We have a history of racism and bigotry in my family.
I would call it a dirty secret except that it’s been rather out in the open for anyone who cared to listen (and painfully obvious to anyone who didn’t care to listen but who found themselves socially entrapped).
It wouldn’t be such a big deal except we castigate people from this particular ethnic group; we stereotype about them; we crack the nastiest jokes we can come up with about them to their very faces, and we warn others against them.
Growing up, I heard about the necessity of preserving the “pure blood of the line” and other similar sentiments.
It is possible I have felt a secret sense of shame about this, er, “history of misstatements.”
Until today, that is.
It wasn’t until today that I recognized my mother’s mother was fully justified in her consistent warnings about the dangers of associating with this particular people group.
It is today that I realized my mother’s gentle pokes about the characteristics of “these people” were completely accurate.
I speak, of course, of the ongoing enmity between the Swedes and the Norwegians.
The Swedes and the Norwegians have had a very spotty history together, and when many of them emigrated to the United States 3-6 generations back, they carried their mutual history, along with their mutual suspicion, right along with them.
But then my mother threw it all away for love: she (gasp!) married outside of her race. She, 100% Norwegian of 3 generations back, married a half-blood. She married a man who was half Swedish, half Norwegian.
And our family has never been the same.
Every extended family gathering since then has included uncles trying to out-do one another in their jokes about each other’s ethnic backgrounds, small nieces announcing (in some confusion) that they want to be “Sweet,” like Uncle Gene, and the standard political commentary that usually concludes with a group consensus (sans my dad, of course) that the best way to deal with Sweden is to build a fence around the country and call it Norway’s National Zoo.
Yup.
Today I must finally acknowledge that my entire extended family has been right about Sweden all along: after all, a country where even the elk get drunk just to make it through the day is certainly nothing to brag about.
As of today, if anyone asks me, I have suddenly realized that I am only Norwegian after all: any (mistaken) understandings that my father is partially Swedish are based on malicious! false! filthy! rumors.
(The depths to which gossiping, malicious people can sink will simply never cease to amaze me.)
For more information on why you, too, can be grateful you’re not Swedish, feel free to peruse the picture of the tree-entrapped drunken elk while reading about the inebriated elk population that roams Sweden every autumn.
Those good-for-nothing Swedes.
My grandma was right all along.
lol! Wait until you dad reads this!