Well, does it? It can certainly give you a stigma, serve as your stereotype; elevate you past your peers or trap you in their shadows, but does it tell you who you are? I suppose you have the choice to submit to your stigma--your stereotype, or you cannot. Jeannette Walls, author of The Glass Castle, certainly didn't. She was considered white trash. She specifically wrote that people referred to her and her siblings as urchin children. She was looked down on, treated differently and she died as a product of her misfortune: old, scarred and uneducated, just like the pattern of her heritage predicted. Oh wait, that didn't happen. She worked hard in school to educate herself, she worked hard in school to get away from her stigma, she worked hard in school to prove to herself she could escape her heritage and become something more. She started from the bottom, now she's here. Her heritage didn't dictate who she was, just gave her a place to start. In fact, her heritage gave her the first stepping stone she needed to escape--that being, it gave her the motivation to leave.
Okay, let's backtrack a second. Does anyone else remember reading Lord of the Flies? Do we all remember those wonderfully educated, darling, civilized schoolboys that quickly formed a democracy and operated under order and reason until they were rescued? Again, no, we don't, because that didn't happen past the first five seconds. I understand LotF is written with more analysis on human will and human tendency toward evil and things as such, but we'll use this as an example for heritage. The heritage of these prep boys turned savages was just that--preppy. They went to school, they learned, they were civilized; had manners. Again, how long before they turned into savages that killed two of their own and burned down an island? Maybe everyone would've acted the same, maybe not, but that's besides the point. If heritage said who you were, those boys would've been singing in their choir 'til rescued arrive. They shed their heritage, on purpose or not, they threw it away about as fast they decided started fires was the next best thing to civilization.
I don't think your heritage defines you. It's where you come from, and it may be your yellow brick road to where you're going, but you don't have to follow it. Sometimes you do when you shouldn't and should when you don't and end up killing a poor boy trying to hold onto his heritage of civilization. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqrREfjDS-c
rescue arrived*
ReplyDeleteI think one of our nation's problems is that people let their heritage define who they're going to be. They grow up knowing how their part of the world lives, and they are taught to believe that everyone else is wrong. Thus we have ghetto kids and people on welfare and gangs and murders and dropouts and on and on and so on and so forth.
Heritage, in my mind at least, is not all an individual's deciding factor. What's so incredible about being human is just this, that you have the power to make your own decisions and ideas and morals, and these are yours and yours alone to shape as you wish. Overcoming and reconfiguring heritage and background and expectations is what allowed for the evolution of humans in the first place, and will continue to be. Heritage is the past, and innovation is the future.
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