The Arrival (How to survive in America)

By Ian C. Dawkins Moore

THE ARRIVAL tells the story of the 30 year culture shock experience of a man of color searching for his place in the New World. Told in tales and poems and anecdotes of acculturation, THE ARRIVAL embraces all the hopes and aspirations of those who would leave their homes and seek redemption in another land. THE ARRIVAL provides a unique vision of the multifaceted world of America at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty first century, offering lessons in survival and the benefits of embracing a vibrant and demanding culture.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ian C. Dawkins Moore
• Release date: Oct 25, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310620195

Ian C. Dawkins Moore

Ian C. Dawkins Moore was born under the sign of Aries in the year of the Tiger. He survived a British boarding school, the jock world of football hooliganism, hitch-hiking across the Sahara desert, and the two-tone culture of American racism. He is the published author of over 20 books, and he can still see the funny side of life- Be Well & Enjoy!

Book preview

THE ARRIVAL

(How to survive in America)

by

Ian C. Dawkins Moore

©Copyright 2015 Ian C. Dawkins Moore

Smashwords Edition

https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/icmoore.

PLEASE REVIEW

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only.

This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people.

If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with.

If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not

purchased for your use only, then you should return to

Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy.

Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This book is available in print

From

Ian C. Dawkins Moore

For information call

510-866-3660

Email: [e-mail]

https://www.iandawkinsmoore.com

In memory

of

Seth Tank Edwards,

who taught me how to learn

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS:

To Sue Stoney for her diligent work editing and proofreading this book.

To Joe Shakarchi, who was the first to encourage me to write

To Jonathan Smythe esq., who turned from his life of privileged to encourage a poor wretch like me to appreciate my purpose in life.

To Sam & Norma Smith, my real parents, who taught me to live and love life.

To my Aunt Sissy and Dennie, who got married on the day of my birth and who always believed in me, even when I didn’t believe in myself

To Jazmine Moore for the beautiful cover artwork.

To my wife Bridgette, whose support through the years has allowed me to write this book.

In courtesy of:

Brit-Think, Ameri-Think – Penguin copyright©1986 Jane Walmsley

Riding the Waves of Culture – Understanding Diversity in Global Business copyright©1998 Fons Trompenaars & Charles Hampden-Turner

The Gasser – Richard ‘Lord’ Buckley©copyright1958

Let America Be America Again – copyright©1935 Langston Hughes

Ebonic Plague – copyright James Cagney ©1998

I am solely responsible for the selections and articles in this book.

Dedication

To all who would venture to these shores…

The bitterness of poor quality remains long

after the sweetness of low price is forgotten.

~Benjamin Franklin

CONTENTS

EDITOR’S PREFACE

INTRODUCTION: WHY I WROTE THIS BOOK

PART I: COMING TO AMERICA

Tale One – The Migrants

Tale Two – Coming to America

Tale Three – Visitors’ Observations of Americans

Tale Four – My Take on Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville

Tale Five – The Ice Age

Tale Six – The Culture of Change

Tale Seven – The Heaven of Hope

Tale Eight – The Culture of the Immigrant

Tale Nine – A Cultural Journey

Tale Ten – Love Is a Perfect Imperfection

Tale Eleven – And This Is Love

Tale Twelve – Jamaica – No Problem(Or How I Survived Hurricane Gilbert)

Tale Thirteen – Do You Know WhatIt Means to Be Free?

Tale Fourteen – China – 6,000 Years in 6 Days

Tale Fifteen – Somewhere

Tale Sixteen – See London and Die

Tale Seventeen – My Fate

Tale Eighteen – The Road to Ramadan

Tale Nineteen – Walking on Air

Tale Twenty – Nice Chap

Tale Twenty-One – Cockpit Country

Tale Twenty-Two – The Promised Land

Tale Twenty-Three – Fear of the Unknown

Tale Twenty-Four – Another Country

Tale Twenty-Five – The Dictates of History

Tale Twenty-Six – The American

Tale Twenty-Seven – Fortune Favors the Brave

PART II: LIVING IN AMERICA

Tale One – A New World

Tale Two – The Culture of Stereotypes

Tale Three – The Culture of Money

Tale Four – The News Is Bad

Tale Five – The Culture of Self-Employment

Tale Six – The Dove’s Lament

Tale Seven – The Culture of History

Tale Eight – The Culture of Race

Tale Nine – Racism

Tale Ten – Only in America (based on the poem The Incident by Countee Cullen)

Tale Eleven – The Culture of Sports

Tale Twelve – Freedom’s Free Fall

Tale Thirteen – The Culture of Philosophy (the Socratic Method)

Tale Fourteen – The Culture of American Exceptionalism

Tale Fifteen – The Shadow of Youth

Tale Sixteen – The Culture of Politics

Tale Seventeen – Can Obama Do?

