Heritage: Fill & Download for Free

Nobody minds when people (not just Americans) do that. What pisses people off is when some guy called Joey Cazzopiccolo turns up and insists he’s a real Italian, even though he can’t speak the language and doesn’t even remember where his grandparents emigrated from. He has Italian heritage, sure (and he could probably get Italian citizenship pretty easily under the current laws) but he’s American, not Italian.The same think when Collin O’Murphy turns up in Dublin and insists he is Irish. Irish heritage is one thing but claiming to “be Irish” is another.I’m Australian, not American, and Europeans are quite interested in hearing about any connection you may have to their country. I have a Scottish surname (but very distant Scottish ancestry when it comes down to it). I am definitely not Scottish but I appreciate my little bit of Scottish heritage and, when I was in Scotland, I found a lot of Scots were very happy to note my name and inform me about my heritage on that side (which I hadn’t much explore until then).I enjoy the fact that, because of my name, I am “entitled” to wear the McCallum tartan if I want (but I only have a scarf and cap, I wouldn’t be caught dead in a kilt!) but it doesn’t make me Scottish. I am Australian.My father had bagpipe music at his funeral, because he liked bagpipes and his father was a bit more culturally Scottish than he was himself but my father was a proud Australian and not that fussed about “heritage”. It is interesting to know about your roots but we are not our ancestors. My father never set foot in Scotland in his life, so it is pretty hard to be “from” a place you have never even been to.I think this is the point. Europeans are happy to celebrate “heritage” but a little less keen to embraces people’s illusions of belonging to societies they are not really connected to except by ancestry.

What heritage do you think “white people” share in America? I’m white. That’s not my heritage. But what is that heritage?Some “white people” celebrate ethnic ancestry; consider Irish-Americans on St. Patrick’s Day. All “white people,” come down to it, have ancestral traditions tied to other nations. I have a heritage of that sort. Perhaps you do too.But the long line of WASPs who founded this nation and broke from Britain — what is their “heritage” that they must express it not with green beer and Pogues songs but with torches and bedsheets? The Murican “white heritage”? What’s that?Buying and selling human beings? Denying those people first humanity, then equal rights, under the law?The heritage of rape and brutality?The heritage of mass incarceration of the minorities their hegemony has kept, systematically, in disproportionate poverty? The heritage of turning prisons into privatized profit machines?The heritage of treason in the mid-nineteenth century?The heritage of systematizing cultural dominance in all American centuries?The heritage of anti-intellectualism that culminates in stupidities like “white heritage” in America?The heritage of hating the immigrants who in successive waves built this country? The hate that called most of my “white” ancestors “dagos” and “wops” and my grandfather a “kike”? That “heritage”?The heritage of bigotry whose apotheosis in Nazi Germany “white people” keep wanting to replicate in the US?The heritage of lacking melanin — a matter of genetics, not virtue, and biologically a mark of nothing more profound than susceptibility to sunburn?The heritage of lynchings?The heritage of mass shootings so many white kids celebrate so ardently nowadays?What do the particular “white people” you talk about have in common but a legacy of hate and violence?Hate is not a heritage worth celebrating. And the fear of “white genocide,” of becoming other, is so pathetic that it deserves only contempt.Heritage my ass. You don’t believe that. Or maybe you do — but in this case this white man has a big vaffanculo for you, and your Bed Bath & Beyond “heritage.”

Don’t forgetThis was Bharat, now is PakistanThis was Bharat, is now AfghanistanThis was Bharat, is now Bangladeshand the ruined heritage