As found on I-Report....by me!!!!

First, let me make one thing clear to everyone.

I have no shame in any of my ancestry. African, European, or Native.

I believe they all contributed to the world I now live in.

I believe they all are a part of me....genetically speaking. Beyond physical traits, there is nothing in me, however, that has its basis uniquely because my grandmother was Native American. Same for my European great-grandfather and my African grandfather.

WHO I am is a direct result of when I was born, where I was raised, the environment I was raised in and , most importantly, the lessons I was taught while being raised by my parents. They did not teach me the African or European way of approaching problems. They did not teach me an African or European set of morals or values. They did not dwell on our past. They dwelled on our future.

It sounds nice and cozy to talk about heritage and ancestors and their impact on our self-identity. In some countries and cultures, that is more applicable.

America is different.

America is a country where everyone that came here LEFT somewhere. They left somewhere to start a new life in a new "world" - voluntarily or forced. They may have brought their culture with them INITIALLY, but each generation reduced that inherited culture more and more to the point where , eventually, that culture is just the celebration of a holiday or a certain meal here and an ancestral name passed down to a child there.

While one celebrates their ancestry and ethnicity, what about the here and now?

One hundred years from now, YOU will be the ethnic ancestor of your great-great-great-great-grandchildren. Will they still call themselves ethnic-dash-Americans? How many more ethnic groups will they have been mixed with 100 years from now? Just how many dashes do we get to use in describing ourselves? What makes you so sure YOUR ethnic group will not be one of the ones dropped like many of us have downplayed/dropped our "other" ethnicities? Why wait a hundred years?

The point of being in America is to be an American. We are creating a new culture and a new ethnicity as we live and breathe. I say we should embrace our task and work dilligently to pull the best of all our ancestral cultures and make a unique culture that - one hundred years from now - will be identified as an American ethnicity.

What is so wrong with that? How is this shame against my ancestors?

Every immigrant to every country 100 years or more ago faced these same tasks.

Poland did not have the culture it has now until the immigrants to that country made a Polish culture. I am sure Polish culture can be dissected to be a mixture of this country and that country.

The same for Germany, Ireland, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Irag, Iran, Saudi Arabia, England, Canada, Brazil, Australia, Japan, China, Figi and Russia. The same will be true when mankind colonizes the Moon, Mars, or some other planet.

I will say this again with all due respect for my ancestors and my contemporaries...The dominant genes in my DNA may control how I look and what I "am" but they have NOTHING to do with WHO I am. WHO I am is what I have control over.

I want my descendants to be proud of WHAT I did to contribute to their lives, their country, and their world.

I don't care if they forget where my great-great-great-grandparent was born. If you really checked, I think you will find that you have no idea where YOUR great-great-great-grandparent was born either. You assume, because of your physical traits, that they were born on the continent of Africa.

What if you check your DNA and find that most of your ancestry is from Poland?

Will you then change your dash?