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Unlearning Racism Pt. 2: getting to know ourselves
Published by vegankid | Filed under 101
I’m a firm believer that talking about racism isn’t just about focusing on other people, we need to make it persynal and talk about ourselves, too. So with that in mind, let’s look at the varied parts of our ethnic and cultural heritage. Racially and ethnically, we are a patchwork of cultures and ethnicities put together in a persyn, family, tribe, clan, or community. So let’s get to work on creating our own virtual patchwork quilt. The instructions are simple:
A.) Take a piece of paper and divide it any way you want to by folding or dividing it into four sections.
B.) In the different sections of the paper, describe the following aspects of your identity:
Section 1: Where you are from. Draw a pictorial or symbolic representation of where your ancestors are from.
Section 2: How you identify yourself racially/ethnically.
Section 3: Describe an aspect of your racial/ethnic heritage that you are proud of.
Section 4: Describe what you know about the heritage of you first or last name.
C.) After completing all four sections, describe the patches on your quilt in the comments section of this post.
I’ll publish a follow-up to this post in a couple of days.
July 1st, 2006 at 7:24 am Section 1: Where I'm from
Just about everywhere! My mother's family is from El Salvador, all Mayan descendents and mestizos; but my mother grew up moving around Latin America. My father's father's family was Spanish and my father's mother's family were Polish Jews. My father is an English Jew.
Section 2: How I identify
Mestiza. Jewish Latina. I'm from everywhere and nowhere.
Section 3: An aspect of racial heritage I'm proud of
I'm not sure that I know what it means to be proud of my heritage. I am who and what I am.
Section 4: Heritage of my name
My surnames are Spanish, but that's all I know.
Good idea, Vegan. I'm interested in Section 3 and what it means to be proud of heritage. Clearly pride in heritage can be both a positive and a negative thing.
--IP
July 1st, 2006 at 7:16 pm Section 1: Where you are from.
I am from the U.S.A., specifically, the Rio Grande Valley of south Texas. The area is predominantly Mexican-American.
Section 2: How you identify yourself racially/ethnically.
I identify myself racially as biracial: half white and half black. Ethnically, I identify myself as German, Irish, and African.
Section 3: Describe an aspect of your racial/ethnic heritage that you are proud of.
Ethnically, I am proud to be Irish (married on St. Patrick's Day); I am proud to understand where my German heritage in my family came from; I am proud to be a surviving descendent of slaves in the U.S.A.
Section 4: Describe what you know about the heritage of your first or last name.
My first name came from my mom. I was born in April at dawn, i.e. "April Dawn", and my last name "Spreeman" originated from the Spree river in Germany.
July 2nd, 2006 at 12:09 pm i guess i could share, too, huh?
Section 1: Persynally, i am from the US. Born and raised in Indiana. On my father's side, i'm a third-generation US citizen. On my mother's side, i'm a sixth-generation. My dad's side is mostly from Ireland. My mom's side is mostly from England.
Section 2: I identify as White. I know most about my dad's side of the family. I know they assimilated pretty quickly in hopes of "making it". So i've never been raised with any sort of Irish- or English-American traditions or pride.
Section 3: I'm proud of the St. Patrick's Battalion, which switched sides in the Mexican-American War and fought for the people of Mexico. I'm proud of the early Irish-American involvement in the abolition movement. I'm proud of the many White folks who have stood up for justice... i just wish there were more:)
Section 4: whoo, quite a bit. After the first time that i was a participant in this exercise, i realized that i didn't know shit about my family and decided to do a lot of research. My last name is not actually an Irish name. At least, not an original Irish name. It came about shortly after the Norman invasion of Ireland in 1172. The name (Lynch, Linch, O'Lynch, McLynch, depending on the occasion) was that of invaders. Ironically enough, the invaders' name and many of the invaders/settlers themselves (including that of several other invaders) became definitively Irish. They eventually converted from Protestant to Catholic and became staunchly nationalist. My family reigns from a southwestern region of Ireland.
