Avoiding Becoming White

An interesting point that is made in "From Hindi Swaraj" is the argument that, to truly be released from the oppressive hands of European imperialists, we must also completely reject their cultural influences. The author takes one of Mahatma Gandhi's famous quotes about this, "'If the master's house is to be dismantled, it cannot be done with the master's tools" (200). Although the foundation of this argument is that one should avoid erasing the influence of their culture, and that is a seemingly obvious concept, the real conflict begins with the idea that "white culture" is something founded completely by white people. If one were to consider American culture White culture, it should be noted that culture that we would now consider as something belonging to the United States has been melded and influences by the foreign populations that built the pillars of this country. Hip-hop, commonly seen as a genre created by Americans, would never be considered a white invention. I make this distinction because the argument that one must not fall victim to the ways of the white people, the Americans, is a complicated thing to say because the culture has never really belonged to them. It is a mixture of all the ethnicity's that populate the region. I am essentially saying that people of color cannot be criticized for following trends that seem white that are popular in American and European society, because white people have no pure culture.