The year was 1978. I was in the cold clutches of a winter that would not end. We endured an intrepid record setting blizzard and up to two feet of snow on the ground that never seemed to melt, even on the most brilliant of days. I was but one among a sparse number of African Americans at my upscale suburban high school outside Columbus, Ohio. The image of beauty was a Farah Fawcett looking blond sporting a feathered hair dew. On this night the multiple blue-eyed contacts at the present seemed to fulfill the fantastical narrative. Mine were but green, however they were real.

The gymnasium was inundated by the aroma of sweat, cheap perfume, and hairspray. The peer pressure was immense, locking everyone into a pattern While the never-ending frigid white snow was on the ground outside. An equally unyielding Hegemony wrapped in the social coldness of Whiteness would dictate the rules of the game inside. Life in this high school marked my murky introduction to the Mirage. As an impressionable, youthful teenager of color, I was caught between a rock and a hard place. On one side existed the yearning to fit in. On the other was the admonishing brandish of being called an Oreo by my African American peers.

From past attempts to speak in a way that was indistinguishable from my white classmates to an occasion at a district Basketball tourney game between two majority African American teams, I felt the urge to talk to my parents in what I would describe as a lousy attempt at slang. With grimaced and puzzled expressions on their faces, in unison, they both curiously asked, “What did you say?” I felt conviction over the whole Mirage thing and how it tied my young teenage mind up in knots.

On this particular night, the bleachers of our high school were frenzied in anticipation of the upcoming game. So, I did it. I decided to put a sizeable wire-toothed hair comb (hair Pic) in my afro. I bought it at the barbershop. It advertised one of the majority African American schools that I watched with my parents. It drew jeers and fearful astonishment from many in the crowd that day.

Something happened to me. I suddenly felt empowered with a sense of sovereignty. Looking back at that day brings laughter as maturity shaved off the extremes and landed me in a place of self that I have existed in for nearly a half-century since; I have found this to be a good place. Not only purchasing a comb, through the years in my father’s footsteps, I gained so much more from the black barbershop as a source of belonging, culture, verbal African American folklore and sense of community, brotherhood, strength and empowerment of self. That sense of self only multiplied through my faith and by the encouragement of the black church. Looking back to those high school days I am grateful for my exposure to other cultural perspectives that made me versed in navigating them to arrive at the sense of self that I rest in today.

Self is the Imago Dei (created in His image) space in which we all exist. I am not alone in that space. I and each of us in the human race are enveloped by layers, of community and belonging, including immediate  and distant family, ethnicity, nationality, culture, etc. The Mirage was none other than the Mirage of assimilation, a counterfeit disguising so much more.

” Assimilation represents “the process by which a group or individual learns and adopts the characteristics of a dominant culture, becoming indistinguishable from other members of that society” https://www.britannica.com/ .

The mirage of Assimilation may appear as harmless as a sophomoric bit of peer pressure or as deadly as a suicide initiated by online bullying or fraternity hazing gone too far. For far too long, the mirage has been fatal for people of color in America. It was spoken in very real terms by “Captain Richard Henry Pratt’s speech in which he used the now well-known phrase to describe his philosophy of assimilation: “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.””  from Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center. The boarding schools used in the name of assimilation were, in fact, a mirage of brutal cultural emasculation.

This Mirage is ancient and not losing a bit of its potency. The supposition of Darwinian Natural Order was laid as an excuse at the feet of modern Western society’s actions from Bacon’s Rebellion, Chattel Slavery, the Three-Fifths Compromise, the Indian Removal Act, and the corresponding Trail of Tears, the Dread Scott decision, to anti-affirmative action and current rollbacks in DEI programs. The excuse was rooted in a mentality of supremacy, suggesting that those of European heritage were in some way more intellectually and culturally developed than other ethnicities

A closer look at Bacon’s Rebellion is revealing. “Bacon’s Rebellion (1676) was a multiracial uprising in Virginia that led to the legal establishment of “white” and “black” as distinct racial groups.
The rebellion’s aftermath included the intensification of slavery, the social separation of whites and blacks, and the creation of laws that prohibited interracial contact.” Google AI overview

Sources

Bacon’s Rebellion: Inventing Black and White – Facing History Aug 2, 2016 — After Bacon’s Rebellion, Virginia’s lawmakers began to make legal distinctions between “white” and “black” inhabitants. Facing History

Bacon’s Rebellion (1676) • Jan 13, 2022, Black post

Bacon’s Rebellion And the Modern Invention of Race – LinkedIn

Jan 20, 2023 — Bacon’s Rebellion * Multi-racial militia led by Francis Bacon. * Attacked and burned Jamestown VA to the ground. * In…LinkedIn

According to Facing History & Ourselves, “Inventing Black and White”, last updated August 2, 2016.

“After Bacon’s Rebellion, Virginia’s lawmakers began to make legal distinctions between “white” and “black” inhabitants. By permanently enslaving Virginians of African descent and giving poor white indentured servants and farmers some new rights and status, they hoped to separate the two groups and make it less likely that they would unite again in rebellion.”

Darwin’s Natural order places Europeans at the pinnacle of human development. According to this implied Natural Order, other groups of people should want to be accepted by this dominant group. Rudyard Kipling’s white man’s burden is described in noun form by Merriam Webster as : “a duty formerly asserted by white people to manage the affairs of nonwhite people whom they believed to be less developed.”

The Melting pot, Cultural Colorblindness, and other ideologies remove our uniqueness as colorful and magnificent image bearers of the creator and reduce the whole of humanity to the natural order of hierarchy where the only change in station in life will be at the bequest of the current dominant ethnicity.

Aren’t we more than that, especially in America, where the gateway to our nation at Elis Island reads, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” The air is free and available for each human being to inhale through our nostrils, whether broad and pronounced, narrow and slight, black, white, brown, or somewhere in between including a myriad of phenotypes. The Tower of Babel account listed in Genesis Chapter 11 of scripture was an epic failure. Its construction was an affront to the creator’s desire for diversity that ends in disaster leading to the originally intended global diaspora. The Mirage of Assimilation wants to blend marginalized communities of color into the dominant culture, therefore causing erasure. As result, erasure of the tainted history of the dominant culture toward the marginalized is never told effectively making these people groups disappear under the guise of cultural colorblindness and the melting pot so that their history and their story is silenced.

According to Study.com ” Acculturation occurs when the minority culture changes but is still able to retain unique cultural markers of language, food and customs. Acculturation is also a two way process as both cultures are changed.” It stands in stark contrast to the Mirage of Assimilation. It is the E Pluribus Unum (“out of many, one”) model, found on The Great Seal Of The United States Of America. Acculturation gives, honor, respect and voice to each culture and is foundational to the hopes of a multiethnic democracy.