Assimilate or Die!
This was my favorite hot take when I was firmly in the majority. But as the center of gravity is rapidly moving away from me, it is now my turn to take this politically incorrect medicine.
I love history. I majored in it in college. Context is one of my top 5 strengths in StrenghtsFinder, and I am a 5 on the Enneagram. I have always enjoyed stepping back and striving to understand the world from as many different perspectives as possible. And with this incredible resume, I found that I have developed a hot take:
People groups have two choices: when conquered, assimilate, or die!
The problem with this hot take, is that it isn’t as fun as the subway guy (https://www.tiktok.com/@subwaytakes) from TikTok’s hot takes:
If I’m going up to order, I’m not tipping!
America has gotten soft ever since we stopped drinking whole milk.
Allow people to pronounce words wrong.
Boomers have ruined the world.
Assimilate or die is the sort of hot take that seems to have no place in our current cultural climate. As long as I remember, this was not a take ready for polite society. I should have learned this all the way back in the mid-1990s when I was in a Chicano Studies class, and we were talking about the conquest of the Aztecs, who were conquered by the Spanish in 1521 by Hernan Cortez. There was a vibrant discussion about how beautiful the Aztec culture was and how all indigenous cultures were until the brutal and evil Europeans came and conquered them.
Like an idiot, I raised my hand and asked a simple question about wanting to know the difference between the conquering Cortez and the ways the Aztecs conquered their rival tribes, enslaved them, and even used their conquered slaves as human sacrifice. I thought this was a no-brainer question without moral equivalency, but simply as a matter of history and the rise and fall of kingdoms since the dawn of humanity.
Well, it was clear that I stepped on a land mine, and after sparking a forest fire in the class and being the main casualty, I meekly put my head down and kept quiet and manged a B- in the class.
Now, almost 30 years later, it is even less of a question we can ask out loud, but I think it is an important one. Especially for those of us who happen to hold on to majority culture, for just a little longer, and even more so for the church as our culture becomes more and more secular and post-chrisitian.
Here are a couple of examples from history:
Since the dawn of humanity, humans have conquered other groups of people. There is no group of people that hasn’t been conquered at one time or another. The Romans conquered all of the known world during the 2nd century AD. A few hundred years later, the empire split into a western empire centered in Rome and an eastern empire centered in Constantinople. The Western Empire was conquered by Germanic tribes in 476, and the Eastern Empire was conquered by the Ottoman Turks in 1453. The Ottomans ruled all through World War 1. In the cities and towns that populated the Mediterranean, many diverse people had to find a way to live or resist the current powers that be.
Back to my Chicano Studies class. The Spanish were able to conquer the Aztecs with under 600 men. The reason they were able to do this was not just their technological advantages but because they were able to make fast friends with many of the other indigenous peoples. Those people groups were so glad to join the Spanish because Aztec rule was brutal in every way imaginable. Just like the Roman world, the Aztecs were the biggest and best empire established before the Spanish showed up. Before the Aztecs, some tribes and city-states fought to control resources, including land and slave labor. And like every conquered people, these tribes had to decide how they would respond, assimilate, or die.
The conversation has changed since the 1960s
Before the 1960s, everyone assumed the world was a brutal place where the survival of the fittest was how history should unfold. The United States was simply another power broker on the world stage, levering its power and might. Instead of wielding its colonial power overseas, it did it within the evolving borders of the United States. The United States had blood on its hands, and that blood was still fresh. There were people alive in the 1960s with memories of the brutal conquest for land the US government levied.
The indigenous population living on reservations and the African-Americans living in the Jim Crow South were two conquered people groups who have been fighting for their rights for their entire history with the European settlers, who became colonizers, who became the majority culture, who set the rules for this new civilization with little to no mind for these two populations. Before the 1960s, the obvious choice for these groups was to assimilate or die.
What is wild is that many Indigenous and African Americans abandoned their culture and took on the culture of the white man and attempted to live in peace. In the 1960s, our culture changed, and the conversations around race were changing, and America was attempting to make amends for the horrific abuses it had inflicted on these people groups. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the legislative beginning of making amends.
The debate to assimilate
Today, there is a huge debate as to what these two people groups are supposed to do. The majority position is that the indigenous and African Americans who assimilated actually embraced whiteness and were seen as traitors to their people and culture. There is a fragmentation of cultures and a mad scramble to figure out which culture will be victorious in this nonviolent cultural conquest that is happening before our eyes.
The homogenous culture we (those of European descent) used to live in is rapidly changing. And the former majority culture is freaking out. And rightfully so. A real cultural battle is happening, and people are digging in and choosing a side. And while this conflict doesn’t have arms and tanks with clear winners and losers based on death tolls and infrastructure damage, this conflict is just as real, and the consequences are just as visceral.
As I have stated before, I think the cultural war is basically over, and the majority white, “Christian” culture of the past and really of nostalgia is rapidly coming to a close.
Can I drink my own medicine?
And with this culture war over, what will my posture be? Am I going to resist? You see this movement gaining steam on the political right. A cultural resistance that is trying to stop the bleeding and might even turn the tide. Or is there a new secular progressivism that has won the day? This is the new culture of the empire, and those who are going to live within it now have the choice to make, assimilate, or die.
Trust me, I am not a revolutionary, so my inclination is to assimilate. But giving up my culture, my worldview, and my power is incredibly hard. And what was simply a mental exercise in my Chicano Studies class, which had zero empathy for the conquered, is rapidly becoming a stark choice for me.
For those of us who have enjoyed majority culture and have been on the recent winning side of history, we are experiencing what just about every other people group on earth has experienced at some point in their history. We are not immune to the changing world and changing empires. While there is some nobility in fighting to the death, we need to discern and decide if we are going to fight to the death or see the writing on the wall and surrender, and in our surrender, take our place among the vanquished and embrace the new rulers and attempt to live in peace with them.
I actually don’t know how to answer that question, but I have put my cards on the table.
What do you think?