I'm sure nothing I'm saying is new, but with the detrimental effects of predatory globalism and neoliberalism giving way to the rise of nationalism it's left me with some thoughts on what then happens once nationalism and the desire to preserve one's culture becomes even more stringent to the point where it is then fused with ethnicity/race. I apologise for the runons and other gramatical errors in this culture rant, I just had to get this into a freewrite and out of my system.
I'm gonna start out harsh and opinionated sorry: if the ability of a culture to exist and thrive is mainly contingent on ethnocentrism or ethnonationalism, then it is a weak culture. It's my personal opinion, but it's grounded in our observable history as humans in an ongoing struggle against colonial powers through whichever form they manifest and rehash themselves.
I think to the dogged perseverance of many cultures through centuries of colonialism, genocide, forced conversion, commodification of their spaces and ideas, and efforts to use ethnonationalism itself to wipe out their culture and I can't help but pose a serious inquiry into the character of those that feel their cultures ability to prosper is threatened by “race mixing,” or immigration, or a disparity between interethnic/intercultural marriages and intra-ethnic/intracultural marriages and the subsequent families they raise. Very few, if any, people in this world are pure _______, no matter how within their culture or perceived ethnicity their bloodline is. This is applicable to not only those in for instance the USA, Caribbean, Mexico, the Balkans, North Africa, South Africa, India, and many other historically diverse regions, but also to areas like northwestern Europe, where most everyone there is a mix of Anglian, Saxon, Briton, Norman, Roman, Frisian, and Celtic tribes. This is the case even amongst historic tribes themselves such as the Miccosukee tribe here in South Florida, who while maintaining their culture through centuries of attempted cultural and literal genocide of indigenous peoples in America are distinctly Miccosukee yet can be mixed with Seminole, other clans within their tribe, other tribes of the Creek Nation, and potentially even the Tequesta peoples of ancient Florida; and they all regard each other as family anyways.
It is in particular when I think of those that I am honored to know, from indigenous peoples of America, to indigenous peoples of the Caribbean, to the Akan people of Africa who today are a part of the diaspora, and many other friends and family from different cultures just to name a few, and think of them alongside observable human history that I recognise how a perseverance of a culture does not happen through an emphasis on ethnonationalism/ethnocentrism and a concerted effort to maintain a particular gene pool or mix of physical features. Should one even desire to maintain a relatively uniform ethnicity, that should happen and has happened organically as different groups of people conquered or coexisted with each other throughout history.
Furthermore, cultures that have managed to persevere through actual state/corporate sanctioned threats to their existence, from erasure of their language to poisoning of their environment to outright genocidal massacres, have done so not through sinking into themselves and instituting programs of ethnocentric thought or policy; they have primarily done so through oral tradition and storytelling, communal and familial education, a continuous connection and/or reconnection with nature and the land + air + water + organisms with which sustain them in an ongoing circle of life, innovations such as new music or food as a way of teaching people core values, spiritual science - a more fluid form of religion + spirituality that doesn't promote blind dogmatism or the same stringent colonial church, music, dance, food, people, endless fighting spirit and hope, and so much more! And where are the ethnonationalists in all of this? Ignoring the solidarity they can have with these many other cultures while attempting to institute superiority complexes via their apparent adoration of people arbitrarily deemed more “pure;” such mindsets which also promote useless sectarianism and an escalation into the very type of policies used to carry out pogroms, apartheid, and genocide? It unfortunately seems so. Why, ethnonationalism + ethnocentrism is nothing new; when we look into histories of cultural perseverance we often find it on the side of the oppressor - the mentally and spiritually weak oppressor who needs who clings to such fearful systems and thought processes devoid of any soul to gain power.
