When did it stop being okay to be proud of your heritage?

Surely, many nations, if not all, have had a time when they were in power.  Chances are, at some point in history, your ancestors were part of a nation that was dominant over the other nations in that part of the world.  If there’s any comment that can be made about human nature, it’s that that power was likely abused, or that cruel things were done to obtain that position in the first place.  Now, seeing how most dominant nations operated in strict hierarchies, probability suggests that your ancestors were not near the top.  That is, your great-great-great.....great grandparents weren’t dictators, they were more likely servants to dictators.  Does that ease the guilt?

My question is, why is there guilt?  You are not your great-great-great-great grandparents.  You’re not even your parents.  You’re you.  And it’s up to you to make that mean something.

What does it matter if you come from warriors or slaves or anything else you might not want to associate yourself with?  Why must we feel guilty if our ancestors had power or ashamed if they were at the bottom of the heap.  Let’s just drop this stupid idea of hierarchies and progress together as one nation, the nation of humanity. *Cue John Lennon song* *record scratch as it suddenly stops*

I went to a self-labeled “progressive” university.  The people there were so willing to do away with social constructs of difference that they were throwing out the baby with the bathwater.  Yes, prejudice is bad.  Slavery, war, exploitation, and genocide are bad.  But is it really wrong to remember ANYTHING about where you come from?  Don’t try suggesting that to these folks, you slavery-endorsing, war-mongering, genocide-supporter, you.

Where your family is from does not define you.  Your race, religion, socioeconomic class, and all that jazz are not the be all and end all, and I think that for the most part, people understand that.  Why, then, does the topic still make people so uncomfortable?  If it doesn’t matter what your background is, why can’t you talk about it?

This is a social issue.  I suppose civilization has had too many run-ins with barbarians to discuss nationality in polite society.  I know this because people in “mixed company” get squeamish about the topic, whereas in my circle of friends, this doesn’t happen.  We are a somewhat mixed group, but it isn’t an issue.  We don’t dwell on it either way.  If someone has a question about someone else’s culture, asking it is no big deal and the other person is happy to share the answer.  The reason for this is because the background culture is, well, in the background.  What unites us is our shared culture of nerdiness.  We don’t want to get political.  We just want to write stories and play video games.

Perhaps it is the idea of difference that people find unsettling.  In my high school, the cliques were sometimes exclusively people from one background.  My theory for this is that it is a matter of familiarity.  Usually, they say you are most comfortable with your own “kind.”  I’d say it’s more an issue of neighbourhoods.  In my city, each neighbourhood has a particular concentration of a certain group.  Chances are, then, if you are of a certain background, then you live nearest to people of that same group.  This means you went to elementary school together, because you lived in the same district.  Therefore, by the time you get to high school, you gravitate towards people you know.  Not ethnicities you know, but actual specific individuals.  “Yeah, I know that guy.  He went to my school.”  That being said, if you didn’t like the people you went to school with, you’d take the opportunity to meet new people.  Background didn’t enter into it much.

We don’t grow up mistrusting one another.  That happens in higher education and other forms of “refinement”.  We study history, only to be doomed to repeat it because we are focusing on the wrong things.  When we look at humanity’s most terrible tragedies, we fail to remember that all people are equal and everybody suffers in the horrors of war.  What we remember is that there was some big-shot leader who wanted to lead his nation to glory, and look at the mess that made.  The lesson becomes: Glory is bad.  Pride is bad.  If you are proud of what you are, then you are probably a bad person who would like to kill innocent people.  Ironically, this, in turn, leads to more fighting (over who is less aggressive) and more passive bystanding (because even though we could easily step in and prevent the dueling debators from repeating the behaviors they scorn, far be it for us to be so intrusive in the affairs of others).  It’s swung too far the other way, people.  We shouldn’t have to censor our differences.  We shouldn’t pretend that we are all the same and nothing we do is ever out of step with what everybody else wants.  We need equality, not sameness.  We need to take pride, not conform.  Some things are hard to hear, but we need to hear them.  Let’s not abolish history.  Let’s just remember it carefully.

Over the years, I have written many an essay on the topic of Canadian culture (elusive creature that it is), and often I have come to the peppy but unsatisfying conclusion that we do not have a culture aside from what comes in from elsewhere.  Sure, that’s true, but isn’t it also true for any other nation?  We are one planet and our cultures evolve in tandem.  Maybe some nations contribute (positively or negatively, and doesn’t that also depend on perspective?) more than others, but it’s all in there together.  The planet is a melting pot.  It’s also actually melting, but that’s another essay.  But back to the Canadian culture issue.  What I found in my research, more often than not, is that Canadians look down on our lack of a distinctive culture.  A phrase that keeps coming up is a problem with how we define ourselves.  We want to do better than the cop-out “Not American.”

Well...yeah.  We’re not American.  Actually, nearly all countries are not American.  The only one that is American is the United States of...guess where.  So, if we’re not American, we had better stress that we are also Not British, Not French, Not...name every country in the world until all we have left is Canada.  So what does that leave us with?  Something we have yet to define.  

