An Ethnography for the Estranged

Reclaiming descent, resisting erasure, and recovering the stories that remember us.

Introduction: What If You Don't Remember Your Inheritance?

In last week’s essay, I argued that whiteness, not to be conflated with Americans of European descent, many of whom classify as white, was not a culture but a deal—a protective proximity to power that required the erasure of ancestral memory. That deal did not create belonging; it created estrangement; particularly by one’s ancestral history.

The blood-and-soil fantasy offered by border propaganda and Christian nationalism trades in fear and false history. It’s easy to imagine that the antidote to that fantasy is a matter of better policy and more accurate history. This is an assumption made both by the critical theorists who advocate on behalf of honest history, where I’d count myself deeply aligned, but it is also an assumption made by the modern Right that book banning, media censhorship, and bringing uiversities to heel are effective tools to purge society of multiculturalism. Perhaps, on that point, the authoritarian and fascistic tendencies of government control are effective methods to purge non-white, non-colonial culture from accepted discourse, in this essay, I raise an alternative question.

What if resistance to authoritarianism is remembering ourselves differently?

This essay offers a response to that question. It is an invitation to reclaim what whiteness demanded we abandon—not in search of purity or performance, but to practice memory as a form of presence—an act of resistance against erasure and an invitation to a history that lives in practice, not only in books.

I do not here advodate for nostalgia. Instead, I call us toward diasporic practice of relation. Through oral history, communal ritual, and the recovery of cultural fragments, we can begin to remember what we didn’t know we knew.

I want to assert early that I acknowledge both the African diaspora and the Jewish diaspora as well documented outcomes of history, and each of these, extending the discussion even more broadly to diasporic communities from many ethnic and ancestral backgrounds, the argument herein is not that there is a racialized white diaspora. That notion would presupose that there is such a thing as a white cultural identity in the same way that these other diasporic communities have come to exist. That is patently false, and whereas diaspora assumes existence outside of a circumscribed homeland, or a forced separation from one’s ritual practice and cultural identity, this idea would lend credence to the idea that there is a prejdudice against people who classify as white, which, should such implicit biases exist, it is not codified in institutional power, which is a requisite for racism: prejudice conjoined with power.

As we will hopefully make clear throughout this essay, whitness is the thief of cultural identity, not an expression of it.

Whiteness as a Deal, Not a Culture

Whiteness has never been a stable identity. It has always been a bargain: safety in exchange for silence; complicity through compliance, for fear that without adherence, total agency is lost. While I do not want to allow this essay to drift too far afield, we are living, in the American context at any rate, during a time that cell phones can be confiscated for monitoring and student activities are surveilled for opinions that upset the federal talking points.

Whether on college campuses or simply holding a public identity, proximity to power is granted only in exchange for cultural erasure. This point seems nearly obvious to make when we consider the outright attack on DEI programs as a foundational tenet of the modern Right. What is lost when diverse identities vanished from the curriculum and disappeared by the state is not food or language. We lose, collectively, the very practices that make identity durable.

How is it for Black students, Latino/a students, disabled students, gay students, and immigrant students to rarelyencounter their stories in their classroom texts?

Werner Sollors describes American identity as a tension between "consent" and "descent." Consent means choosing to belong; descent means carrying what was passed down. Whiteness demanded consent without descent. It asked immigrants to forget where they came from in exchange for a new name, a flag, and a place in the dominant order—an arrangement now echoed in the growing effort to revoke birthright citizenship.

But the consent/descent dynamic isn’t a simple transaction. Sollors describes it as an oscillation, a relational cycle in which immigrant communities engage in a dialogue with Americanization—adapting and transforming in both directions. Immigrant writings, he notes, serve as handbooks for this negotiated belonging. Birthright citizenship, then, is not merely a legal concession—it is a recognition of that mutual exchange. A democracy enriched by pluralism grants not just legal status, but protection for cultural continuity. The attempt to sever descent through policy—to revoke birthright, to erase cultural memory—is not just cruel, it is a betrayal. It undermines the very premise of American strength: a nation made more resilient by its differences.

Flattening multiculuralism into white identty politics signals to immigrant families: assimilate, forget your language, your food, your name—and maybe you’ll be allowed to stay. But even then, there are no guarantees. The trap is set.

All the while, your cuisine becomes lunch specials, your holidays become drink specials, and your heritage gets sliced up into Instagram aesthetics. Taco Tuesday is a national pastime. Cinco de Mayo is an excuse to sell tequila. Half the country gets drunk on St. Patrick’s Day but bristles at your grandmother’s accent. This isn’t inclusion—it’s consumption. What gets celebrated is the performance of ethnicity without the presence of its people.

Zygmunt Bauman calls this the liquid modern condition—a constant dissolving of tradition in favor of flexible, commodified identity. Toni Morrison reminds us that American identity has often defined itself in opposition to a racialized Other. Together, these thinkers help name the void: whiteness as both erasure and vulnerability.

And that vulnerability runs deeper than sentiment. Even when you trade your accent for fluency, your customs for conformity, you are never fully secure. Whiteness, as a construct, offers conditional belonging—it can revoke its protections at any time. Bauman shows us that identity under modernity is fluid by force; Morrison shows us that whiteness defines itself by negation. Together, they reveal the trap: whiteness promises safety, but delivers insecurity. You are emptied of your inheritance and handed a mask you must keep adjusting.

And into that void, nationalism steps with an offer that echoes two core conservative tenets: that the world is naturally hierarchical, and that it is zero-sum. Feel whole again—by excluding someone else. Get yours by denying the portion set aside for someone else. Ensure you’re on the inside with us, or we may revoke your citizenship and throw you out.

