Being White and Being Multicultural:
An Autobiography

Jeanne Zimmerly Jantzi
Eastern College

The author describes how the confluence of her ethnic/religious heritage, family of origin, and adult experiences as a cross-cultural worker in Africa has contributed to multiculturalism within her.

I am a white female Swiss Mennonite cross-cultural worker coming from an American farm family. I never really thought of myself as a complex person until I tried to describe myself in one sentence. My culture comes from many influences which include a strong sense of history, the influence of my family of origin, and my own adult experiences.

I am an Anabaptist with a Swiss Mennonite ethnicity. Anabaptists split from the Catholic church at the time of the Reformation, feeling that even the Protestant reformers did not call for a radical enough change in faith. Today some of our Anabaptist faith distinctives are pacifism, believer’s baptism, and a commitment to service. I have embraced my strong Swiss Mennonite ethnicity, but I struggle with how my ethnic group can open its boundaries and share Anabaptist faith with people of other ethnicities. Sometimes our ethnicity gets mixed up with our faith or takes the place of our faith.

Being Swiss Mennonite defined the rural Ohio community where I grew up. Each day on the way to my Mennonite high school, my school bus passed a sign that read, "Welcome to Kidron, an energetic Swiss community!" The rolling hills of Wayne and Holmes County, Ohio attracted Swiss Mennonite settlers because it reminded them of Switzerland. The counties are full of Mennonite farmers and churches.

Swiss Mennonite heritage is important for many of us of this ethnicity. I can trace my family tree back to its roots in Alsace-Lorraine, Switzerland. My family names of Zimmerly and Steiner are still recognized when I visit Switzerland. The clear family story gives me a feeling of being connected with the past and a strong identity base from which to operate.

For me, the most important part of my heritage is the historical faith story. Anabaptist Mennonites came to America to escape persecution for their faith. As a child, I spent many hours poring over the pages of a 2000 page volume entitled Martyrs Mirror (Braght, 1998). This book, first published in German in the 1800s, chronicles the stories of Anabaptist martyrs who were killed for their faith. Wood engravings illustrate the lives of these heroes and heroines of my faith heritage who died for what they believed. My favorite story was of Dirk Willems, an Anabaptist Dutchman of the 1600s. He escaped from his captors just before he was to be burned at the stake and quickly ran away across the ice-covered canal. When one of those chasing him fell through the ice, Dirk turned back and rescued his captor. Dirk was recaptured and burned alive. These martyr stories were so much a part of the Mennonite culture that they were retold as a theatre production which I saw as a child at a local Mennonite church every two years. I later performed in the production at my Mennonite College.

The cultural hero stories shaped my values of standing up for my faith and that personal comfort or even staying alive is not the highest goal. They have also made me identify with other groups who have experienced persecution in their history.

The fact that Swiss Mennonites are also an ethnic group gives me a strong sense of being connected. In our churches, we joke about playing the "Mennonite game."   Give me five minutes to talk with an ethnic Mennonite I have never met before.   Even if we are hundreds of miles from home, I can guarantee that I will discover some connection. I met my husband at a Mennonite College in Virginia. It turns out that my husband, a Swiss Mennonite who grew up in another state 500 miles away from me, shares a mutual relative with me. His father’s cousin married my father’s cousin. Their son, my second cousin on my father’s side, married my first cousin on my mother’s side.

In my childhood, my family always attended the bi-annual Mennonite Assembly in the USA. I would meet the same people over the years:  at Mennonite junior high Camp in the Rockies, at Mennonite High School soccer tournaments in Indiana, at Mennonite High School Choir festivals in Ontario, later in Mennonite College in Virginia, and still later as adults as volunteers with Mennonite Central Committee. Now I keep track of the same people through the churchwide weekly paper that lists baptisms, births, marriages, and deaths along with articles on faith and the important opinion-shaping forum provided by letters to the editor.

This sense of belonging has molded me, but I realize that my definition of belonging means that others are excluded. It feels painful to new members of our faith community when people comment that their name is not "Mennonite" or when they can not play the Mennonite game.

