Quote:
Originally Posted by Chip
While it's a good thing to know one's heritage, I personally am weary of people claiming a people as "their" people - we are one people, the human race.
Some of you may think that is an innocuous term, but then again, some of you didn't have the opportunity to grow up in the deep south of the US and hear how this term is used. The bottom line this so called love of "one's people" has what has sustained racism over the centuries - it is a simple fact of history and can easily be verified that those societies that historically have used terms such as these have been the most racist and have committed the the most heinous racially motivated crimes, etc.(Germany, Japa, Bosnia, etc, etc, ad nauseum)
Why can't people think out of the box for once and why do people have such a hard time recognizing this?
|
Quote:
Originally Posted by bob saunders
you are assuming that every Dominican has African Heritage; most do, but not all.
|
What does heritage mean?
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/heritage
The opinion that the African continent is the soil in which the initial seed of humanity germinated, is very widely held. I believe it to be highly likely that this opinion is indeed a fact, and therefore all people, Dominicans included, have African heritage. We are all one people. However the routes that each individual’s ancestors took to get us all where we are today, are vastly different, and the study of these migrations must be a very interesting pastime.
My answer to Tony’s question is yes, you can call your self Spanish. I remember many years ago my mother telling me reluctantly about my heritage. I believe she was very wary of the "our people" phenomenon expressed above by Chip. Her parents and my father’s parents were all born in the United States. Her father’s parents were born in Italy. Her mother’s parents were from Pennsylvania, and their ancestors probably came there from Holland more than a century ago. My father’s mother had French ancestry and his father had Irish ancestry both also probably from more than a century ago. Based on this rather vague distant conversation of less than an hour, and the few things I’ve read about the dawn of history and subsequent spread of the species, I call myself North American, European, and ultimatley African, so you would have no argument from me.