Thanks, IP. I'm glad you are enjoying it. I hope that others will join in as well. Pride, itself, can be a positive or negative thing. My goal is to navigate ourselves along the positive route.
July 3rd, 2006 at 2:13 pm But what does pride (in it's positive sense) *mean*? Is it simply preserving traditions, passing down knowledge about one's origins, is it thinking about my culture as "good" (which seems kinda meaningless to me because either all cultures are good, or some cultures are better than others, and clearly the latter option is not positive)?
I keep Jewish traditions, I try to learn about and preserve Latin ones. If/when I have kids, I will raise them with those customs, and I will make sure they know about their mixed racial/ethnic backgrounds. Is there any more to benign pride than that?
--IP
July 3rd, 2006 at 9:39 pm IP brought up the notion of 'pride'; I'll get to that shortly.
I'm late here so:
By ethnicity: I'm German, British, Spanish and Scottish aka: 'white'
My traditions were destroyed and replaced by the cultural mythology of the hebrews in the Christian form about 1700 years ago.
Now, Racial pride is labeled 'racism' by you and others when practiced by euroAmericans on the grounds that euroamerican culture is evil and any reasonable person cannot be proud of such racist evil.
at least that's what I think when I read this:
"I'm proud of the St. Patrick's Battalion, which switched sides in the Mexican-American War and fought for the people of Mexico."
July 4th, 2006 at 4:58 pm Section 1
I grew up in a small town in southern Ontario, Canada. My father's mother emigrated from England as a baby, and his father was the third or fourth generation of his family in Canada -- they came from a region that was German speaking at the time but is now part of France. My mother grew up in Glasgow, Scotland, and came to Canada as an adult.
Section 2
I identfy as white Canadian. I think a lot of white North Americans identify their "culture" as being the country or countries their ancestors came from no matter how long ago, but I think it makes sense to treat it a bit more functionally...there is nothng about my ways of knowing and being and doing that is particularly German, for example. Functionally I think my culture is a pretty mainstream (white-dominated) Canadian culture, with a bit of an inflection of Scottish culture because my mother grew up there, because I myself spent a fair amount of time there growing up, and because my father's lifelong professional connection to Scottish music/cultural production put me in lots of spaces in North America that were shaped by that culture while growing up.
Section 3
This one was tough to answer. I suppose in an abstract sense I look back with pride on acts of resistance of various sorts by those with whom I share ethnic or racial identification, but I have trouble really feeling that as being connected to me via shared ethnic or racal identification versus via some sort of shared politics. I suppose there are some aspects of Scottish/Celtic culture, once you get past its commodification as a means of giving white North Americans a way of buying exotc-for-a-day experiences, in which I still feel echoes of remnants of things that might once have been not wholly taken and transformed and used by capitalism, unlike mainstream Canadian culture.
Section 4
My last name came to Canada in the 1830s. My ancestor was part of the first wave of white settlement in southwestern Ontario, I believe on territory of the Ojibwe Nation. The spelling of the name was arbitrarily changed thanks to how an immigration official wrote it down way back then, and in fact three siblings from the same family immigrated to different parts of North America at around the same time, and their legal surnames all ended up being spelled differently from each other and from the family back in Europe. The family were German-speaking Protestants from the Alsace-Lorraine region of what is now France.
July 6th, 2006 at 2:16 pm "My traditions were destroyed and replaced by the cultural mythology of the hebrews in the Christian form about 1700 years ago."
This caught my attention. I was wondering what connection you feel to those pre-Christian traditions that you refer to them as *your* traditions. (On rereading this, I realise it sounds like I'm challenging your ethnicity identifications, which isn't my intention at all, and hope you didn't read it that way.)
As for pride in ethnic origins: Vegan, do you want to talk about that in this thread, or should I start a new thread for it?
"Now, Racial pride is labeled 'racism' by you and others when practiced by euroAmericans on the grounds that euroamerican culture is evil and any reasonable person cannot be proud of such racist evil."