My sense of history also comes from being tied to the land. I grew up on the same farm where my father grew up which is just down the road from my great grandparents’ farm. My parental home is a two-story log house built on land that was deeded to the first white owners in a land grant by James Madison in 1816. My parents still own the farm on Chippewa Road, a county road named for the original Native American owners of the land. We often found arrowheads in the fields. My brother and I use to collect these artifacts and speculate about what the land was like in the days of the Indians.

Because of our strong pioneer identity, our family never really questioned what right James Madison had to grant our land to the first white settlers. The idea of "family land" took precedence over the justice issue of who were the original owners. Native American history seemed prehistoric, with no real relevance to our lives. All my enthusiastic reading of pioneer stories and visits to historical villages reinforced the idea of the strong, resourceful, and always-right pioneer settlers. If the martyrs of Martyrs Mirror were my faith heroes, the pioneers of Little House on the Prairie (Wolf, 1996) were my lifestyle heroes. Re-evaluating my pioneer heritage has come in recent years as I become more aware of American history from the viewpoint of others. This awareness has come mostly from justice issues that have been raised within the church.

My family connections also formed my culture. Most of my relatives lived nearby as I grew up. My parents considered it important to know my genealogy on both sides and to know my great aunts and uncles and second and third cousins. Family history is also tied to the land. Because the land endured, my mother still has a living legacy of flowers and roses transplanted from her mother’s flower beds and kept alive for several generations. My father’s legacy is in his care of the land, in conservation of waterways and other improvements to protect and sustain the land. As junior high students, my brother and I cared so strongly about certain old trees in our woods that we pleaded with our dad not to have them harvested. My dad understood our passion about those trees and allowed them to stand to this day. The sense of being tied to the land and family is very strong.

The connections of land and family have freed me to live anywhere in the world as long as I have this "right" to this one corner of the planet that belongs to my family. In the past year my family of origin, together with our spouses, discussed the future of the family farm. The farm is at once a legacy, a lifestyle, a shackle, and a duty. Neither my brother’s family nor my family are in a position to farm in Ohio. Yet even as our parents age, no one wants to give up the legacy or the lifestyle of the farm. Our family plans to live overseas again. My brother’s family lives in Canada nearer to his wife’s family. Farming would require us to be permanent Ohio residents for the rest of our lives. We are not sure we can do that and still follow God’s call on our lives. Yet all of us grieve to think that we may lose the heritage and the farming lifestyle that we all valued so much growing up.

If the family farm is sold, it will cease to exist as a farm. Land values in Wayne County have skyrocketed so much that the land would most likely be parceled out and sold to housing developers. Someone has said that yeoman farmers would rather cut off on arm than be separated from the land. That feeling describes my family. To let go of the farm would be like losing a part of our bodies.

These ties to the land have sensitized me to the situation of refugees. Being without a place is to be completely cut loose from all ties to this planet. Refugees in Zaire, sitting on a mat in the middle of the street, far from home, had not one place on this whole earth where they could curl up and be "at home."  Land is security. Yet being with refugees has made me question whether I have the "right" to the land or whether I need to be willing to let it go.

My father came from the Mennonite Church and my mother came from a related Anabaptist group known as the Church of the Brethren. Their ethnic community shaped them, but their life choices as a couple had a tremendous influence on my cultural heritage. Their families of origin were very local, and inward-looking to their homogeneous ethnic communities. My parents, on the other hand, seemed to hunger for cross-cultural experiences.

Before I was born, my parents worked for three years in Indonesia with Mennonite Central Committee. That experience began a lifetime of openness to other cultures. Soon after I was born, in 1964, one of my parents’ Indonesian friends came to visit them in Ohio. During his visit my parents received repeated telephone calls with racial threats. That family story first made me aware of racism in my own community.