Tale Eighteen – The Culture of Fame

Tale Nineteen – The Envy of Us All

Tale Twenty – Culture Shock Interviews

Tale Twenty-One – The Color of Jazz

Tale Twenty-Two – The Culture of Language

Tale Twenty-Three – Ebonic Plague by James Cagney Jr.

Tale Twenty-Four – The Poverty of Plenty

Tale Twenty-Five – The Culture of Distraction

Tale Twenty-Six – Knowledge Is the Cancer

Tale Twenty-Seven – The Culture of Music

Tale Twenty-Eight – Unfold Your Own Myths

Tale Twenty-Nine – The Culture of Integration

Tale Thirty – Let Them Eat Cake

Tale Thirty-One – The Culture of War

Tale Thirty-Two – After a War

Tale Thirty-Three – The Culture of Ignorance

Tale Thirty-Four – The Culture of Class

Tale Thirty-Five – Refuse to Lose

Tale Thirty-Six – The Culture of the Future

Tale Thirty-Seven – The Culture of Change

Tale Thirty-Eight – Dreaming America

PART III: SURVIVING IN AMERICA

Lesson One – The 7 Phases of Surviving Culture Shock

Lesson Two –How to Be an American (with a tip of my hat to Jane Walmsley)

Lesson Three – In America –Don’t Look Back

Lesson Four – ESL (OR English as a Stupid Language)

Lesson Five – Learn How to Learn First; Then Learn English

Lesson Six – The Art of Communicating

Lesson Seven – Tomorrow Belongs to the Communicators

Lesson Eight – Getting a Job

Lesson Nine – I Will Survive

Lesson Ten – Cultural Signals in the Workplace

Lesson Eleven – Why I Write or Spreading the Disease of Literature

Lesson Twelve – I’m a Writer-Holic

Lesson Thirteen – The Culture of Survival

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: IAN C. DAWKINS MOORE

BIBLIOGRAPHY

WORKSHOPS BY IDMOORE CONSULTING

(The Moore you hear, the Moore you love)

EDITOR’S PREFACE

The Arrival is a compilation of three publications by Ian C. Dawkins Moore brought together to focus on acculturation and its influence on people’s interactions. The first two parts are a mix of essays, biographical stories and poems titled tales. The third is a 13-lesson guide to dealing with culture shock in the United States.

The author is an engaging storyteller who generously shares about himself and the others he has met along the way. His experiences connect what he learned with what others can learn, as well.

Ian has the ability to bring his lessons learned to what he writes, invaluable in this age in which we need to understand once again how to connect our reading and writing so that it adds meaning to both.

Because of Ian’s ethnic origins, wide travels and living circumstances, and copious reading and research, he is uniquely suited to be something of a Culture Coach, teaching us about the cultural divide.

Who better than a man born in Britain of a Black Jamaican father and white English woman can teach us about what really underlies our deepest-held beliefs and drives our interactions with others, for better or worse? Here is how Ian himself puts it in the tale about his encounter with a New Jersey Black man during his travels in Africa:

This experience with Walter showed me that it is culture that joins and separates people, not color or race. I believe when people look deeper – particularly if they really want to change and improve understanding between themselves and others – they will find that the distinctions lie in their cultures.

As I edited this book, I delighted in the reading of it and believe you will, too. I am honored to be part of this project.

Sue Stoney, Pleasant Hill, CA 2015

INTRODUCTION: WHY I WROTE THIS BOOK

I began writing this book over twenty years ago. I wanted to collect the stories of my migration, from a foster kid in a charity school in southern England to a man who has carved out a life for himself as a traveler and teacher. I wanted to understand what had happened in my life; what had influenced it and what part good fortune played in it. For as I look back today, despite all my best efforts, I’ve not fulfilled all my dreams and desires; in fact, it seems that every time I was fixated on an outcome the reverse would happen. And then out of the blue something I actually needed occurred and my life drifted on into the next round.

I was born in Hammersmith, London to an English mother and Jamaican father. My mother, after being kicked out of her home by her beloved father because she had a Black baby, hid out in north London for the rest of her life. She was advised by a social worker to put me in a series of foster homes from the age of three months old until I was seven years old, when I was sent to a charity school in Twickenham, Middlesex.