Empathy as Method: The Ethics of Recollection

Oral history reminds us that people often recall things they didn’t know they remembered. This is not just a technical insight; it’s a moral one. Reclamation begins with empathy—the willingness to let someone else’s story reshape our understanding of our own.

Research yields facts. But being there—lighting the candle, asking the question, holding the silence—is the story. Like the story of the Exodus, we tell to remember. It is in the telling that memory becomes cultural life. The story doesn’t serve the facts; it serves the people. And when we start from that posture, we discover that memory isn’t just a record of the past. It’s a relationship with it—a way of remaining in relation, even when the facts are gone.

You may not remember your inheritance. But it remembers you. Consent without descent may be demanded by the state—but your story waits for your return. The question is whether you’re willing to receive it.

Belonging Without Borders: Diaspora as Durable Identity

Jewish scholar Daniel Boyarin offers a compelling framework for this kind of reclamation. He writes:

"Jewishness is not a set of freely chosen beliefs; it is a thick web of genealogical links, kinship relations, bodily practices, and communal ‘doings’ into which Jews ‘are thrown’ from birth."

This thrownness is not exile. It is inheritance. It is a belonging that precedes belief. And it models a way of being that doesn’t depend on statehood, purity, or domination.

Boyarin calls this diasporism: caring for your people and your neighbors, especially the oppressed. Diaspora becomes a model of continuity without conquest—a form of non-dominant sovereignty sustained through ritual, relation, and memory.

But even Boyarin’s vision is not universal. Many Jews find deep belonging only within a Jewish state. For them, diaspora feels like absence, not continuity. That tension is real. It must be held.

My uncle once voiced a related critique: that we Jews often frame our resistance to Israeli violence through Jewish values—centering ourselves even in protest. He’s right. Even ethics can become self-serving if we’re not careful.

Especially for someone like me. I wasn’t raised in tradition. My Hebrew is brittle. But I light candles. I sing Shabbat songs with my kids. I say modeh ani in the morning, even if I don’t fully know to whom—or what—I’m speaking.

It matters to me—not because I need to prove anything, but because this is how I remain in relation. We have Jewish neighbors. We hold space. We stay.

That’s diaspora: not exile, but chosen continuity. Not domination, but presence.

In Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), one of the most powerful tools for behavior change isn’t logic or threat—it’s values. A person becomes more capable of action not through punishment or persuasion, but through clarity: Who do I want to be? What matters to me enough that I’ll endure discomfort to protect it? In ACT, values are both a hook and a help. They ground us in identity while opening us to possibility. The point isn’t to feel better; the point is to live better.

But even values can be used in ways that protect the self more than they protect others.

That’s the tension we face in moral protest. When we center our discomfort with injustice in our values—“this isn’t who we are”—we risk a kind of ethical narcissism. The wrong is framed in terms of what we can tolerate, not what others endure. The question becomes: How could we do this? Not: What have we done to them?

The danger isn’t in having values. It’s in mistaking self-consistency for solidarity.

But what if reconnecting with our traditions—our rituals, languages, meals, memories—isn’t a celebration of self, but a preparation for relation? What if recovering our lineage is how we practice presence so that we can stand with others more fully?

To identify with your people should not mean to center yourself. It means to remember who you are, so you can take responsibility for how you show up.

Four Ways to Begin: Ethnographic Practices for Inheritance Recovery

If we want that kind of belonging—a memory that lives without borders—we need ways to practice it. Ethnography offers a path not of study, but of witness and return. Here are four ways to begin:

1. Participant-Observation in Family Life
   Pay attention to rituals, meals, songs, silences. What was repeated? What was lost? What is still shaping you?

2. Strategic Oral History
   Ask elders about what was surrendered. Not just facts, but how they felt. What did they stop saying? What names changed?

3. Material Culture Investigation
   Look for objects: textiles, recipes, tools, documents. Ask why they were kept. What do they mean? What do they conceal?

4. Linguistic Traces
   What words lived in your house? What languages were buried? What jokes or idioms still flicker from your grandparents?

You don’t need fluency. You need to show up. To witness. To dwell long enough in the language of your people—even if broken—that it becomes not just about words, but about relation, recognition, and the reclamation of a descent that others tried to strip from you. It is how you reenter the line from which you were exiled. It is how memory becomes belonging again.

Conclusion: Reclamation Is Resistance

The ICE poster told us to defend the homeland. But the homeland they mean isn’t yours. It’s a fantasy—one that demands the disappearance of others so you can feel like you belong.

That’s the lie.

The truth is quieter. Harder. Truer.

Many of us were separated from our inheritance not by exile, but by agreement—an unspoken deal that said: You can belong if you stop being who you were. That wasn’t diaspora. That was erasure.

But ethnographic practice offers us another way. It’s how we refuse that erasure and choose diaspora instead—not as loss, but as continuity. A belonging that doesn’t require borders. A homeland made of memory, not exclusion.

As Boyarin writes, diaspora is not absence. It is a commitment to caring—for your people and your neighbors. It is autonomy without domination. A sovereignty of memory.

You may not remember your story. But you can still become its steward.

Start with one story. One song. One gesture of care. That’s the work.

Not to reclaim power.

But to reclaim memory—without domination. Because once memory is restored, so too is agency. And from agency comes resistance—not abstract or performative, but rooted, living, sustained. A resistance led by our grandparents' stories and fueled by unprocessed grains, smoked fish, and cured meats—foods of preparation and preservation, tradition and transmission. Just like the Seder plate, they remind us that symbolic storytelling and cultural memory are braided together in every bite.

An ethnography for the estranged is a nonviolent act of resistance that transcends borders, restores descent, and reclaims the future from those who would steal it.