Our home became multicultural. I remember going with my parents to cross-cultural retreats and learning to enjoy Latino music. In 1968, in the heat of civil rights tensions, my parents took a church youth group to repair homes in a Black community in Mississippi. Over the years, my parents sought out people from other cultures living in our community and brought their friendship into our lives. My parents worked with the Overground Railroad in getting an El Salvadoran family through the USA to Canada. They participated in social action to persuade the U.S. government to grant a Ugandan friend a political refugee status. They helped more than 65 Lao refugees settle in our community through the sponsorship of our church. In 1986 my parents were part of a Mennonite Central Committee peace delegation to Laos, the first group of U.S. civilians to visit some parts of Laos since the Vietnam War. Since my father’s retirement from teaching, my parents live and work as missionaries in Albania.

My mother also helped me become comfortable in crossing class barriers. During my childhood, she worked as a volunteer with a church service that filled in gaps in social services. Through these connections, she built a friendship with James and Lydie. James was a disabled veteran in his 60s who struggled with alcoholism and Lydie was his mother. They scrabbled to survive in a crumbling home on the edge of town. Visiting often in their home with my mother, I learned to visit comfortably in the midst of smells and sights I had never experienced before. I learned to eat whatever I was offered and to say thank you for it. I remember my mother’s discomfort with the awareness that even after becoming Christians, James and Lydie would never be welcomed our homogeneous, middle class church. That was my first understanding of the way class made a "closed community" of our church.

Through my parent’s example, I learned to be multicultural. In my parental home, I never,  ever heard my parents belittle the custom or practice of anyone’s culture, race, or class. I saw my parents giving to and helping people of other cultures, but I also saw my parents receiving help from these friends. Lao friends provided hundreds of eggrolls as a gift for my wedding reception. Our family got garden produce from James and Lydie. Somphit, a Lao friend, sewed traditional clothing for my mother, which she wore with pride. These days Vali, an Albanian friend and neighbor, cooks meals for my parents when they are tired from coping with few conveniences. I learned to value reciprocity and the dignity that comes from receiving as well as giving.

I learned a lot from watching my parents relate cross-culturally. I saw that certain things that were normally unacceptable in our culture became acceptable for us when they were done in the context of being sensitive to another’s culture. I watched my parents dance at Lao weddings (most older Mennonites consider dancing to be worldly), help Jim get Veteran’s benefits (Mennonites usually have nothing to do with the Veteran’s Administration since we are pacifists), appreciate Latino music (while never listening to rock music), and drink toasts in Albania (my parents are teetotalers).

Part of my social identity as a woman comes from my family of origin. In a farm family, there is often a traditional division of labor according to gender. Women are more likely to do the house and garden work and while men do the barn chores and fieldwork. Women may help out in the field or come out to help hitch up machinery, but the real decision-making is seen as the man’s role. In my parental home, this was reinforced because my father was the professional farmer. He earned a Master’s degree in International Agriculture, taught vocational agriculture at the high school, and organized Young Farmers groups as well as running the family farm. In my early teens, I railed against the gender division of labor in our weekly "family council" meetings. It did not seem fair that I had to do dishes while my brother got to rake hay. I was then assigned outdoor work, but it was clear that no one really thought I needed to know farm mechanics and grain prices. Even now, I don’t feel competent in "outdoor work."

I have had a good feminine model in my mother, who has broken ground for women in the church. As a child, I remember her fuming all the way home from church when "households" were counted to record attendance at church business meetings. She pointed out that this implied that both husband and wife needed to share the same opinions. (Now, many years later, I wonder what church issue she and my father were disagreeing on at the time.) Over the years my mother talked with me about her struggles over the role of women in the church. She definitely had gifts to be used in the church. However, our church had canonized the Greek culture of the early Christians and said that women could not hold leadership positions. Things have changed, and this past summer both my mother and my father were ordained in the Mennonite Church. My mother’s struggles have strengthened me and made me feel like I have options as a woman.

Life has never been the same for our family since living in Africa from 1989-1997. Living in Africa has helped me think through issues of race. I have never really considered "white" as a part of my identity until living as a white numerical minority in Africa and experiencing the overpowering white privilege that still remains from colonial days. We tried to give up the privileges that we could recognize. We lived as much like our neighbors as we could and constantly reflected on our place among them. In groups of African friends, I never felt "white" so much as just different. Yet when I would see a photo of myself with a group of Africans, I would be shocked at how sharply I contrasted with those around me.

