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Respect your fucking elders.

I don't understand pride in your ethnicity. I flat out don't fucking get it.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not a racist, though I may be a classist. I'm probably agist, if that's a word.

I was raised in an all white neighborhood, with a father who desperately wanted to be white and a mother who embraced my father's heritage to the point of sending us to classes to learn our native trades.

I've lived on a reservation, as a half breed. I was taken in, if you could call it that, by a tribe that was not my own.

This was my journey, my path. I learned a lot while I was there.

I do not BRAG about what I saw. I don't walk around talking about who I am, and what kind of mutated string of genes flow through my blood. I never made it an issue. I am what I am, just as you are what you are, and that gives me NO FUCKING RIGHT to hold it over your head.

What happened to seeing everyone as an equal? What happened to simply accepting race, ethnicity, just as you would someone who's left handed or right handed?

Last night, I wanted to vomit after I read what I did. If you think I'm talking about you, you're probably right.

Look at me! I'm special because I was born!

Embrace your culture, yes. Love yourself for who you are, yes. Repeat, over and over, how special you are because you born at a certain time, in a certain place, to a given number of parents, NO.

It's classless. It's immature. It is the action I would expect out of a twenty year old.

Really, I'm not even sure why it bothers me so much. Maybe because those types of things are so personal to me, and I watched it get thrown around like it was nothing, watched it get tossed around as though it was a toy on a playground, when it's something to be protected.

Don't stop writing about it. Give it the weight it should be given.

Don't take pride in it. Value it enough to treat it with the respect it deserves.

3:41 p.m. - 2003-08-07

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