What is Southern Heritage?

[frazzled]

140. And then there are those of us (many of us)

who are immigrants, or the sons and daughters of immigrants, or their grandchildren, who really have no relationship with this so-called "heritage," except as outsiders who have adopted it in part—signed on to its collective guilt.

I grew up in the Midwest, where our history studies in grade school were full of log cabins and pioneers and Potawatomi and Miami Indians. And I grew up with this image in my head, and later with a great amount of guilt about the Indian removals, etc. I truly bore that guilt. But then one day, I thought about it and realized, hey shit, my ancestors weren't even here when all this happened. They didn't know from log cabins or Indians. They were in Eastern Europe busy running for their lives from the Cossacks and pogroms. They became part of the new America, people who came here with nothing and then helped build the 20th century.

My husband is a Southerner, born and bred in Charleston, SC. Indeed, he had a job when he was in high school at a clothing store just down the block from the Emanuel AME Church. He eats freaking grits. But he was also a Jew (just one rung above the black folk in his native town), the grandson of immigrants from Eastern Europe and the son of a father who immigrated to the US in the early 1920s. He says he grew up with the realization that he had absolutely no relationship to the antebellum culture of genteel Charleston. He went to a high school in which he was one of only five white kids left in the school. He came North for college and stayed, fully recognizing the racism he saw there.

All of us should consider ourselves part of the "new" America--you know, the one where people of Asian and Hispanic and African and Muslim, Hindu, and Jewish backgrounds coexist and try to make this a more perfect union.

Forget this heritage crap, and get with the program. Start with a clean slate. Know the history, but don't live with it. Start building the America of the 21st century. Clinging to "heritage" only invites exclusionism, false pride, xenophobia. Let's be Americans and let its vast potpourri of cultures define the new era.