Crimes of the Past Affecting Today

It is interesting the different histories that shape culture and intercultural communication. The things that happened in the past shape our current and future perceptions of events and even people. For instance, in the Martin and Nakayama textbook there are two students’ voices that talk about different perspectives involving the Holocaust.

One student is German and of typical Aryan description. Even though he was obviously not a Nazi, because of his ethnic history he was persecuted by people for being linked to a particularly bad period of German history. The other student was living in Germany and dating a Jewish boy. She characterized all the Germans in this day and age as having Nazi tendencies. There is no doubt that the Holocaust was a terrible and tragic period in Germany's history, but just because German's share the same ethnicity as the Nazis does not mean that they should continually be persecuted for what their ancestors did. I have also been affected by this history. Even though I am American and most of my family is, my ancestors were German. When I was younger I had a friend that was Jewish. When I was learning about the Holocaust in school, I remember being really upset about what my ancestors did to hers.

I feel like the same thing applies to Americans and slavery. Because of our history with the enslavement of black people and the awful things that we put our fellow human beings through in the past, we are still sometimes held accountable for those misdeeds today. There are still huge racial tensions between the different ethnicities of this country. Last fall I took a class on African American Experiences in the Performing Arts and the class turned out to be more about race relations than about the arts. The professor seemed to be still really angry about the racial history of America's past. She was still looking for the white kids in the class to apologize for what their ancestors did over 200 years ago.

I also have a friend who is Serbian. I met her when we were studying abroad in Prague last spring. For some reason many people kept getting in fights with her over the Bosnian genocide and the conflict over Kosovo that people of her ethnicity committed. Both her parents are from Serbia, but she was born and raised in the United States. She is held accountable for the awful things that happened in her ethnic history. It may not be fair, but we equate ethnic histories to the same ethnicities today.

It is hard to break away from stereotyping ethnicities today with crimes that they have committed in the past. We have to remember that, yes, the people may share the same ideas and sentiments as their ethnic predecessors, but that is usually not the case. History plays an important part in shaping our cultural beliefs about other ethnicities, but that is not all that we should focus on.