This is from a comment to a blog post, actually the post and comments are pretty interesting in their own right. I was trying to find out how to make schnitz
und nep which is apparently different from apple dumplings. Comments from me follow.
From:
here
The problem with trying to give white people a little color is that so much of it has already been lost--often forcefully scrubbed away by our own hands.
I vividly remember living through a part of that assimilation.
My family is Pennsylvania Dutch and have been in the same area since the mid 18th century. Not recent immigrants, and yet I grew up surrounded by the culture.
My grandparents spoke fluent Pennsylvania Dutch. My great-great-grandmother was a powwow witch (I have her spellbook.) My mother cooked traditional PA
Dutch foods like schnitz and nep, hog maw, fasnachts, pot pie (not the stuff the rest of the country thinks it is!)
But in school, we were taught that all of this was wrong. I'm talking the sixties and seventies, here, where this culture was beaten out of us. If we used
PA Dutch words or the German sentence construction where we got our phrases and verbs out of order, we were called "Dumb Dutchies." We were made to feel
ashamed of not being "normal."
Today, PA Dutch culture is an isolated tourist attraction in Lancaster County. Here in York, it's dying out. Few people under the age of seventy know what
you mean when you say reutch, brutz or strubly anymore.
I'm still not sure why there was this deliberate effort to obliterate it--or why today there doesn't seem to be any desire to revive it. But what I remember
is a real anger in the movement to assimilate that probably had its roots in many different events and issues. A lingering memory of a sort of "no Irish
need apply" mentality, the humiliating 1929 Hex trial where PA Dutch culture was held up to international ridicule, and long-simmering racial issues that
erupted in the 1968 race riots (a solid white front being a stronger force than one culturally divided?) Fear is always a great motivator.
And then the cynical side of me wonders how much of it was driven by marketing. Easier to market to a broad common population.
In working with kids in my son's school (and they're almost all "white," in a sharply economically divided community, but that's another long rant) I found
that none of them were aware of the origin of their last names and had no sense of culture beyond a consumerist one. They have learned at their parents'
knees that it is the things you have that make you who you are.
I don't really remember any anger or insults, but I do remember the English teacher who did public speaking telling us that if we ever used "yous" or "ain't"
in a speech, we'd get an F. I was never sure if that was for the speech or for the whole class, but given some of my teachers the whole class wouldn't
have surprised me at all.
We lived in an area where a German dialect was spoken fluently by an older generation, and the languages we could take were French and Spanish. I know
at least some of the teachers knew some sort of German because I remember a guidance counselor, that would be Mr. Stump, asking another teacher, Mr. Unger
maybe, to translate some technical German he had from some book, about a gun I think. I also recall Mr. Unger arguing with me that English wasn't a Germanic
language, the idiot.
I don't think we had a lot of anger or anything, but did everybody play on that, hey you don't wanna be from some hick town and saund stupid nau wuntz
do ya? You bet your ass they did. Unfortunately I went right along with it and only realized what we didn't really have until I was much much older.
That's how it works when you're a kid I guess. Now you tell me the part at the end about being what you have isn't true. If you do you're lying, heh.
