Cultural Appropriation and getting in touch with your own culture
Good afternoon,
First, for the purpose of disclosure, I am a white American male from Alabama(located in the southern United States). From doing my geneology(something that I acknowledge as part of my white male privilidge to be able to do) I know that I do not have a real culture to claim outside of rural southern American culture.
One of the things I've gathered from reading about cultural appropriation is that one should get in touch with their own culture. My question is, what do you do when you see over and over again that your culture is not something to be proud of and even is something that should be consigned to the dust bin of history?
In my particular case when people think of racism, if they don't think of Germany, they think of my culture.
Jim Crow laws, the KKK, slavery, segregation, George Wallace, "Bull" Conner, the 16th St Baptist Church bombing, the beating of the Freedom Riders, and many, many others are all products of my culture in particular.
Many of the more recent creations of my culture(such as Faulkner) are basically about the dissolution of the culture.
So, because of the above, my culture is something that seems to me that needs to be destroyed once and for all. However, I don't have enough of a background or upbrining to be able to call any other culture, "mine"(I'd be one of those, "I'm 1/18th Irish so that's my culture".
So, any suggestions?
First, for the purpose of disclosure, I am a white American male from Alabama(located in the southern United States). From doing my geneology(something that I acknowledge as part of my white male privilidge to be able to do) I know that I do not have a real culture to claim outside of rural southern American culture.
One of the things I've gathered from reading about cultural appropriation is that one should get in touch with their own culture. My question is, what do you do when you see over and over again that your culture is not something to be proud of and even is something that should be consigned to the dust bin of history?
In my particular case when people think of racism, if they don't think of Germany, they think of my culture.
Jim Crow laws, the KKK, slavery, segregation, George Wallace, "Bull" Conner, the 16th St Baptist Church bombing, the beating of the Freedom Riders, and many, many others are all products of my culture in particular.
Many of the more recent creations of my culture(such as Faulkner) are basically about the dissolution of the culture.
So, because of the above, my culture is something that seems to me that needs to be destroyed once and for all. However, I don't have enough of a background or upbrining to be able to call any other culture, "mine"(I'd be one of those, "I'm 1/18th Irish so that's my culture".
So, any suggestions?