Dr. Roher

The culture in which we grow up molds our views of ourselves and the world around us and maintains a connection with our ancestors and traditions.   The feeling of belonging to a group of people with whom we identify is a human need that gets expressed by learning and cherishing one’s ethnic, religious and cultural heritage.  This identification is very important in shaping our identity.

In our American culture, the importance of feeling connected to an ethnic sub-group grew in importance in the past 30 years or so.  Before that, immigrants wanted to blend in, following a vision of blending in the “melting pot” of various ethnic and racial groups who make up our country.  Then, there had been a desire to shed individual cultural and ethnic identities and adopt new “American” identities and be like everyone else.  Swept in this movement toward assimilation, immigrants last names were Americanized to remove any trace of their ethnic origins.  http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/26/nyregion/26names.html Parents named their children John, Judy, Chuck or Barbara.  Old traditions were abandoned in order to make room for new ones.  Parents discouraged their young children from learning their native tongues, so non-English languages were forgotten for English only.

This approach is no longer the norm.  Psychology has taught us the value and importance of feeling connected to one’s traditions and ethnic backgrounds.  So, now we speak of being African-American, Jewish-American, Japanese-American and so on.  Having a hyphened affiliation is not a hindrance to being American, experts tell us, but an added value, an extra layer in the multi-faceted organization that creates our identity.  These different ethnic identities teach all of us to value diversity and encourage us to be more tolerant and accepting of others.

So, when we celebrate our ethnic traditions, we teach our children what they mean and why they came to be what they are.  These cultural traditions connect us to our ancestors and provide a cultural treasure that connect generations to one another, providing continuity and identification.