On the other hand, in public, I was constantly reminded of my race as people would greet me by my racial identity. I learned without trying how to say "Hey, White person!" in five different languages. When I was not too tired, I would confront people and tell them that it was not polite for me to say "Hey, Black person!" and that we should just greet each other with the regular polite greetings. Now I am wondering whether it might have been just my own culture that made me think that pointing out race is impolite.

It also became clear to me in Africa that history is a major factor in the experience of African Americans in America. Coming from the same racial and cultural roots, their diverging experiences created a profound difference between African Americans and Africans.

Living in Africa helped me to move out of an ethnocentric view. I learned to read scripture from the viewpoint of Africans. I found out how many things I did not know and came to value African ways of doing things. I learned to adapt my eating, cooking, and living styles to make life easier in the context of an African village. I changed my way of dressing to fit in with what was culturally appropriate. I learned to adapt my way of hosting visitors and working at conflicts.

Many African cultural values have rubbed off on me. I place a high value on relationships and doing my duty even if it is not convenient. I am sensitive to family duty and taking care of family responsibilities. I have learned to value and respect age and I look forward to getting older. Africa also gave me a respect for other people as I often became painfully aware of all that I did not know. I saw Africans clearly as experts in their culture and ways of coping. I learned to value others as I became vulnerable to them. I try very hard to guard the dignity of others. I think I learned this through multicultural experiences.

I value my cultural identity as a white female Swiss Mennonite cross-cultural worker coming from an American farm family. Writing this cultural autobiography has made me value my cultural identity and the influence of my history, my family of origin, and my own adult experiences. Living with people of other nations and cultures, I have become more and more convinced that the Kingdom of God should be my reference point rather than any earthly kingdom. I cannot get patriotic about a legal boundary. I get excited about the kingdom of God which welcomes diversity because God created it and which transcends boundaries and includes every nation.

Notes

1. For example, four part a cappella singing is valued in many "ethnic" congregations. Some ethnic Mennonites fear they will lose that tradition if new members decide to sing choruses accompanied. What is an issue of our faith and what is ethnicity? Is ethnicity within the church something to be valued and preserved?

2. People use the word "Mennonite" to describe both a denomination and an ethnicity. Thus it is possible for someone to say s/he is "Mennonite" without being a Christian.

3. Some African American Mennonites accuse Swiss ethnic Mennonites of claiming that their ethnic history of persecution makes them "victims" and that because of this they are not responsible for white privilege. Although Swiss Mennonites first came to America to escape persecution, we have benefited immensely from being white and being able to assimilate into North American culture (except during the World Wars, when speaking German and refusing to fight made Swiss Mennonites suspect).

4. Besides valuing our rural roots, we Mennonites also value a passion for justice and social action. These two parts of our Mennonite identity came into tension around the 1992 Columbus Day celebration. Mennonite Central Committee suggested that we as a church should publicly repent of the sin of taking the land from Native Americans. At that point I really started considering my complicity in an injustice that happened generations ago but that still benefits me with my deep ties to the land.

5. My husband and I worked with internally displaced refugees in Zaire (Congo) from 1992-1994.

References

Braght, Thieleman J. van (1998). Martyrs mirror: The story of fifteen centuries of Christian martyrdom from the time of Christ to A.D. 1660.  Scottdale, PA: Herald Press.

Wolf, Virginia L. (1996). Little house on the prairie : a reader's companion. New York : Twayne Publishers.

Jeanne Zimmerly Jantzi and her family had worked in communities in Zaire (now Congo) and Nigeria with Mennonite Central Committee during 1989-1997.  Since 2001 they have served in Indonesia with MCC. She has completed a M. S. degree in Economic Development from Eastern University.

Write to the author

Recommended Citation in the APA style:

Janzti, J. (1999). Cultural autobiography. Electronic Magazine of Multicultural Education <http://www.eastern.edu/publications/emme/1999spring/jantzi.html> (your access year, month date).