Blue Laws and Ethnocentrism

Thanksgiving morning I needed to buy some last-minute ingredients for the derves I was making, so I walked up to Clement Street and got everything I needed at the big pan-Asian supermarket there. And on the way back, I though about how this was just one more side benefit of living in a multicultural metropolis. Thanksgiving: not a huge holiday among Asian immigrants.

So I was horrified to see a story about Massachusetts investigating stores that apparently committed the crime of being open on Thanksgiving.

From one perspective, blue laws are a pretty trivial matter, quaint anachronisms, with the only harm being inconvenience. Looking at it as someone who lives in a city with a Chinese-American plurality, though, blue laws are a lot more insidious. What they do, ultimately, is assert the dominance of the cultural/religious traditions favored by the people who happen to dominate the political process. The issue with blue laws isn't whether someone like me who failed to plan ahead can get groceries on Thanksgiving; the issue is whether people like the owners of New May Way, or their customers, should be screwed on holidays they don't celebrate. (One chain that did stay open (illegally, apparently, although they seem to have been unaware of the law) was Super 88, an Asian supermarket; they close one day a year, for Chinese New Years. Thanksgiving: not particularly relevant.)

When I was in London in 1988, my (then) wife and I needed to change money on a Sunday; we found an Israeli bank that was open (they obviously closed on Saturday instead), and we were able to get what we needed. The German woman we were staying with, however, was horrified that a bank would be open on Sunday. She wasn't some reactionary, mind you--she was a committed feminist socialist, and did all sorts of good work in her community--but this wasn't how they did things in Germany. In her view, immigrants and minority populations should simply have to conform to the practices of the majority.

As foreign as Gudrun's perspective was to us, as anachronistic as it seems, it is an increasingly common assumption here. It underlies the campaign to enforce Christmas, and the English-only drive, and a host of related inanities. And the people in charge of enforcing Massachusetts' blue laws, as quoted, seem to be entirely clueless about the existence of anyone who does things differently.

I can't help thinking that the blue laws have survived just long enough to be popular again. Now there's a depressing thought.