Culture

I’ve complained a lot. I have resisted and pushed against my culture for much of my remember life. I recognize how deeply that rejection must go.

This continues to cause me much ambiguity and uncertainty as I try to relate to others who appear much more guided by what the culture prescribes. Most seem uncertain or even hesitant about how to relate so someone like me who walks a path unlike many others.

I remember how when I was in high school, I was not “one of the boys.” I found my own way of running in the woods and burrowing into books. I could act in very conforming ways, but internally I found myself separate from the culture that guided others around me. We had common ground, but I had little interest in following the way that most of my peers went.

This resistance to culture followed me into the classroom where I disputed what teachers said and where I wrote papers that took a different view of commonly held perspectives. I found in time that I could not be an honest teacher of religious tenets that felt alien to me, and so I left the monastic group I had been part of for a dozen years.

I have always pushed against what my culture tells me about being male. I have developed my own view of sexuality and other expressions of intimacy, separating myself from what I consider to be too extreme or too restrictive in my culture.

Now I am discovering that the culture that I have been pushing against on what now seems like surface issues actually has a deeper and more sinister aspect. All this while I have been living in a white culture that has a great impact on many of the cultural trappings I have been resisting. At the root of many issues I have instinctively pulled away from is a dark notion of what it means for me to be white.

The white culture that I was born into has lost its humanity. My white culture, based as it is on the enslavement and continued suppression of others, has warped and caused us to lose our sense of what it means to be human. Being culturally white, affects most expectations of what I am and what I am to do.

I am now trying to look at the big question of how to reclaim the humanity I have culturally lost by the way my white culture continues to treat those we see as not-white. I wonder what it will take to create a white culture that is more rooted in the common humanity we share with those we see as “others.”

My struggle against my culture has taken on a different, even startling dimension. It has gone to a different level. As I search for a revitalized white culture, I am uncertain about just what it might look like and wonder who I would be walking with.