I was at the charity school for 10 years and when I was released back into society, I had no training for the real world. Incarceration has a way of consolidating certain skills behind a protective wall of mutual acceptance, yet it also freezes one out from the free interplay of the real world, where nobody is in control. My skills were in sports and personality, both of which I excelled in. These skills were limited, so as I found my legs in the real world, I was subjected to many frustrating identity crises, sexual confusions, economic challenges and cultural clashes that found me spinning unconsciously through a world of perpetual culture shocks well into my fortieth year.

I was fortunate to be rescued from being stamped with the stigma of being just a black sports jock because of the intervention of a white teacher, Mr. Tank Edwards. He was a Welshman, who had suffered through his own battles with discrimination from the insidious English class system and was therefore disposed to offer a hand to a struggling colored boy. But he was not patronizing or sentimental. He simply called me out for not making the effort to use the intellect that he could see I had.

As a result I discovered education and it set me free. I quickly joined the smart set at school – most of whom were already my friends because I was a very personable lad – but now I got to join them in the debating society and discuss books and ideas with them. My life changed dramatically in eighth grade because it became multi-dimensional, interesting and filled with an excitement for the future.

That future took me on a journey of personal discovery across many lands where I interacted with many people, trying to find my purpose in life while facing the feeling that somehow I’d done something wrong being born brown in a white society. This is probably the most insidious aspect of racism that white people or any dominate group or tribe can never fully appreciate. When another group is denigrated because of the color of their skin or the shape of their nose, and when those people have been subjected to brutal genocide in the name of economic progress, it’s impossible to escape the lie.

The haunting feeling of inadequacy kept me in a fog for most of my life. Despite educating myself, traveling, unveiling the lie everywhere I could, I was still left with this debilitating nausea. My gut kept telling me that all these white people couldn’t all be wrong about my inadequacy! Of course it was a lie. But I’d told myself the story of victimhood so often it was difficult to free myself from my own obsessions.

This is why, I believe, the psychic damage of racism and all forms of violence continues to resonant and persist in us all as we repeat the same acts in a misguided desperation to free ourselves from hurt by hurting each other. It’s a cycle that keeps us tethered to our fears and self-destruction, which leave us vulnerable to those who would manipulate our weaknesses for their personal gain. The simple fact of life amongst humans is that: If you fail to control yourself, there will always be someone who will control you!

I’ve lived half my life now in America (California). When I first arrived here, I was just happy to get away from the cold, damp and class-ridden dankness of Britain. I had attempted many escapes before; and for many years of my life, I saw myself as one of perpetually escaping from my past, or to be more honest, running away from my past. That I had good reasons to run away didn’t lessen the reality that I could never run far enough away from myself.

A different land, a different woman or a different job was never enough to hide the hurt that I felt at not belonging or bonding with a people, an idea or a philosophy that would sustain me. I looked out into the world, and witnessed how groups bonded, discriminated against each other, cheated and stole from each other, and set up false gods of criminality to assuage their subordinate status by honoring drug dealers and celebrity economic gangsters; I didn’t want to belong to any of them!

So writing this book has helped me understand the world I am living in and that I am still traveling through. Writing gives me an opportunity to look more deeply into how my education has provided me with a way to be more honest with myself. It also frees me to stay conscious of the great gift of life that I’ve been blessed with. I hope these essays provide the reader with the encouragement to reflect on his or her own stories and experiences and to see them in the context of the world and the cultures that they live in.

PART I: COMING TO AMERICA

Tale One – The Migrants

The first illegal crossing I made into a foreign country was into Mali from Algeria. I was stranded in a town called Tassalit – it was called a town on the map, but it had only one building built of stone that blended into the surrounding rocky canyon. The rest of the town was decorated with tents and lean-tos and cardboard boxes and tin shacks. I spent three days in this moonscape fly-infested outpost while the driver of the truck that was ferrying me across the Sahara desert to Timbuktu negotiated with the customs officer the price for my visa of entry.

My second adventure was less successful. I was traveling on the top of an overcrowded truck – there were some 100 of us stuffed onto a cargo of carpets and furniture destined for Niamey in Niger.

The fifty-mile journey had dragged into a third day, due to bad roads, repeated stops at arbitrary police post demanding a toll per person; and the perennial break downs – at least one every day. As we neared the Niger border a group of Tuaregs, who had be-friended me, got out of the truck, urging me to accompany them, so as to avoid the official customs post and the palaver that would ensue because of lack of papers and money.

