Cultural Homelessness

Over the past year a few of my friends have joined ancestry.com or 23andme.com to find out about their cultural heritage. These people, mostly white, had the opportunity to learn about which parts of Europe they are from and at what quantity of whiteness' they possess.

These options are wonderful and I am glad that they have the opportunity to find out more about themselves and where their family traditions likely came. However, I think it is more complicated when an African American attempts to find out the same information. There is sadness and there is hurt mixed in with the knowledge that you don't know. It is a heritage that was stolen, not lost... It is more easy now to trace my cultural heritage with DNA testing, but I don't want to deal with the hurt that comes with both finding out and the sadness of all that was lost. Nor do I feel like I need to pay for a test to show me who I am when I didn't lose it in the first place. We, African American's, in essence, have all been beaten to the name Toby. Generation after generation we were increasingly dispossessed of our cultural heritage and given Toby to replace it. [Then when we create new traditions, Whites take that and act like its brand new (cultural appropriation)...but that's a different blog posting.]

The other night I had the opportunity to go eat Ethiopian food. I went with a friend who teaches future teachers about indigenous Native traditions, pedagogy and culture. She has always known about her Native American heritage and some of the traditions. She is learning more about her culture, especially language, but she knows the land of her ancestors. Yet, when we went to go eat Ethiopian food, I had feelings about it. I have had Ethiopian food just one time before and I have no clue if it is MY cultural heritage. Here I am sitting with a woman who teaches others about her cultural heritage and we go to eat and to an ethnic eatery and I don't know if it is my heritage. One of the ladies who went with us, not only knew what to order, how to say/eat it, but could also say "thank you" and "goodbye" in the native language.

I have no clue what we ate but it was good. I wondered if this is the food my DNA craved but I was too busy eating Shepard's Pie. I relayed this experience to my little brother and he coined the most perfect term. He described the experience as "Cultural Homelessness." The culture that I live in is not my own, however, I do not know where I belong. And no one wants the homeless around. So, what does that make me?