Before we preserve our culture and heritage, let’s acknowledge what they are

Let’s talk for a while about “culture and heritage.”

Those two words have become quite popular these days among white supremacists, neo-Confederates, young Nazi wannabes, the Republican Party and Fox News hosts, all of whom have taken up the cause to preserve our culture and heritage by bringing back the “good old days.” But I contend that before we think about preserving our heritage, we should first try to understand what that means, because in my world, if people actually did understand it, we’d find it’s not really worth restoring after all.

First off, I do believe that we should study our culture and heritage, or, as most normal people call it, our history. We should make an honest effort to educate the under-educated adults who get their news from right-wing opinion and blog sites and Facebook group chats with their crazy cousins and friends. And we should teach it in schools so our children understand it as well. But a little knowledge can go a long way, which is a nice way of saying the more we learn about our “culture and heritage” the less we should want any part of it.

To make my point, please allow me to recount the condensed version of early American history in a few short paragraphs:

It started in the 1400s or thereabouts when shiploads of white European emigrants crossed the Atlantic Ocean to establish settlements in “the new world.” They landed on soil that would become the United States, claiming the territory for England or Spain or whatever European flag they flew under, and set about building homes and churches and forts and what have you on land they believed was theirs.

The problem is, the “new world” they thought they had discovered was actually a pretty old world that was already inhabited by various tribes of native people who settled the territory 15,000 years ago (or more) and believed that the land was theirs to use, but not to own. So Job #1 for the white men who landed here was to eliminate the natives by killing them or enslaving them or otherwise chasing them off the land they had occupied peacefully for several centuries.

Once they had taken over the land, these white people started farms where they planted crops and tended animals, but it didn’t take long to discover that planting and harvesting crops was pretty hard work, so the white people went off looking for some help. A few of them sailed over to Africa, where they kidnapped boatloads of black people who they enslaved, brought back here and forced to work for free.

Skip ahead a few years to a time when the white people started running out of land in the eastern part of the country, so they started expanding their territory westward, which they called their “manifest destiny.” This westward movement required them to kill or displace even more native people along the way and to claim any property they came across. When they arrived in the west, they needed to possess even greater chunks of land, so they fought a war with Mexico, stole some land that became Texas (they called it “annexation”) and settled the war by paying Mexico a pittance for the vast territory that we know today as California, Nevada, Utah and Arizona and parts of New Mexico and Colorado. An estimated 5,000 Mexican soldiers and 4,000 civilians were killed and thousands more were wounded.  

So now the white people had land in the east and land in the west but no easy way to connect the two, so they decided to build a railroad linking the two halves of their new home. Railroad work was even harder than farming, so the white people didn’t want to do that either. Instead, they enlisted their black slaves and hundreds of Chinese workers to do the work for them … again for little or no pay.

Finally, in the late 19^th century, things had come together and the white settlers had themselves a big, fine country where they could live – a country that had been built on the backs of the black, brown, yellow and red people they killed, enslaved or otherwise coerced to do their work for them while they themselves rose to the top of the food chain. To celebrate this accomplishment, the white people put themselves in charge of everything, including the government they had founded with a Constitution that still permitted slavery, treated minority people as 3/5 of a human, and told women they couldn’t vote, work, sit on juries, have an opinion, go to school or enjoy any of the other benefits the white men granted to themselves.

Women were allowed to cook, clean house, make babies and care for their husbands but were not considered equal in any way. This, sadly, was the beginning of those “good old days” that the white men still long for today.

In the years since, the United States of America has had 46 presidents and all but one of them was a white man. All of our vice presidents were white men until last year, when a woman of color was elected, and Congress, for the most part, has traditionally been old and mostly white, but is now becoming much more diverse with women and minorities capturing seats.

All of this diversification has become very threatening to the white men who wish to remain in charge, and they got really scared when someone told them that in a few years, America would no longer be a white majority country, such was the rate of immigration by people of color. So what did the white men do? They elected a racist president whose first official acts were to ban Muslims from entering the country, start building a wall on the southern border to keep out brown people and lock immigrants and children who did get through inside cages indefinitely.  

This anti-immigrant, anti-minority posture continued for four years and emboldened the aforementioned white supremacists, neo-Confederates, Nazi wannabes and Republicans who began to come out from under their rocks and openly support discrimination against minorities, suppression of minority votes and even an attempt to overthrow the government on the day that the results of the presidential election were certified.

I could go on all day about that, but here’s a brief recap: White people came to America in the 1400s and took over the territory by killing, raping, robbing, stealing, coercing, enslaving, strong-arming and going to war against anybody who got in their way. They even fought a war among themselves over the issue of slavery, then assassinated the president who put an end to it.

Now we’re faced with a reinvigorated movement of very dangerous people who want to “preserve our culture and heritage,” to the extent that they would bring back all of the dark days of the past just to retain their place as the nation’s white ruling class. To that, I can only say one more thing: If “preserving” it means storing it away in the history books and libraries where it belongs, then I guess I can go along with that. Meanwhile, the rest of us can learn from our mistakes and move ahead to the reality of life in the 21st century ... and accept the cultural advancements that accompany that growth.