

I won't lie. I get frustrated sometimes with people who don't follow commonly accepted American customs or people whose English isn't great. It's hard sometimes; it really is.

But we are literally a nation of immigrants. Given that we're, what, 230 years old, can there really be such a thing as an ethnically distinct American? When my great-grandfather came here from Germany, people didn't want to hear him speak German and my family either changed its last name or had it changed for them. Many of my maternal relatives, who were either Native American or had some degree of Native American blood, were manhandled by the governments of the day; I think one even lost custody of his child and died in a sanatorium. Yes, there is some liberal revisionism and romanticizing in that view, but the point is the same. America is supposed to give everybody the chance to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. This idea of racial, economic or class superiority - didn't we as a society leave that behind a long time ago? I had hoped so, but I guess not.