Historicizing Heritage

We have a tendency to want to look at the products of [culture], and look at survival, look at joy and pain, but we do all these things as a way to let the violence of the oppressor off the hook. It's amazing how we can talk about black culture, but we can't talk about the violence of white culture that forced that culture to exist.  We can talk about queer culture, but we don't talk about the violence of cisgender culture that forced that culture to have to exist…

When I think of not naming violence –  what are we doing? What narrative are we serving? We're continuing to assume that these things are universal, in a way that perhaps they're not. When we talk about culture being "problematic," heritage being "problematic," why don't we say they're violent? Why don't we say they're racist? Why don't we say they are anti-indigenous? We use words like problematic to avoid actually engaging with some of the various levels at which these things worked in the past and continue to work to continue the the oppression of people who are exiled from what we consider to be mainstream, but also how that violence constructs the mainstream itself.