Where is my culture?

Sometimes I get so jealous because of the culture that Rick has. I'm starting to realize that we are so opposite in every way. Rick's ancestors hail from two different Mexican states, both of which he knows and has visited. I don't know where in Africa my ancestors hail from. And by the color of my family's skin it's too far back in any of our pasts to know it for sure. As an African-American my family, of course, came from the south. And I could go around cooking southern food and speaking in a southern dialect, but that's not really me or my family.


So I'm bound to all of my American-ized ways. I make a better spaghetti sauce than I do a cast iron skillet corn bread. I make salsa like I was born and raised on it, but it takes me an hour to prep a couple of yams. The only other language I know besides English are bits and pieces of the Spanish I was taught in high school. I go to the Mexican grocery regularly. I've bought and cooked fresh cactus before. But I consider the African convenience store by my house a foreign land. Do I need to get immunizations before I try to purchase anything? It's really sad. Do I just not have a real culture? I embrace everything about being African-American. I mean I love it. I get to say what I want about who I want and don't have to put with the slack. People want to give me jobs and small business loans because hey my people were slaves for 200 years right...


So is that my culture, slavery? I don't want to wear that on my back, I don't want to go to the store to purchase that. But that's where all this came from. Our food, our history, our names, our family, it's all we have. This is why I sometimes envy the culture that Rick has. I want a language, I want a homeland, I want native food, I want a family tree that doesn't start in the states.