“What aspects of your cultural heritage are you most proud of or interested in?”
Are you f*****g kidding me?
I read today’s prompt and immediately felt dirty.
My research lately has been discussing how white nationalists have adulterated and appropriated the term heritage to justify their hate and cruelty. The word is tainted. There’s blood on it now that can’t be washed clean.
And it breaks my heart.
I was so in love with the concept of heritage when I was growing up. In my dysfunctional and dysregulated family, heritage was the connection that transcended the dysfunction.
We were farm people, even after we’d moved to cities. We ate dinner together at the table every night. The women made that meal together most days. We rejected the pull of popularity, and were suspicious of progress. We hunted, and fished, and gardened. We processed our own meat, and the chill in the autumn air still demands my participation in the harvest, in whatever form it takes. We canned. We baked. We dehydrated batch after batch of jerky but could never manage to store any because it just doesn’t last that long. I preferred venison jerky, but the larger consensus preferred elk. It all disappeared the same.
Cooler darker evenings gave way to handicrafts as we lay our projects across our laps and discussed our intentions for them, and self-castigated our mistakes.
We hadn’t completely lost our Irishness, or our Germanness for the sake of the larger whiteness, but that doesn’t mean that we didn’t benefit infinitely from white privilege.
We came from immigrant stock, clearly, because neither Ireland nor Germany are in America. While my memory of my family sees our racism pretty blatantly, we did have a consciousness that none of us have any more right to be here than anyone else. (They were wrong. Land Back!)
I went on to connect deeply with the ethnicity of our roots. I studied German, and learned folk music and folk dances. Those weren’t given to me through generational transmission though. I had to go dig them up myself.
I would have taken Gaelic in an instant if given the opportunity. I learned a lot about the history and the dances and the food. (Yay, potatoes!) I fell in love with the music. Again, this was all heritage that I had to appropriate, even if I was entitled to it, because it was not given to me.
The agrarian roots that I valued so much when I was growing up, while the lifeblood of nourishing this world, are also tied to exploited labor, and the hardship of barely getting by. It behaves with a disregard for the realities of its time, and those raised in its expectations are expected to conform to things that just don’t work in the real world.
I was raised to think I was inheriting a country worthy of my patriotism. I thought we had a heritage of refusing tyrannical rule, and individual freedom. I was fed stories of “give me liberty or give me death,” and “united we stand, divided we fall.”
I was brainwashed into believing that George Washington was just the most honest human that ever lived until Honest Abe came along to unseat him from the throne of righteousness where his statue can still be found today.
I was taught that we had already had the civil rights movement and all of that racism nastiness was just part of an unfortunate past that we can’t change so we might as well just not fret over.
I was taught that we beat the na%is. I was taught that America we supposed to be a refuge for the tired, the hungry, the poor. I was taught that we were not subject to rule by state religion. I was taught that our rights were so important, the states wouldn’t ratify the constitution without them. I was taught that we were protected by a system of checks and balances that were supposed to protect us against tyranny.
I was taught that we the people means ALL of the people, and that those rights have to extend to ALL of us because there were amendments to the constitution that said so. Every single one of us was supposed to have access to that American Dream without being restricted by caste.
As I’ve grown older, I’ve also grown to understand the privilege, entitlement, and abuse that go with my “heritage,” and I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to dismantle it.
The America I loved so much never existed outside of my head. We have over 200 concentration camps. We have ALWAYS had concentration camps. We have never stopped committing genocide. We never stopped slavery, we only dressed it in stripes and gave it a new name. Our capitalistic greed has ravaged the third world. We meddle in the sovereignty of other countries. We refuse to defend those who deserve it (Palestine, Ukraine, Sudan, Congo, the list is endless).
Heritage is gaslighting that keeps us playing along.
I need to go take a shower now.
Survivor Literacy 
What do you think?