I wrote a post on my other blog recently entitled 'Defining culture by what it's not'.
The post was inspired by a friend's story. It caused me to see how part of my European American culture is defined by many things that I am unconscious about.
Click here to read the post.
Frustration
17 years ago
2 comments:
Tom,
I read your post on your other blog. Although working in human services and higher ed for so many years, I've heard far too many similar stories, stories such as these are always a kick in the gut.
Part of my work is helping my students to define their culture. Obviously these women comes from so many diverse cultural backgrounds that to fully understand even one of them would take a lifetime. It gets incredibly difficult when you have multi-cultural families tied to multi-cultural step familes and on and on. Mom is African American and marries a man who is South Korean, they have a daughter. Later mom and dad get a divorce and mom remarries a man who is white and they have a son, dad remarries a woman who is Hispanic and they have another child. Then the kids start getting married to different varities of cultures and you end up with such a cultural mixture that noone can really keep track any more. Trust me, some of the women I work with have such complicated geneologies that when they get to the requisite family tree exercise they are so overwhelmed that they sometimes freak out.
In some ways that's what has happened to those of us who are EA's. Who can keep track of all of those wars and who conquered who besides who married who.
Maybe that's what it will take for ethnicity to not be such a devisive issue (I'm not saying that's necessarily a good thing) but it may be reality.
Just my two cents. Thanks for making me think!
Bev
Bev
So many layers to culture is right. Even for people who appear somewhat 'homogenous' there are always interesting stories and connections when we look deeply enough.
Thanks for your comment.
Tom
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