Media and blogs: Week one
5) Take some time with this one. Answer it thoughtfully and give me around three or four paragraphs of text.
How does culture represent you?
i think culture can sort of set you up with the tools that you need, like a good starter pack, so that you can eventually figure out where you belong in the world as you grow up in that home. a lot of people will define culture in different ways but i think of my ethnicity first. for others, it may be family traditions, the town you grew up in, a hobby you like to do, the school you go to, the music you listen to, or a job you want to have. just like how you can't pick who your family is, there are some cultures that you can't break away from. there is not one person in the world who only belongs to one culture because culture can't survive through only one person. through being a part of many cultures, you inherit things like language, history, stories, that now become your responsibility to keep alive and pass down.
when you are out living your life and you can't seem to find your spot in the world, you will always have your culture to fall back on, which means you have people in that culture and community and family to depend on because life is just hard. see, for me, i belong and i place myself onto a lot of cultures. i'm ethiopian, i am oromo, i live in Seattle, i'm go to seattle u, i'm a college student, i love going to the movie theaters. these are cultures i am already a part of and can fall back on. cultures that i want to find my way into could be things like i want to learn how to roller skate in the future, or finding the career path i want to pursue.
focusing back to ethnicity being the culture that represents me since that was the first thing that came to my head, i think it is an awesome thing to know where i come from and a blessing to have been surrounded by it my whole life. i didn't get to this place of appreciation until a lot later in my life because i felt othered, as many children of color do, or i would even be shamed by people from my own community for things like not speaking oromo fluently. it took a lot of work and self-discovery to realize how lucky i am to call this culture mine and i have the ability to work on improving my native speech in real time. so in that sense, culture doesn’t just represent me, it also evolves with me. It is something i carry, build on, and pass forward. it represents where i come from, but also where i want to go.