I resisted their entreaties, believing that my British passport would validate my membership to citizenship of the world. It had worked before in Turkey when I was stranded at a hotel because I’d been misled about the time of my plane flight out. The hotel manager, once presented with the biblical seal of the British Empire on my passport, put me in his favorite cousin’s taxi and had me delivered post-haste to the airport; if it could work in the capital of the Turks, I reasoned, why not in the desert waste-lands of West Africa? In the two days that it took me to get back to Timbuktu, I agonized over my fall from grace and what kind of bad luck had struck me, that I should run into the only customs officer in the whole of West Africa, who wouldn’t take a bribe.

Migrations are an ancient activity. Our original ancestors began their migrations from Africa’s rift valley and populated the earth – movement to somewhere better and challenging is in the human DNA. Migrants also represent the most determined of our species, the individuals who bring a new energy to the host countries because they have nowhere to return to; therefore they are determined to succeed. But migrations have also been the cause of much friction among people who settle the land and those who are traveling to or through it.

A perusal of any conflict area in the world will identify the land as a crossroads of many cultures. In ancient days these areas were kept free and open and became the places for cultures to meet and exchange goods and ideas. Today as we run out of space in these delicate areas, these conflicts have transcended the ancient accommodations that different cultures used to offer each other and are now only reminders of ancient conflicts.

It is, therefore, all the more strange that America, with its vast open spaces, abundant resources and under-populated land mass – as compared to the rest of the world – should be so psychotic in its reaction to immigrants. It is even stranger when you consider that America’s huge population and rise to world domination has been fueled by a steady stream of immigrants. Yet America’s history has continually displayed a vitriol nativism. Those newly settled in the land panic and attempt to pull the ladder up and away from those who would seek to come to America after them.

The history of American nativism has affected every group that has tried to come here – except Blacks who had no choice about coming to America. And the propagators of such negative behavior are not hard to find. They are the political and business interests who benefit from the manipulation of the American people’s opinions, the same American people who’ve been denied a meaningful career ladder or job or improved wages or opportunities by the very power brokers who claimed to support them. The working poor’s frustration is easily directed at their neighbors who are just as poor and neglected as they are.

These are some of the underlying factors that ferment migration today, but in today’s world migration is, on the one hand, big business, and on the other, very complex. Every country in the world is plagued by the influx of immigrants, presenting a huge challenge to all nations. We may believe that everyone has a right to a safe and free environment, but making that available to everyone from every nation is a herculean task. America, along with Germany, has one of the most liberal (meaning welcoming) immigration programs in the world.

Lotteries are offered in almost every country of the world for people to win an opportunity to come to America. Refugees are directed through well-established programs that allow people from war-ravaged and politically unstable countries to find a home here. Millions of professionals have the opportunity to acquire work permits; many stay. Millions of tourists find happiness and easy integration into American society if they have money and are the right race. Workers needed in the agricultural fields of California, the meat-processing factories of the mid-west and the service industries throughout the country are encouraged to come and contribute to the American dream. For all the frustrations with America’s political class, the record of America’s compassion towards immigrants has lit a beacon of hope for millions more who dream about the day that they can come to America and raise a family in dignity and safety.

Yet, is America suffering from the onslaught of children from El Salvador because of the war that the United States waged there for ten years in the 1980s? Is El Salvador just an unfortunate victim of circumstances, being prone to a succession of earthquakes in a country that was already one of the poorest in Latin America, if not the world? Is this crisis of immigration a function of America’s and the world’s responsibility to assist those less fortunate than themselves? Is immigration an opportunity for a Christian people to demonstrate its commitment to the principles of charity? Or is immigration retribution for the sins of the military political adventures of Ronald Reagan and former U.S. presidents? And if the latter, what kind of fall-out can we expect from the flood of immigrants to America as a result of the wars in Iraq, Syria, the Ukraine and Egypt?

It would be comforting to acknowledge that, because the issue of migrations is so complex, good people can disagree on methods and numbers as to who should come; but in 2015 when over eleven million people are estimated to be in the country illegally (it would be safe to assume there are at least double that amount of ex-tourists and professional visa holders still living in America), the Federal governing representatives are more concerned with childish gamesmanship than making every effort to solve a serious problem that is critical to the welfare of the country.

The sheer naked grasping for power by the U.S. Congress is an insult to the very nature of the constitution and the history of America. They act as if the problem will go away. Yet the reality is, and has been, that other forces will manipulate the situation for their advantage and the social consequences of the fall-out from those desperate acts will only compound the social problems of America.

