#lost little sheep that discovered they have teeth
Regular reminder that there’s literally nothing stopping white people from enjoying their own heritages and that all that bonehead noise about how “the SJWs” are gonna come after you because you wanna learn Irish or you think Vikings are cool is just straight-up a lie.
Y’know what robs white people of culture? White supremacy does. And you can take that to the fuckin bank.
This is actually something I’ve felt for a long time but was afraid of talking about because I wasn’t sure if anyone else felt the same way. We’re losing any and all important ways of positively and benevolently performing, expressing, sharing, and celebrating our cultures because they keep getting invaded and corrupted by white supremacists.
It’s the white supremacists we need to annihilate. Then we can have our celebrations.
Gatekeep white supremacists from white culture. Separate them from it, remove them from it.
They’re not white culture, they’re hate culture.
When Urgroßvater fled the Rhineland way back in the day, he wound up in Mississippi. All the kids grew up as monolingual Anglophones, because the last thing you want to be in a place like that is different; better to identify with the dominant group, if you’re lucky enough that that’s an option. Any meaningful sense of heritage was gone by the time the next generation learned to talk. Now it’s 2018 and all the German I have is Berliner Hochdeutsch from school and Duolingo. Whatever songs and stories and traditions I could’ve had are just gone, like a fart in the wind.
Deep down in my bones, I feel like I was cheated out of something. And it was the pressure and desire to assimilate into whiteness that did the cheating.
The same thing happened to me with Italian on both sides, children raised to fit in without any real heritage or traditions passed on.
My grandfather told his Prussian parents, “We’re in America. Speak English.” He spoke Polish, Russian, German, and English. My grandmother spoke German, Norwegian, and English. My parents used to have arguments in German but refused to teach us. I’m a monolingual Anglophone. I’m still upset about it.
My grandmother’s family assimilated so hard because they were Russian Jews. I am continually working my way back to my ancestress’ list of languages and crafts skills.
(There is probably an argument that I’m carrying a lot of Nanna around here, but hey.) (She spoke English, French, German, Russian, and probably some Latin. I’ve swapped Latin for Spanish and am kinda crappy at German. She also could look at a piece of finished clothing and go home and put together a replica; I’m working towards it with knitting instead.)
And yes: I was named for her.One of the truths about European colonization of the world was that most of those who were most emphatic about assimilating or eradicating non-European cultures were usually those who’d already had the same thing done to them. Which can go all the way back to distinctions of rank and station in what we think of as “the same” society - some of the areas of the USA and Canada that were/are the worst in terms of anti-Indigenous and anti-Black racism were those colonized by the Welsh, Scottish, Irish and even English farmers and peasants who’d had their entire generations and centuries of culture, ancestry and livelihood ripped up and thrown out by Enclosure or forced relocation or the Famine or what have you.
They came to the Americas and thought now we can be on the top and acted out the worst parts of their own (often intergenerational) trauma on everyone vulnerable to them. It’s a very very common human pattern and all over the world it continues today.
I’m relatively connected to Scottish culture for a western Canadian—my mother and uncle did Highland dance when young, my brother was in pipe bands, I’ve been to a lot of Highland games, my grandmother took me to Scotland when I was young.
And it’s basically all because my Orkney ancestors REMEMBER and are still VERY PEEVED about being invaded by the English, having their language, culture, and traditional forms of dress outlawed and stolen, and losing political autonomy.
So even though they were still kinda racist, when my grandparents went up to the Arctic to exploit the environment and learned about how Canada’s Indigenous people had been colonized and had their language, culture, and traditional forms of dress outlawed and stolen… even then they were like, “Hey, that sounds shittily familiar” and worked in small ways (in between drilling oil wells) to help preserve Inuit culture and help individual Indigenous people.
Imagine what might happen if white people remembered what it was like for their families to be fed into the meatgrinder that took in their heritage and spat out mayonnaise, and decided that maybe it wasn’t so great after all.
I was always very, very pissed off that my grandparents steadfastly refused to teach me Greek.
If it weren’t for “We’re in America, speak English,” I might have grown up speaking Norwegian, German, Dutch, and maybe some Gaelic.
