Idenity in the Global Age

Globalization has changed the world in a number of ways. It has interlocked individual nation states’ economies together. It has created a variety of subcultures that have been able to transmit their values via the internet. Globalization has also moved a lot of people around, sending wave after wave of immigrants over national boarders.
For some countries, these sudden swells of new populations are a relatively new phenomena. Europe, once a stronghold for homogenization, a bulwark of a continent comprised of single national identities is now being slowly transformed. Pockets of diversity have sprung up in areas where once a single language had been spoken. There are now neighborhoods in France, England, Germany, and Italy, where the native language has been replaced by Arabic, Afro-Caribbean patois, and African dialects. Customs once observed in Maroco, Senegal, and Haiti, are now seen in Paris, Liverpool, and Frankfurt, with an increasing amount of frequency and proliferation. These countries who have for so long been largely unified by language and shared history are now trying to find ways to accommodate and incorporate new workforces from various social-ecconomic backgrounds, and new pupils in the classroom who do not have the same cultural background as the students that have been filling classrooms for centuries.
The United States, once a beacon for the world’s tired and poor huddled masses yearning to be free, is also facing these new challenges brought about by globalization. But the face of America’s attitude towards immigrants, and the faces of the immigrants themselves have changed. When America first became the Great Melting Pot, the aliens who had settled our shores were mostly European. Even with the particular cultural bias of different time periods (whether the dominant culture was set against the Germans, Irish, Italians, or Jews), these migrants coming to our shores would be nearly fully assimilated within a generation or two. This is no longer the case. Today’s American immigrant can trace his/her roots to South America, Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. By the very virtue of the color of their skin, their facial features, they are indelibly stamped with the designation of “other.” These new cogs found within the Jeffersonian Great Machine of Democracy, face a cultural limbo; where they are simultaneously are and are not seen as American.
In her chapter, for the book entitled Globalization, Culture and Education in the New Millennium, Carola Suarez-Orozco raises the issues that are facing the children of this new crop of Americans. She points out that one of the largest challenges that children of immigrants now face are the cultural attributes that are ascribed to them. Racism in the United States has never been a secret. Expectations of people of color, whether they are of Latino, African, or Afr0-Caribbean descent have traditionally been low. As Marshall McClune has pointed out, the medium is the message in a postindustrial age. Children who are expected to do poorly, will. What is more distressing as C. Suarez-Orozco points out, is that in this environment of over-determined failure, a subculture forms. Academic achievement becomes a sign of cultural betrayal for many second and third generation Americans. Terms like “coconut,” “banana,” and “Oreo,” are now freely ascribed to ethnic minority children who succeed in school by their own communities. We are now living in a country where large portions of our population now see learning as a curse, a rejection, where children face the choice of being successful within the context of the larger society, or being accepted within their home communities.