How Does Heritage Affect Us

By Adam Murphy

When we talk about heritage, we talk about how important it is, how it lets you feel connected to your past and to people who share the same past. This is not the only aspect of the idea however, for as much as it brings people together, it can also separate them. Heritage can be a great driving force for a community as well as a tool used for oppression and conflict. Indeed, many conflicts both past and present boil down to this idea of heritage, in fact it is rare that a conflict would exist without some element of it in play. Heritage can be used to drive people apart, “othering” them and thus making it easier to see them as something less. The idea of a shared heritage is usually little more than a group of characteristics, and because these can be changed so easily by those in charge it can become a very potent weapon in the right, or wrong hands.  

While heritage seems as real as anything else, it can be viewed as a set of arbitrary groupings, "imagined communities" of people who differ as much as they are similar. Being from rural Cork, my life is different in comparison to someone from Dublin city centre, but we both define ourselves as Irishmen. Is it really fair to group us together when we lead such opposing lives? These imagined communities of people can be used to justify the control and oppression of others, in fact it was a mainstay of the colonial oppression strategy.

In Rwanda two tribes (the Tutsis and the Hutus, with the Tutsis making up about 15% of the population, Hutus 75%) were pitted against each other in order to be distracted from their common enemy, the Belgian empire. The Tutsi tribe were given preferential treatment in almost everything as the Belgians saw them as more “European” and therefore superior. Each tribe was fed so much rhetoric about the other tribe that they no longer saw them as individuals but as a group of traitors, power-stealers etc. The result of this was the Rwandan genocide where an estimate of 800,000 people, mostly from the Tutsi tribe were killed because they were deemed as different to the Hutus. They did this as they felt that the Hutu tribe was under threat after the president of the Hutu’s Tribe was shot down. These two groups were treated each other differently, simply because of their heritage. They became so wrapped up in this idea of “us versus them” that they became blind to the real perpetrators, the Belgians. In this way, it is clear that heritage can be a dangerous tool, especially in the hands of those in power, to divide people and prevent them from rising up together. 

The truth of the matter is that as we scale up, we lose our individuality. Protestant people in Northern Ireland became “Dirty Unionist Oppressors” while Catholic people were “Terrorists” and “Car Bombers” specifically during the Troubles. These negative ideas become attached not towards the perpetrators but towards the group of people they happen to align with. We refuse to let go of irrelevant details in favour of grouping people together, saving mental energy by viewing them as “other”. Zadie Smith put it succinctly when she stated “stop worrying about your identity and concern yourself with the people you care about…you can’t live by slogans, dead ideas, clichés, or national flags. Finding an identity is easy. It’s the easy way out.” By aligning ourselves within a group rather than as an individual that is within a group, we cease having individuality and start becoming a statistic. 

Globalisation has made us more connected and yet divided as we struggle to find ourselves amidst the billions of people. We feel lost in the crowd if we do not have a banner to fly under, yet by flying a banner we alienate others who are “not the same” as us. Things like social media do little to help this. Misinformation is rife online, making xenophobia absurdly easy to propagate, even if unintentional. These actions or minor quirks are taken as indicative of a whole group of people, for little reason other than their heritage. By ignoring these overarching groups and instead focusing on the individuals we can find connections with those we may have otherwise deemed too different to talk to.  

As I mentioned earlier, the colonial tactic was to split groups up in order to control them more easily. They would split people into ethnic groups and give preferential treatment to one group, causing prejudice to be shone on the natives rather than the colonisers. This is a clear example of ethnicity being a source of conflict however is it really fair to call it the culprit? The Marxist view is that the bourgeoisie are using their power in the class war to keep the proletariat down, using ideas of ethnicity and heritage as an excuse for their greed and need for power. In this reading of things, heritage serves only as a tool to be used by the few to keep the many down. It is a sombre viewpoint, but I believe it to be an important one to consider. In the case of Rwanda it is absolutely what happened. Even in things such as World War Two, the antisemitism was used as a common enemy to unite the German people, so they would work unquestionably for the Nazi government and keep the blame away from those in power. The connection between class and heritage is a dangerous one, even more so because it goes unnoticed so often. 

While of course heritage can be a force for good, especially for those entering a new country and looking to find some sort of grounding, the damage that these ideas have caused over the years is too much to ignore. It is unlikely that ideas of nationality or ethnicity will ever fully disappear, we are simply hardwired to find these things in others, but we can try and move away from this mindset. People exist outside of the labels we give them, and if by ignoring these labels we simultaneously remove a bludgeoning tool of higher powers then all the better for everyone.