Everyday Use is a short story by Alice Walker about a family consisting of the mother and two daughters. The older daughter has had “traditional” education in the United States, but she comes back embracing her cultural identity by changing her name, and she wants to take some artifacts from their traditional home to put on display. This is an example of a growing problem in the modern world: cultural assimilation and the loss of minority cultures.
As the world has settled into nation states, one of the greatest disturbing factors of the world has been ethnic tensions. Many times those tensions have turned violent such as the Rwandan genicide. In an effort to prevent such things from happening in their own countries, many countries have conducted the process of assimilating minorities into the culture of the majority population(such as China, Brazil, and the United States), or creating one central culture for the entire nation(such as Tanzania). This has led to a massive loss of traditional culture in many parts of the world.
In my opinion, governments and people should work to preserve the traditional culture of all ethic groups in their country. Culture is something that has been passed down through the generations by our ancestors, and it should be treated just as we treat artifacts from the past, to be preserved and valued, not destroyed.