See, there is a major problem with defining yourself by what you are not.  By not having a clear nationality, it is as if you are absolved of guilt - guilt that you shouldn’t be having in the first place.  Are people of Italian heritage to blame for the brutality of Julius Caesar?  No.  So what are you trying to absolve yourself of by disassociating from other people’s backgrounds - or your own, for that matter?  Half of my ancestors were Hungarian (as far as I know).  That means, a thousand years ago (if they were personally there at that point in history), they might have been riding alongside Atilla the Hun.  Am I responsible for any of the deaths caused back then?  Obviously not.  So it’s “okay” for me to acknowledge what I actually am.  Why then, should I feel pressured to set myself apart from what I’m not?  If it’s okay to be one thing, it’s okay to be another, because all nations have worked out more or less the same way.

Are Canadians trying so hard to not be American because we don’t want people to think we’re responsible for the Vietnam War?  The nuclear bomb?  Curly fries?  You know, of all the nations that are Not America, we are probably the least Not America, so using that as a name tag isn’t making a very strong statement anyway.

Then again, people are afraid of strong statements.  They make other people uncomfortable.

Here’s another example from my old university days.  I was a contributer to our school newspaper.  It was quite the progressive paper, printing all manner of opinions and taking pride in doing so.  Additionally, a couple of times a year, we’d print a “special” issue: there was an African heritage supplement and a feminist supplement and a LGBT supplement.  All well and good.  Now, here is something that has stuck with me for a long time.  At one of our meetings, a (straight, white, male) student jokingly asked when the Straight, White, Male supplement was going to be.  Laughter in response.  The Editor-in-Chief (a female student of Middle Eastern background, and I don’t know about her sexual orientation) joked in response that every issue was the Straight, White, Male issue.  Only...it’s not.  Our paper was about everything and everybody.  We reported news that affected all the campus, or all the country, or all the world.  We talked about a variety of issues, covering every news topic one can think of (health, arts, science, politics, sports, culture, and so on).  We are not a straight, white, male paper.  We are for everybody.  We are standard.  We are default.  Whose idea was it for John Smith to be the standard default?  What makes him “normal” and everyone else a freak?  

The answer is...nobody.  It’s an illusion.  This is the problem with identifying with NOT being something rather than being something.  You become so focused with not being in a particular group that you forget to remember what you actually are, and meanwhile, you’re letting someone else unwittingly hog the spotlight.  You are trying so hard not to be standard that you are limiting yourself and all people who share that quality with you.  You and your socially predetermined group will never be accepted as mainstream because you define yourself as, literally, unacceptable.  At the same time, you need a standard to play off of, which is why you are just as much a part of keeping John Smith on his pedestal as the John Smiths are.

When did being oppressed become something to be proud of?  Being a survivor, being tough, and overcoming adversity are all things to be proud of.  But those are marks of personal strength, not other people’s opinions.  Never let yourself be defined by other people’s opinions.  Guess what.  If some bigot decides that they don’t like you for whatever reason, it doesn’t change who you are as a person.  You are no better and no worse.  Giving in to the misconception that being hated makes you stronger only reinstates a hierarchy and puts power in the hands of the hateful.  Don’t let it happen.  Don’t worry about being too mainstream or not mainstream enough.  Just be you, and if your background plays into that, so be it.

There are a lot of good things that can come from being in touch with your ancestral history.  Language skills, for example, or familiarity with certain traditions that might help you when you translate them to the modern world.  These are things that are special and specific to you and people of your background.  Now, it’s not divisive because every group has its special aspects.  We’re all equal, we just have different languages and traditions and stories.  They are all beautiful.  Why do people feel the need to wipe them out?  Political correctness has gone so far that it has defeated its own purpose.  The idea is not to offend anyone.  What has happened is that it offends everybody equally by trying to wash us all clean of any trace of identity.  We’re not dirty and we don’t need to be cleaned.  We need to be recognized.  It’s time to stop being ashamed of what makes us each special.  There are some things that you will be brought up with that others will not, and vice versa.  That’s multiculturalism.  Deal with it.  I’m not saying you have to withhold sharing special knowledge from people of other backgrounds.  On the contrary, I would encourage people to share.  That’s what makes our shared culture so much richer.  

And we should be sharing and cooperating.  In the words of Issac Newton, “If I have seen further than others, it is because I have risen on the shoulders of giants.”  Actually, the realms of math and science suit this example quite well.  This is because they are objective and apply in any place or time.  As it happens, everything we know came from Europe, and the Europeans got it from Asia and the Middle East, and the Middle East got it from Africa.  Here’s another example of different cultures strengthening one another to help all people: medical science.  Some of the first expeditions by Europeans to east Asia were for this purpose.  The start of these trade routes, the basis for modern globalization, was not to acquire silk or spices.  It was to share information on medical procedures (because we are literally all the same inside).

Now, how can we learn from each other if we are not allowed to be different from one another, at least in some aspects?  Freedom, true freedom, makes us all equals.  What it should never do is attempt to make us all the same.