I don't recall anyone saying that here, but I'd like to discuss this comment further because it's a commonly-expressed sentiment.
--IP
July 7th, 2006 at 1:27 pm IP,
I see religion as a superstition where the 'god' or 'gods' are reflections of the culture that developed the 'god' or 'gods'.
I don't like Judaism because:
" 1 When the LORD your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations—the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites, seven nations larger and stronger than you- 2 and when the LORD your God has delivered them over to you and you have defeated them, then you must destroy them totally. [a] Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy. 3 Do not intermarry with them. Do not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons, 4 for they will turn your sons away from following me to serve other gods, and the LORD's anger will burn against you and will quickly destroy you. 5 This is what you are to do to them: Break down their altars, smash their sacred stones, cut down their Asherah poles [b] and burn their idols in the fire. 6 For you are a people holy to the LORD your God. The LORD your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on the face of the earth to be his people, his treasured possession. "
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel best expresses my sentiment here:
" Christianity has emptied Valhalla, felled the sacred groves, extirpated the national imagery as a shameful superstition, as a devilish poison, and given us instead the imagery of a nation whose climate, laws, culture, and interests are strange to us an whose history has no connection whatever with our own. A David or a Solomon lives in our popular imagination, but our country's own heroes slumber in learned history books . . . . Thus we are without any religious imagery which is homegrown or linked with our history . . . all that we have is the remains of an imagery of our own, lurking amid the common people under the name of superstition. "
On your wish to discuss further, I lost my off-roading tires, so here is Charlton Heston arguing the 'commonly expressed sentiment' you wish to discuss:
http://nramemberscouncils.com/harvard1.shtml
July 7th, 2006 at 5:37 pm [...] I want to bring this onto another thread, because I don’t want to derail Vegan’s thread on racial heritage. [...]
July 7th, 2006 at 9:57 pm Section 1: Where you are from. Draw a pictorial or symbolic representation of where your ancestors are from.
It is a geography:
First celestial... my peoples are gods.
West African coastline aunts, cousins, momentary best friends in the Atlantic ocean. Blood curlding in the belly of sharks.
Barbados the temptation of the machet for cutting cain.
North Carolina U.S. shores tobacco and corn
Up South to Baltimore for steel industry which is now rusted. I was born.
To the west. Where round black girls with wild nappy hair are not to be.
Section 2: How you identify yourself racially/ethnically.
Racially I am a BlackWoman (my race is gendered)
Ethnically I am a virtual GRITS (girl raised in the south) west coast pseudo ecofeminist, carribean black baptist backslider.
Section 3: Describe an aspect of your racial/ethnic heritage that you are proud of.
racial heritage: that we continue to struggle through the inherantly racist rhetoric to define ourselves.
ethnic heritage: culture culture culture... there would be no top 40 without us regardless of our oft. lack of representation there...
blues, rock, gospel, soul, work songs, freedom songs, field hollers, r&b, hip hop, funk, be bop, gogo, cubism, abstraction, the blues aesthetic, slam, corn lika, uptowns, the second line, steppin', revolution, gumbo, sweet tea...
Section 4: Describe what you know about the heritage of you first or last name.
First name is german in origin... but when attached to this Black face it is often assumed to be a name in the families of "Shaniqua, LaShonda etc." which I usually don't have a problem with (because i grew up with many Shaniqua's and LaShondas and it feels like home) until I don't get a job because of it.
last name - is ALSO german (crazy no?) It belongs to a white Jewish family in North Carolina who enslaved my family and kept them in destitution and sharecroppery into the 20th century.
---
Its full and fluid... the ancestors are grinnin'
July 8th, 2006 at 6:15 am 1. I personally am from rural Pennsylvania, although upstate New York and Worcester, MA are home to me as well. My ancestors are mostly Swedes (from the Skåne, Halland, and Uppsala regions, I believe), with a bit of English, Scottish, and Welsh thrown in. Through the Brit side I'm distantly related to several of our more disreputable presidents (Jackson, Pierce, and Dubya). When I think about my ancestry, though, I focus on the Swedes, because there are more of them, because they immigrated much more recently, and because they were poorer (so I can get a bit of anti-privileged pride).
