Olympics remind us that melting pot needs warming at home and abroad

Americans are notoriously culturally insulated. While claiming to be the great melting pot, many Americans seem only comfortable with the concept if that melting pot is boiling everyone down to a homogenous and palatable form of “normal.” That means speaking English, preferably without an accent, and acting and thinking like a white, middle-class Midwesterner might do.

Although the idea that being American means one thing (one color, one accent, one socioeconomic position) has never been true, today, it’s less true than ever. The Olympics, which I wrote about last time, both emphasized that point, and also strengthened that feeling of cultural isolation.

American teams are now comprised of people of many races and ethnicities, and include first generation Americans, children of undocumented immigrants and athletes whose family history — both in the United States and in the Olympics — stretches back many generations.

But coverage of the Olympics was so wholeheartedly focused on the American teams that television spectators rarely got a glimpse of other countries competing in the same events. Unless a country was doing spectacularly well — say, Jamaica in track and field or China in gymnastics — it was hard to tell how other countries were doing. Mexico won bronze in women’s synchronized diving, for example, but were rarely given screen time during the event. And I’m pretty sure Russia and Canada were competing in women’s gymnastics, but again, we caught only a few glimpses of their athletes.

And heaven forbid it was a country Americans couldn’t pinpoint on a map, such as Trinidad and Tobago or Netherlands Antilles. Maybe you’d catch a fleeting glimpse of an unusual uniform in the background of a shot of an American, if you were lucky.

Of course, given the large number of events happening during the Olympics, it’s natural that something must give, but isn’t the point of the games a celebration of international unity? When Japan and China put aside centuries of aggression to compete side-by-side? When Russia and America ignore the growing tensions over Georgia and Poland and focus instead on performing at the highest levels?

I like to pretend that I take enough interest in international goings-on to at least hold an intelligent conversation about events that take place outside our borders, and I’ve done a limited amount of international travel. But my own lack of knowledge became crystal clear when my partner challenged me to take a test identifying a variety of foreign accents. I figured I’d at least be able to pinpoint various accents from the British Isles, having spent a brief time living in England. It turns out, I failed horribly.

At www.languagetrainersgroup.com/accent_game.html, you hear people from around the world reciting fragments of a Rudyard Kipling poem, and you are supposed to guess not only what country they are from but, at times, what region or city. So even when I correctly identified a Brit, I managed to fail to distinguish whether they were from Cheshire or Brighton. I was thoroughly ashamed at my undiscerning ear.

And even when I thought I had the upper hand, such as identifying which part of the United States a person was from, again I failed. What I thought was a strong southern accent (I guessed Tennessee, where my grandfather is from) turned out to be from Chicago (seriously? At least it was clear to me that woman was not from Southie). It made me question everything I thought I knew about accents.

Try your hand at the challenge and see if you do any better. If so, I congratulate you on being slightly more culturally knowledgeable than the rest of us. We should all aim to do better.

Theresa Hogue can be reached at theresa.hogue@lee.net or 758-9526.