Archive for June 9th, 2009
Heritage and Culture vs. Racism – What’s the Difference?
The thing is, we call it heritage and culture when we like it and racism when we don’t. Either way, we do the same thing.
Hello to all my scores and hordes of non-existent readers! Ok, there are a couple of you out there. Sorry for not writing in a while – life’s just been a little stressed for me as of late. Anyway, enough with the excuses, on with the blogging.
So, I got into a mild argument online regarding the topic of racism vs. heritage and culture. The topic spawned out of a picture of a person who was flying the Confederate Battle Flag in his workplace – a place that he owned. The discussion ensued over whether flying the CBF was a question of “heritage and culture”, or because of “racism”.
I’m not going to get into the controversy of the Confederate Battle Flag, but I do offer this Well-written report if you want to read more:
Webster, Gerald R. and Leib, Jonathan I. (2002) Political culture, religion, and the Confederate Battle Flag debate in Alabama. Retrieved from http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-3412184_ITM
So after shooting it out for awhile with some people I never met (my wife wonders why I waste the time, but alas) I got to thinking:
I find that the line between the monikers of “heritage and culture” and “racism” really aren’t divided by as wide a line as we make it out to be. I say this because, first, what is “racism”? It’s the delineation of creeds of people within the human race, thinking that these divisions are racial in nature.
It is my belief that black, white, brown, asian, latino, doesn’t matter – we are all of the human race. The minute that we do things to create subsets of the human race based on anything to be used as a seperator, we begin the path to racism, because we create those differences that are later exploited for racial means.
People today divide themselves around some sort of physical quality or social boundary. They have tiny flags of a foreign origin hanging from their rear-view mirrors because they have some sort of affinity to that country. We come up with names like, “Chinese-American” so as not to rain on that person’s heritage and origins by just implying that person as an “American”. The plain simple truth is that we’re all human beings, creations of God. When we continue to promulgate these differences as a means of socio-cultural distinction, we let the camel’s nose in the tent, allowing for racism to enter.
I look at the “heritage and culture” reasoning for why hispanic folks refuse to integrate into American society by leaving their Mexican flags in Mexico, but then I also see the same political persuasion criticize another group of people for flying the CBF as a representation of “heritage and culture”. In other words, I get called a racist because I criticize Americans of Mexican origin for flying the Mexican flag and again a racist when whites in the south want to fly the CBF for the same reasons!
Why? Is it inconsistency on the part of the left (since it’s the left wing from which most of these racial outrages come)? No, the issue is larger than that. It’s because we continue to divide the human race along heritage/culture/race boundaries.
The thing is, we call it heritage and culture when we like it and racism when we don’t. Either way, we do the same thing.
What we need to do as humans is stop looking at each other and seeing “black”, “white”, “brown”, ignore those differences and just be humans. That is the only way we’ll ever solve the problem of racism.
Unfortunately, those who cry racism are oftentimes, more racist then they would care to admit. And so the cycle continues.