2. White, or white northestern rural American.
3. Like other people above, I'm not really sure what it means to be proud of my heritage.
4. My last name is what happens when a Swede named Daniel has a son -- not too complicated.
My first name is Greek, and means "man with a loud voice." I ended up with it because I was named after my great uncle, and he got it because his dad had gone to seminary for a while and learned to read Greek. So it's got a bit of an interesting story woven into my family history even though its origin is in a different ethnicity.
July 8th, 2006 at 9:49 pm Section 1: Where you are from. Draw a pictorial or symbolic representation of where your ancestors are from.
I am from the northeastern part of the US. My mother's family is French and Irish.
My father's family is Irish and German. I actually don't know much about my father's
ethnic history. Lynch is a familiar name in my family also. Not as Irish as we thought!
Section 2: How you identify yourself racially/ethnically.
I identify as white or Euro-American . I wouldn't know what else to call myself.
I always thought language and culture was the study of somebody else. Ha!
Section 3: Describe an aspect of your racial/ethnic heritage that you are proud of.
My family never celebrated any Irish/French/German holidays. I have never identified
with any European causes such as the Irish/English conflict. As an American,
I feel I am proud that there is free speech, liberty that many around the world
do not enjoy, and that we can work together to improve things.
Section 4: Describe what you know about the heritage of you first or last name.
This one I do know. My first name is Dutch. The French Hugonots were getting their
heads cut off in France, so they fled first to Amsterdam before coming to the US
July 19th, 2006 at 12:34 pm Perhaps this is a good intro; I recently found this blog.
Section 1: Where you are from. Draw a pictorial or symbolic representation of where your ancestors are from.
I am from the northeastern part of the US.
My mother's family is Eastern Europoean Jew, who came here to escape the pogroms.
My father's family is from various part of Scandinavia.
Section 2: How you identify yourself racially/ethnically.
I identify as white or Jewish, though I am not a practicing Jew.
Section 3: Describe an aspect of your racial/ethnic heritage that you are proud of.
I'm not proud of anything to do with my heritage; I reserve "pride" for things in which I had a conscious part.
I'm proud of my ancestors for being tough and accomplishing a lot of things, but why should I feel proud of myself for what they did? It'd be as ridiculous as feeling "proud" because the Red Sox won a baseball game--I don't play on the Red Sox, so their success does not accrue to me.
Section 4: Describe what you know about the heritage of you first or last name.
My first and last name occur in my father's family tree within three generations (in Sweden) though that was apparently not taken into account when selecting my name. Both of my names have been around in Scandinavia for quite a few centuries, if not longer.
July 22nd, 2006 at 2:59 am Section 1:
I consider New Zealand my home, and my ancestors are celtic - Welsh and Scottish. My parents and my brother and I were all born in England, but that was a short stop for our family.
Section 2:
I consider myself Pakeha - sometimes I worry that as I am first generation New Zealander to use that term is to claim a level of identity with this land that haven't earnt, and that isn't available to sixth generation Chinese New Zealanders. But mostly I don't.
I also consider myself part Welsh - I'm trying to learn to pronounce the language, and keep up a bit with the politics of the country.
Section 3: I'm pretty proud of my Welsh heritage. There's a huge tradition of resistance in Wales, both to capitalism, and to England. As far as I know I don't have any miners in my family, but it doesn't stop me from learning about the struggle to organise the mines. Large sections of my family have been involved in the struggle for Welsh language, and I think that's pretty cool.
Section 4: My surname is Scottish, and is identified with an occupation. I don't know anything of the actual history, since my patenral grandfather ran away from home to lie about his age and join the army just before World War II. It seems to come from a line of alcoholics, but more than that I don't know.
August 13th, 2006 at 4:04 pm 1. I am a Californian, from a part of the US that has a long mestizo past and has become multicultural in spite of itself. But my parents are from Appalachia, and I have always "talked differently" from my fellow Californians as a result.
