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This was brought up today in some threads about certain practices in other countries and ethnic groups as being part of the culture and part of the class structure. Many years ago I read about female circumcision in certain cultures. It was done so the female would feel no pleasure during sex. It was believed a girl would be a better wife and mother if she underwent such a ritual. Evidently, no one thought of an equally devastating procedure for the boys, so they would grow up to be better husbands and fathers, but I digress.
The westerners who came across this practice, anthropologists and missionaries, believed that to impose our cultural standards on these indigenous people would be unwelcome. Yes, it would be, but no one gave a thought about the procedure, performed on prepubescent girls who had no say in it, as being, well awful. Nobody even mentioned that maybe this was barbaric to a tribal chief or even one of his no doubt circumcised wives, so life hummed along until some feminists in the seventies became a little bit horrified.
Since then this procedure has been outlawed in many of the countries it is practiced in. We aren’t there yet, as the procedure is still often practiced illegally, but at least members of those cultures, who were probably victims themselves, came forward and managed to get laws passed banning the practice, thanks to the fact that some feminists shined a light on it.
You see when a practice becomes ingrained in a culture to the point where it is passed on from generation to generation; it makes it almost seem right. Even those victimized by a custom often think it’s right. But, in fact, it isn’t right. Unfortunately, the victims of the culture are usually those at the bottom of the social structure who have little say about what happens to them.
I grew up listening to the class argument from my mother. (For those who don’t know me, my father was an American employed in Chile and my mother was Chilean). I spent my childhood and teenaged years living partly in the USA and partly in Chile. You came from a certain class, my mother told me, and you knew your place is how her mantra went. Yet I wondered why the young woman, who was the same age as I was when I lived in Chile, made my bed and did my laundry while I was able to go to high school and think about proms and such things that teenaged Americans enjoyed.
This woman had no future. I did. But, she wasn’t my social class, I was informed. A young girl was condemned to a life of domestic servitude because of her class. No one even encouraged her to continue in school because at the age of fourteen, she was told to go get a job by her family. They had too many other mouths to feed. She was old enough to look after herself. That was the system, the culture. She was a victim of the class she was born in.
She became pregnant by her boyfriend, a laborer, also from the underclass. Since in those days, no one kept a pregnant maid around, she was sent on her way. She was coerced by her family to marry the father of her child, even though she didn’t want to, and two years later he beat her to death because he said she was unfaithful. No one investigated. No one came to her defense, including me, because I was having my own pater et mater familia problems about this issue. But let me move on to a European people that Americans are more familiar with, the British.
The British are very class minded which is why you had the abuses of Victorian England that Charles Dickens wrote about so eloquently trying to bring into the mainstream discussion, the plight of under classes in England. Back then it wasn’t even about race. They victimized their own because of class and because of culture. Fortunately the English have made progress in the social areas that we here in all of the Americas are sorely lacking except for Canada.
So this brings me up to now. Why are we tolerating the abuse we heap on the poor people from Central America, who come here because life sort of sucks for them in their own country because of culture and class? Why is it okay for the upper classes in their countries to victimize the lower classes and least able to defend themselves because it’s the culture?
Many of the young people who come here illegally to work at underpaid, back breaking, or dangerous jobs, without the benefit of the law to defend them, are still teenagers, like my mother’s maids from so many years ago. They have to negotiate the hazards of working here, of being victimized, used, and often having crimes committed against them because they believe life will be better for them. They also dutifully send money home in spite of the problems.
You know, victims don’t always speak up. But if we, who do know they are being victimized by even very ingrained cultural traditions don’t speak up, who will?
Yet, some posts are about happy natives when they visited south of the border. I am certain many of them are happy. They don’t have to deal with the stresses we do, but it doesn’t mean that they haven’t been victimized by the system. Also, most people, including the poor and disadvantaged don’t particularly want to air their dirty linen in front of you.
But I don’t know why I even bother bringing this up. When I brought up to a club of democrats and liberals I belong to about the increasing number of homeless in our area and what could be done to help them, I might as well have been talking about Martians, if you saw the blank stares I got. I know how Charles Dickens felt. I only wish I could be as eloquent.
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