I mentioned in a previous reflection trying to tie my culture back through my ancestors to Scandinavian/European countries of origin and celebrating things about their culture. I never really felt that here in America we really had "white culture" that was worth speaking about. It just... was. When I lived in a big city, over the summers there would be different festivals: Irish fest, Polish fest, Greek fest, etc. Each one celebrated different things about their cultures. But here in America, we seem to have homogenized white people. Sometimes, I wonder if that's where some of this anti-immigrant sentiment comes from. "We assimilated, now YOU." My childhood church spoke Danish up until the early 1900s, when the anti-German sentiment started making them feel like they needed to just be "American." They gave up their Danish-language church services, their festivals, the things that made them who they were, in favor of bland, inoffensive whiteness. I know I get a bit jealous when I see other cultural/ethnic groups so attuned into their own heritage, into the languages and traditions their families have passed down to them. There's so much vibrancy in the variation of culture! I also wanted to share one of the quotes from the TEDx talk, because I love it so much: “You can’t learn anything new while you’re still speaking. The thing is, you also can’t learn anything new unless you let the information that goes in sit. So hear it. Don’t shut things out when things get uncomfortable. Just listen. Take what we’re saying to you, and chew on it a while.”