“We’re in America, speak English” is also “We’re in America, speak only English,” and that is loss beyond measure.
Sometimes I want to cry because I want want want the Czech culture that my great-great-grandparents were raised in… but when they came over, they renounced it all. They were Czech, but their children (my great-grandparents) were American. Their children’s children (my grandparents) were American. They spoke English and they participated in American culture; even their last name had to be pronounced the American way. They might speak Czech to their friends when they went to Mass at St. Wenceslaus, but at home, they worked hard to learn English and practice American traditions.
My grandfather knew a little Czech, and remembered some of the traditions his grandparents had brought over. But when he died in… 2013, 2014? we lost anything he didn’t pass on, because he was the last child of that line.
I once had someone at a pagan gathering say to me “oh, you’re Czech? that means you can worship the Slavic gods!” But even if I could trace my family back to pre-Christianity Prague and Bohemia, would those gods even recognize me? Through Americanization, my family’s Czechness was reduced to a fun fact and a way of excusing our weird last name.
And sometimes that really just boils my blood.
There is no “white” culture, the traditions of my Welsh ancestors do not look like the traditions of my German ancestors or French ancestors beyond a certain few surface similarities. The languages and religions, traditional metalwork and buildings, the musical styles, they are not the same. They are even less like Russian or Slavic culture. Reducing everything to a bland, homogenous “whiteness” is assimilationist bullshit.
I was lucky in my family’s retention of at least some traditions. My great grandmother came over in 1915 from Ireland. The Garlic language schools were a little too new for her to have learned the language, but songs and stories were preserved, and passed to her children, and then to my father, who spent nearly all of his life so far in preserving and sharing as much as he can of traditional culture as a musician. It’s not much, not in the face of what’s been lost and how much is being taken and sat upon by boneheads and nationalists. But it’s something, at least.
May Brighid and her forge and hammers do to them as they have earned.
omg, I had a huge conversation with one of my Pakistani friends about this recently.
We were talking about “American” culture = “white” culture and then what is that?
What is “traditional” (not-native) American food? Hot dogs? Apple pie?
What about clothes? The Pilgrims, the way so many public schools try to dress up our little ones every Thanksgiving? Revolutionary War garb? Civil War? Victorian? How old are we talking?
When a white American that’s been completely white-washed of their specific European heritages wants to honor their ancestors, what the eff do they do?
But I can go to the Highland Games and find the exact effing tartan pattern Mr. B’s ancestors wore 500 years ago.
White Americans are desperate for culture. I think that’s one of the big factors behind cultural appropriation (ranking behind imperialism and racism, of course). There’s the “American” culture is “white” culture, yeah, totally, but it’s also a whole lot of nothing. What’s our heritage? 250 years of the current government? There’s not much sense of connection, of being part of a culture deeper and more meaningful than just ourselves which I think is also where a huge part of our toxic patriotism comes in. We’re just so effing desperate to belong.
What’s our mythology? Where are our legends? Effing Paul Bunyan and his origins in ad campaign?
My family lists about 8 different European countries as our background but on both sides everyone’s been in the U.S. for over 100 years (150 for most of my dad’s side) and there is just nothing left of any ethnic pride, culture, identity, sense of a homeland, nothing. Just “American.” And we’re not too thrilled about this country right now but the culture is the country is the identity is….. I’m too tired to parse this well.
My partner’s family still talks about being forced to cut ties with the German cousins that remained in the homeland nearly 100 years ago now, so as not to arouse suspicion or cause anyone to doubt their patriotism. That’s when they deliberately stopped teaching their kids German, stopped making their favorite dishes, started making differently styled clothes, etc. They wondered what happened to their relatives during WWII, if they resisted, if they joined, if they survived, what happened to them. But never tried to resume contact.
The melting pot idea is real, y’all. And some of our ancestors took it too darn seriously. What happens when all the European immigrants are stewed up together and melted down and have no connections to who and what they were before and there’s poison in the pot? We get some seriously sick culture.
This forever: “They came to the Americas and thought now we can be on the top and acted out the worst parts of their own (often intergenerational) trauma on everyone vulnerable to them. “
