Harris

"I admit I don't really know what it means to be one thing or another - black, Jewish, French. I doubt if anyone else does either. But someone is out there making the rules that stop us from being individuals and instead force us into groups, rules that steal away liberty and choice and shrink the realm of possibility.
Let me be free to choose: neighborhood, region, religion, taste in food. Let me honor the gods and cultures of my choice.
Culture - a word, a concept, that is tossed around much these days but never really defined. I have, of course, my own definition: that which people do to help them get through the day, and which in doing as a group tends to define the group.
But does following the practices of a particular group make you one of the group? The tribal Chief in an Inupiak village might say no. I would ask rather, Why not?
I have been Irish on St. Patrick's Day, I eat pasta twice a week, I have an ongoing affair with Mexico. Who was there to tell the small boy in me that I couldn't participate?
The world is mine, I thought, as a young boy. Its cultures can all be mine.
Since I was a small boy, playing at make-believe, I have put myself into the shoes of many men and women. I have lived in my head a life of others. I have been at times a soldier fighting Indians on the American frontier, and then turned around to be a Plains Indian fighting against those same soldiers and against the theft of my land. From the books I read when I was a young invalid, I became black man white woman Asian African Eskimo.
I have lived under the mistaken belief all these years that this was what it meant to be truly American, that not only could I celebrate these cultures and these peoples but that I could somehow be them; that what they shared, I could share in as well, that I could be simply citizen, and by the one word so define myself: citizen first of country, citizen then of the wider world."


January 22, 1999