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Before anyone goes off on a tangent I'm not asking who's had it worse or who's suffered the most persecution, I'm simply asking about ancestry and heritage. Are there any other races in history that have had their identities completely stripped from them like Black people? Meaning not knowing where their people are originally from and not knowing their true ethnicity/real last names?
OP, do some reading about ethnic cleansing and I think you will be surprised how many ethnic groups have been subject to forced assimilation, loss of family and culture during the written history of the world. The practice continues to this day in many areas. Wiki would be a place to start.
The Romani peoples of India have had a particularly long history of enslavement and dispossession.
Europe is full of examples, to say nothing of the who knows how many tribes and traditions that were wiped away by the Christian menace during the dark ages. The celts are a good example.
It happened in China too, as the Han people spread out across east Asia and again under the mongols. In Japan, it was the native Ainu who were subjugated.
In Australia, the Aborigines were absolutely devestated and the native Tasmanians were completely wiped out.
Even in the Americas entire tribes were snuffed out by more powerful tribes and the great mesoamerican civilizations were built over the bones of earlier subjugated civilizations, only to be destroyed in turn by the Europeans.
In fact, you'd be hard pressed to find a corner of the world where it didn't happen. You might say cultural genocide is one of humanity's favorite hobbies...
I've met plenty of Jews whose families were murdered in pogroms, who were forced to move from country to country, and a few who were so young they were removed and repatriated in other countries, losing their ethnic identities completely.
Crypto Jews in the southwestern states of th US. This has gotten some attention in New Mexico recently. Jews were expelled from Spain or else they were "converted" (conversos) .around 1492. Some left Spain and Portugal for the New World and kept some Jewish traditions although they may have lost their knowledge or connection to Judaism 'Crypto-Jews' In The Southwest Find Faith In A Shrouded Legacy : Code Switch : NPR
The concept of "identity" in the form of "citizenship" within a recognized nation-state is not uniform; consider, for example, Filipinos, who may belong to any of seventeen unique tribal groups. Only two of those groups share a common language, so there are seventeen versions of the Philippine national anthem. And this was largely due to the influence of the Spanish colonials -- whose Catholic religion adapted quickly to those areas in which it was transplanted, thus emphasized family and ancestry -- and who, unlike English-speakers, intermarried with the natives (at least, on the lower rungs of the societal order) which spread the same concept throughout Latin America.
Nor were background and heritage completely obliterated for those who came here in slave ships; authors from backgrounds as diverse as William Faulkner, Katya Gillden (Hurry, Sundown), and James Lee Burke have all recognized the point that slaves were often aware of their origins -- the histories, albeit weak versions, were handed down orally. Angola Prison in Louisiana was developed around a former plantation, and took its name from the origins of the original labor force.
The loss of heritage via the disruptions of a weak civilization is not unique to people of African descent; we are all "rootless" if one simply looks back far enough.
Last edited by 2nd trick op; 07-08-2014 at 05:45 AM..
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