2. I'm the whitest white girl I know except for Amy Carter.
3. I'm proud of my English ancestors who left one of the deadliest coal-mining regions in England, Durham, and came here to scratch out a living underground. Ditto for my Italian coal-mining ancestors. To have survived and to have gotten their kids and grandkids out of the mines -- that took guts.
4. My surname is Italian and means, roughly, "sledgehammer."
It's interesting to me that so many people don't have any sense of what or why they should feel proud about their ethnic heritage. I understand the argument that "white pride" is racism in a new suit, but everyone should take some time to learn some family history and every ethnic group has done amazing things. (And I think it's kind of cool about the St. Patrick Brigade, too, although it turned out to be a tragic thing for most of them to have done.)
August 16th, 2006 at 1:04 am a black girl, stentor, kathy, sailorman, maia, and caligirl - thanks for your responses. there is a lot in all of them and we'll come back to them later. if all works according to plan, everything will all tie back together:)
August 28th, 2006 at 5:39 pm 1 Ireland, Scotland, England, Germany and possibly Austria. and a little Norse (Vikings)
Section 2: How you identify yourself racially/ethnically. I identify as Irish/Scottish-American. "White" is not a real identity or culture- it's just one society has labeled me with.
Section 3: Describe an aspect of your racial/ethnic heritage that you are proud of.
The arts- music, dance, writing, poetry. The strength of spirit that survived British imperialism, immigration and such.
4 My last name was originally Scottish, a branch of the McDonald clan, but later they migrated to Ireland.
March 1st, 2007 at 8:22 pm My last name is also Scottish and means "family man" ..lol
May 4th, 2007 at 2:23 pm I just found this blog. This is a wonderful thing. Keep up the good work.
1) I am from southern California. Most of my mother's side of the family lives in Louisiana. Most of my father's side of the family lives from Seattle up the coast into Vancouver. I don't know much about my mother's side, other that they're French Creole and Irish. I know my father's father was born on the border of England and Wales, and that my father's mother was Scottish.
2) If I have to check a box I'm "white". But I think of myself as from southern California, really. That place has a culture all its own.
3) I'm glad to be an American, but I don't think much about my heritage, other than sometimes about the Irish part.
4) My first name was one my parent wished they had as a child. My birth last name is generic English.
September 21st, 2008 at 12:13 am 1. My family is from all over Europe-Ireland, England, Spain/France, Italy, and Germany.
My Grandpa claimed he was part Cherokee, but my family members tell me they never knew if he was serious.
2. I'm white. Sorry. ...lol, no I really felt/feel that way. My ethnic background is mainstream American, but I have rejected so much of that tradition.
I identify with the people of my state--Kentucky--be they People of Color, Appalachian, or otherwise...because we're a very misunderstood, but decent people.
I'm from an area dominated by Irish and German immigrants, and I study German. Therefore, I have those cultures to thank for a lot of the ideas/values rattling around upstairs. I have always been ashamed of being part German and learning the language because of the Holocaust.
3. It took a while for me to think of something to be proud of. It's more reflexive to think about the evils of Imperialism and Patriarchy. I guess the printing press was a major accomplishment, and some of the results of the enlightenment are really wonderful. I value the lesson of WWII--the vulnerability of freedom in the face of fascist terror...I think this issue is very pertinent in America today.
4. My parents picked my name because it sounded "pretty." Thanks guys. j/k! My first name is the name of the woman who gave birth to the twelve tribes of Israel. She was the "other wife"--aka not the "beloved" wife of Abraham, but she had an important role. She's an inspiration, even though the name itself is a bit of a pain during introductions.
My last name comes from Dad's Step-dad's family. I don't like it because a) it's a long mouth-full
b) dumb Americans assume I'm Hispanic when they hear it, and their attitudes are dehumanizing c) it literally means "mushroom" and d) it nullifies and devalues the worth of half of my ancestors. I'm working on a new name.