Tale Two – Coming to America

Ships coming from a distance carry everyone’s dreams ashore. For some they slip in with the eddies of the tides. For others, they crash against the rocks of poor fortune. Each brings their new song of freedom, coming to America. – Zora Neale Hurston

When I first visited New York and stumbled over the stacks of garbage on the corner of Fifth Avenue, I was amazed by such poverty side-by-side with such wealth. I later discovered that the city was going broke; and that New Yorkers were betting on the city’s demise. Years later, when I flew into San Francisco, I was greeted by quite the opposite spectacle. My wife’s sister picked us up in her 500 SL Mercedes and ferried us through a kaleidoscope of dazzling billboards advertising everything from gambling in sunbaked Reno, to giving humanitarian aid to Darfur. I was deposited, after a ride across the elegant Bay Bridge, at Lake Merritt, the pride of Oakland’s American-African bourgeoisie. I had to pinch myself to believe the opulence was real.

It was real. The American-African community of Oakland, California, is probably one of the richest Black communities in the world. The skyline houses that look down from the redwood hills of the East Bay are not the exclusive preserve of whites, as is often the case in many neo-colonial lands. The sun-drenched Mediterranean climate is host to one of the most diverse communities in America. Yet beyond the mortar and bricks of their homes, American-Africans own very little of the wealth of this fertile region.

On my arrival in Oakland, California, I learned that the city was scorned by San Francisco, the city across the bay. Oakland’s population used to be more than 60 percent American-African, but it has now shrunk to less than 35 percent. Yet the racial tag has stuck, and Oakland continues to be subjected to insinuations of second-class citizenship. This abuse only serves to highlight the cruel irony of history; Oakland was the celebrated start of the Trans-Continental railway, which was built to bring Easterners to the gold of the Sierra Mountains. But the fame of the whoring town of ‘Frisco had spread too wide for the truth to be known – that San Francisco was just a stop-over place for far more rewarding adventures elsewhere.

It was not, however, until I began to work with Americans that I got to see the people behind their facades. Stripped of a reason to care, people often don’t. Settled people become addicted to their immediate gratifications, and their interest in others becomes disturbingly absent. The American public persona being the embodiment of the perfect lifestyle is a veneer that fools nobody, least of all someone new to the country eager to dig beneath the surface with every question. American lifestyles are so tied to credit and debit – and an obsession with crime – that to come to America is to feast on dreams of fabled opportunities and harsh, demoralizing realities.

My first encounter with Americana came after I pounded the streets for a month, looking for a position comparable to that of an engineer, which I’d been in London. I was told by an agency interviewer, in no uncertain terms, that as a Black man I could not hope to get a position that would allow for vertical mobility. I could only hope for lateral movement.

American racism strikes foreigners with such bold frankness that, on first impression, it comes as a relief from the hypocrisy of the British class system. Yet the acceptance of conflicts among racial groups in America is so prevalent, and reveals an attitude of such bitterness, that it chokes every fiber of the nation’s structure. All sides tug, push, and pull, using an ever-louder voice with which to express their mutual detachment.

Short of a nation undergoing a civil war, nowhere in the world is bitterness for one’s fellow citizens such a basic part of the psyche of the nation. Most startlingly, it is a bitterness that believes it’s the most victimized in the world. Trying to explain the 1,000 year-old war between the Scottish and the English to an American-African is to be reduced to absurdity. American-Africans pride themselves on being history’s biggest victims, as if no other group – Black or white – could possibly have suffered so much!

I was finally saved from the grip of this consuming form of racism by the guiding hand of patronage; in the land of the brave and the free it’s not what you know but who you know! A cousin of my wife just happened to be on the local school board. He found me a job as a janitor at a junior college where I eventually worked for four years.

In the course of my apprenticeship, I was exposed to American supervisors who took more than two years to summon the nerve to have a conversation with me beyond, What’s ‘appenin’? It took me some time to realize that, as a Black Englishman, I frustrated the majority of Americans I met because I didn’t fit into a neat box (i.e., White, Black, Asian, Hispanic or Other).

This confusion I was causing reminded me of when I first filled out a visa form to come to the USA; I had to grapple with questions that asked me what my grandparents’ ancestry and religion were. And whether I, or any of my distant relatives, had committed a crime for which we weren’t convicted. And finally, what was my race? I resisted this attempt to be made into a racist as long as I could, but I was encouraged and indeed impelled by the attitudes of American bureaucracy to view myself in this one-dimensional manner.

Try as I might, however, my accent set