I’ve seen so many people call anything that portrays people as being different “racist”. Cartoons, old TV shows, costumes. Regardless of whether the portrayal or intent is actually negative or not, the mere fact of difference itself, characterization, is habitually and thoughtlessly labeled as racist. The very idea that someone from another culture might speak differently or dress differently and not just be a “normal person”, meaning someone exactly like me. Shocking.

Personally, I’ve always found the idea that, instead of having their own character, accents, differences, and idiosyncrasies, all people of different races, cultures, and nations should be generic and similar and conform to modern American ideals is the real absurdity and stereotyping. We’re so scared of difference that we call any reminder of it racism, as we call any reminder of difference between the sexes sexism. Why are we so afraid? Because we’re afraid if we really are different, then someone might think they’re better. So please sweep all that under the counter. Its essentially the policy toward nationality of the European Union. The way way to peace is elimination of uniqueness.

The truth is, people of different cultures are different. It can be hard to understand one another. You can’t take for granted that other people will be the same as what you’re used to. And if you risk leaving your own little pond, you risk looking a little silly sometimes, and having a hard time sometimes, because all cultures and people are not generic and uniform. And America, with its unprecedented mixing of immigrants, really brought that home to people in a way they had never had to deal with before.

But despite their differences they had to learn to live and work together. And that wasn’t easy and wasn’t without some real challenges and work and friction and misunderstandings, because the differences were real. In fact they were so real that the citizens of other nations thought the entire experiment was almost guaranteed to fall apart within a few years.

It’s only comfortable, modern Americans who can assume everyone is generic and equivalent and interchangeable, and that load other people and the world with those expectations and try to enforce a relativistic progressive monoculture. That is why, increasingly, we have so little tolerance, and much less humor, for any reminders about those differences.

Part of the way that differing peoples dealt with all the tension generated by their differences in the past was with humor, about themselves and about others. By recognizing their own and others’ distinctiveness. But instead of getting overly upset about it, or resentful or angry or fearful, people learned to be amused. We learned to acknowledge our differences openly in part through humor. And that had some real cathartic value. We started to become familiar with one another. It wasn’t just being mean or reductive. To assume there aren’t real differences and challenges and conflicts that need to be aired and deflated is what’s truly reductive.

We’re not more advanced and tolerant today, we’re more repressed and ignorant and naive and comfortable. Even tiny differences bother us, because we think humans are all supposed to be the same and act the same and talk the same and have the same values and the same culture, or at least one that agrees with ours. We’re not better at resolving conflict, we’re just better at avoiding it. The great thing about actual immigrants is they usually don’t have time for these sort of pretensions. It’s obvious to them that people are different. And if they have a positive attitude and aren’t helpless and have some spine and character in them, that amuses them.

Even within ethnicities, there are differences so big that the other side could be a whole different people, and you can either be amused by that or decide to hate it. Because it’s real. Northern and Southern Italians are very different (and in America we’re mostly used to southern Italians). Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews are very different and have had to learn to live with each other and work together. They couldn’t just assume that they would all be the same and have no conflicts, differences, or misunderstandings just because they were both Jews. And you certainly couldn’t assume in early America that the Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Cornish, and English would be the same, or could even understand one another, even though they share the same two, small islands. Even just among the English the variety of attitudes and cultures and accents was enormous. It was a reality early Americans dealt with on a daily basis.

We today come at things from the end point of a very long process, with a very different set of assumptions. And it’s not clear that we’re the smart or advanced ones. We’re just the beneficiaries of everything these people went through. We have the luxury of our illusions and prejudices. We can dismiss stereotypes and differences (as well as having a bit of humor about them) as silly and illusory and shallow, or even immoral.

That’s part of what great about the movie “An American Tail”. It shows the actual struggle of immigrants, the process of meeting one another, being amused, being shocked, duped, amused disappointed, surprised, hopeful, learning to work together, learning to respect one another, learning to be friends, learning to be countrymen…or countrymouses. If we can’t take some pleasure and have some humor about that process, that struggle, we’re going to fear it. We’re going to fear each other. And hiding from it, losing our humor, won’t make us less afraid, any more than avoidance cures phobias. The only way to overcome difficult things is by learning to face them.

So no, I’m not afraid of stereotypes, because I’m not afraid of the fact that people are different. I’m Dutch, and the little that anyone knows about them usually comes down to amusing images of tulip fields and dikes and people with wooden shoes. And if you look up the occupations of my recent ancestors, you’ll find that I’m descended from a dike worker and a flower seller. And we had a pair of wooden shoes with out family name on them. I don’t know about you, but I find that hilarious.