A ginger german question

In the USA there is a distinction between public life (politics, business, schools, etc.) and private life (what we do in our homes, the friends we choose, etc.).

In education and in most aspects of business (hiring and promoting employees, renting out lodging, serving customers, etc.) it is illegal to discriminate based on certain specifically identified factors. These include ethnicity, religion, age, sex, marital status, number of children, sexual orientation (in some but not all jurisdictions) and perhaps some others I'm not recalling at the moment.

In private life (choosing our friends, our roommates, our church, our school, the organizations we join, where to live, what stores to shop in, etc.) we are not legally prevented from discriminating against anyone for any reason. An obvious and uncontroversial example is: If you need to share your apartment with someone in order to make the rent affordable, you're free to choose someone who speaks the same language and can talk to you, eats the same cuisine and generates the same cooking odors in the kitchen, practices the same religious rituals, is of the same sex so modesty is not a problem, etc. If you're a Buddhist or a Samoan, you're free to patronize businesses owned by Buddhists or Samoans in order to increase the prosperity of the community you belong to so your next Buddhist or Samoan picnic is a big success.

Of course the boundary between public and private life is not clearly drawn, so interpreting these laws and rules is not always easy. I live in my basement studio and rent out the main floors of my townhouse. Since there's no locking door between the living quarters and, indeed, we are required to permit free access for fire safety, and because the tenants have to come downstairs to do laundry, this is considered my home and my tenants are my housemates. So I can use any criteria I want to choose housemates. If there were a locking door and they had to buy their own laundry applicances or go to the laundromat, this would become an apartment house and I'd be required to observe the laws against discrimination in choosing tenants. Even though they would still be right upstairs and we'd have to listen to each other's music and prayers, and smell each other's cooking.

If I get a few friends together who like to play go and we form a go club, and put a few dollars into a treasury so we can have a party once a year, we can choose whom we accept as members. But if the club becomes larger, dominating the city's community of go players so if you want to play go with anyone besides your wife you have to join our club, then we can't discriminate.

So when you ask whom we are "allowed" to hate, it depends on whether you're talking about public or private life. In our hearts we can hate anybody for any reason. But in business and other public affairs, we have to obey the law. We can't refuse to do business with someone, or deny him membership in an organization, because he's German or any other nationality, Rastafarian or any other religion, red-haired or of any other physical description, married or of any other marital status, etc.

In fact that Buddhist or Samoan picnic, if it's held in a public park, has to be open to anyone who wants to come.

American public life is deliberately designed and managed to force us to socialize, at least to a certain minimal level, with people we don't like. That way we may find out that some of them are actually pretty nice.

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So that was the genesis of the "ginger-vitis" episode of South Park, where they were sending all the red-haired people to concentration camps? I couldn't figure that out. I'd never heard the slang word "ginger" for red-haired people, over here we usually just nickname them "Red." One of our most popular comic strips is "Red and Rover," about a sweet little red-haired boy and his dog. In "Peanuts," Charlie Brown spent about 45 years in the second grade, in love with a "little red-haired girl," trying to work up the nerve to talk to her.

I had never heard of any prejudice against red hair in the USA, and my people can find an excuse to be prejudiced against damn near anyone and anything!

The Japanese think red hair is just about the most exotic thing people can have. Their advertising agencies routinely hire Westerners for photo ads, and Westerners with red hair are the most popular, followed closely by blond--both male and female.

We went through our anti-German hysteria during WWI. People were kicking dachshunds, sauerkraut was renamed "liberty cabbage," and some kennel clubs renamed German Shepherds "Alsatian Shepherds" because at that time Alsace-Lorraine was part of France. (It changes hands about twice every century.) My parents, who were children during WWI and therefore their anecdotes are not necessarily reliable, said that the "temperance" wackos lobbied very energetically for Congress to declare war on Germany. (England was by no means universally popular among Americans, and some actually wanted us to enter the war on the other side. Geeze would that have completely rewritten the history of the 20th Century! A strong, victorious Germany would never have succumbed to the Nazis, a U.S.-German alliance would have kicked the crap out of Stalin in WWII, there would have been no need to create Israel, etc.) Ya see, virtually all the breweries in America had been founded by German families: Schlitz, Pabst, Hamm, Blitz, Miller (Müller), Coors (Kurz), Yuengling (Jüngling), Anhäuser-Busch, etc. So by fomenting prejudice against Germans, they got Americans to reluctantly support Prohibition and all the breweries were shut down.

There was no repeat of strong anti-German prejudice during and after WWII. My parents' generation was too busy hating "the Japs" and tossing them into relocation camps.

 

We love Ireland and its people. The leprechauns, Guinness Stout, U2, the Cranberries. My bandleader took a vacation there so we now perform a song called "I Love Ireland." Of the American tourists who have kissed the Blarney Stone, I would not be at all surprised if the majority have absolutely no Irish ancestry.

There was a wave of anti-Irish sentiment around 150 years ago, when the Potato Famine generated a huge influx of Irish immigrants. But hell, the Americans of that era regarded themselves as an English expat community and there was a lot of resentment against all immigrants, even people whom we now think are almost a tiny bit better than us, like the pacifist Swedes and the hard-working Chinese. My Bohemian grandparents (we call them "Czech" now because it's easier to spell and pronounce) were treated like second-class citizens--no, make that third-class--when their ship docked in East St. Louis in the 1880s. Even the Italians, who gifted us with pizza, which is now America's Official National Food (I didn't look that up but I'm sure it's true) were spat upon.

But back to the Irish, since they had the advantage of already speaking English it didn't take them long to be made welcome. By the end of that century they were so well respected that the Irish-American policeman became a stereotype. We had always elected only Presidents whose ancestry traced back to the nationalities of the original colonists: British and Dutch. But when we finally broke that pattern, in my lifetime, the first non-British non-Dutch President was from a German family (Eisenhower) and his immediate successor was from an Irish one (Kennedy--arguably our most beloved President ever, surely because he didn't live long enough to be held accountable for his mistakes).

"Kraut" as an ethnic insult is long out of vogue in the U.S. We also use the term "Kraut Rock" but it's just descriptive, there's no animosity in it.

We definitely do not use the word "Pommy." I had to look it up. Interesting that its origin is not authoritatively known. We just call them "English."

It took us more than a century to get over the bad feelings from our Revolution and the War of 1812, but after fighting alongside the British in two World Wars I would have to say that in general Americans now love England and the English. We regard King Arthur, Shakespeare, Robin Hood and the Beatles as our culture too. For as long as this planet continues to turn, Americans will always be willing to die to defend England. You can still hear some Americans refer to the country as "Mother England."

Yeah, we love the Irish too. That's their problem, not ours.

And we "Yanks" are not? We who stomp around the globe, bringing freedom and democracy to every country that strikes our fancy (or is rich in petroleum reserves), even if they don't want it and we have to overthrow their government to get started?