Celebrim
Legend
A chance at what?
It doesn't actually matter whether my 12th removed ancestor came from Scotland or not. I no longer care, and it never mattered really anyway.
I've never been there, and I've never actually met my 12th removed ancestor. My actual heritage is my own life not some myth about my blood, and to the extent that I've inherited the heritage of my progenitors, it's only goes about two generations back and those persons themselves came from families where most everyone had been here at least 100 years. Culture isn't inherited in your genetic code. My actual ethnic identity doesn't depend on the ethnic identity of other people and my race is entirely a construct other people impose on me. Even if my 12th removed ancestor was a Scot or the King of Scotland, the idea that this made me a Scot would still be a fantasy on my part or at best a shared fantasy other people bought into. Indeed, I do really have Wallace and Burns ancestors with deep Scottish roots on maternal lines, but so what? My actual real ethnic identity is American and distinctively so. I celebrate Thanksgiving in November, and Independence day on the 4th of July. My racial identity is meaningless, so I might as well say American as well, because it is not like German-French-Scot-Irish-Choctaw-Heinz 57 is a meaningful ethnic identity. To the extent that I have any other ethnic identity, far and away the strongest isn't the Scotland I've never visited, but the Jamaica I actually lived in.
For my children, this notion of ethnic identity is even more meaningless, because my wife ancestors are Dutch-Swiss-English-Scots, so that makes my kids German-French-Scot-Irish-Choctaw-Dutch-Swiss-English and various other bits and pieces. They aren't meaningfully anything but American, speaking none of the above languages and celebrating none of the traditions of any of those places, nations, or ethnic groups.
My kids got this weird multicultural lesson they had to do explaining about how their heritage and they had to list the foreign country it came from. They were baffled how to answer. So I made up some crap for them. I had them list France, which is true, because some of my ancestors were French Huguenots. Then I had them list Mardi Gras as the French tradition we celebrate, which is also true.
But if you've got a bit of history, you'll quickly see the contradiction. It's all true, but it simplifies the story to the point of a deception. Mardi Gras is a Catholic Holiday, and my Huguenot ancestors weren't Catholic (nor am I). The truth is we don't celebrate King Cake because of our French heritage. My grandmother is in fact Louisiana Cajun. I did in fact grow up with Gumbo and Jambalaya that would shame any restaurant in the French Quarter. But she's not French Cajun - she Scot Cajun from Scottish Louisiana immigrants (there are also Italian and German Cajuns). Some of her siblings married French Cajun, but that just means I've got cousins named things like Gasteaux Amos, not that I am French Cajun if you mean in some fashion that my blood is flying a French flag of some sort. That Cajun culture is not in fact French, or at least not European French, but distinctively creole and Anglo-French. It is in other words an American culture, and no less American than say New England culture.
I told them that they ought to write American, but they'd probably get a poor grade if they did since it specifically demanded a foreign country.
And what's even more to the point, is that Grandma, being Methodist, didn't celebrate Mardi Gras either. We don't celebrate Mardi Gras because our ancestors did. So far as I can tell, ours is the first generation to do so. We celebrate Mardi Gras because I got my degree from LSU. It's got zero to do with me being 'French'. I culturally appropriated King Cakes because I lived in Baton Rouge. Laissez les bons temps rouler. That's more cultural appropriation - English metaphor directly translated into French.
But who has the authority to guard the culture and say I have stolen it because I'm not authentic enough?
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