This reflective paper explores the author's personal cultural identity as a member of the Ibo tribe of Nigeria, tracing the values, traditions, and heritage that shape a sense of self distinct from broader national or racial labels. The paper examines how Ibo principles — including deep respect for knowledge, a strong work ethic, ancestral pride, and community leadership — were transmitted through family and lived experience. It also considers how immigration to the United States has complicated and challenged that identity, as American culture tends to flatten ethnic distinctions into broad racial or national categories. Ultimately, the author argues that true cultural identity is interior, not externally assigned.
This place is strange. Not just because people look, talk, dress, and eat differently than I am used to. Not just because the buildings and streets are different, or because the colors, sounds, and smells of the cities are still unusual to my senses. All of these things make this place strange, yes, but that is not the strangest thing to me. What is so strange about this country is the incredible diversity of people who dwell in it and yet all identify themselves as American.
I am American now, too, I suppose, but American culture is not my culture. I am from Nigeria, but I would not even say that "Nigerian" is my culture. I'm not sure what truly defines American culture, or Nigerian culture, if such a thing exists. Both places have people who come from many cultures and traditions — some more interconnected than others, and some more friendly than others, but different. Not only different, but in both countries still often separate.
My cultural identity does not come to me from a skin color or a nation, but from the Ibo tribe from which I am descended. To most Americans — whatever that means — I am "black" the moment I am seen. If I begin speaking with them, I become "African." Some continue the conversation far enough to make me "Nigerian," but it is extremely rare that anyone thinks there could be anything beyond this.
Yet my cultural identity stems from a long tradition of history and pride, and though the word "Ibo" doesn't mean anything to most Americans, it means a great deal to me. In Nigeria, this identity is understood, but in America everything is blurred and blended in a way that makes cultures and identities indistinct, shaping them into amorphous blobs that are easier to deal with and categorize. I do not sense a great deal of cultural pride in many Americans, and this contrasts sharply with the way I was raised.
Both of my parents were elementary school teachers in Nigeria. They were well educated, and instilled the importance of learning and education in me and in my two brothers and two sisters. Accomplishment and success, it was understood, would come through the use of the gifts we had been endowed with, and it was our job to utilize these gifts to the best of our ability. Formal education itself is not a major part of traditional Ibo culture, and my parents' profession reflects some of the changes that have occurred in my culture in recent decades. But although formal education does not exactly stem from Ibo culture, the values and principles behind it are very much a part of the ways of my ancestors and others of the Ibo tribe.
Respect for the knowledge of the past and for those who retain and transmit this knowledge is a major part of Ibo cultural heritage. Though this did not occur in schools such as those the Western world has now brought to Nigeria — for better and for worse — it happened in ways that were arguably more fundamental in shaping both cultural and individual identity. Chiefs and other members of the ruling class in the Ibo tribe were respected and venerated for the positions of knowledge they held, and as keepers of the tribe's security and traditions. Though they did not "teach" in the traditional Western sense of the word, they were leaders who advised, educated, and guided the Ibo people. These are the goals of any good teacher, in the Western world or outside it, and my parents brought the sense of pride and respect that such positions held to their own roles as both teachers and learners.
Teachers in this country often do not seem to receive the same type of respect and reverence that I was raised to give them. Admittedly, I am not necessarily representative of the entire Ibo culture in this regard — having parents who were teachers, and having been one myself, my views are certainly a little biased — but the culture I have witnessed here is much less respectful in general than what I am used to among people of my own culture. I have encountered various forms of discrimination, including from certain individuals within the education system, despite my background and determination. The ethnic and cultural label that these individuals pin upon me — be it "black," "African," or even "Nigerian" — does not reflect my cultural identity so much as it reflects their own cultural ignorance. Perhaps it stems from the purported democratization and equality that this country still holds dear in its principles, if not always in its actions: when everyone is equal, there is no need to show any more respect for others than one has for oneself, I suppose. This thought could hardly be arrived at in the Ibo culture, however.
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"Interior cultural identity amid American uncertainty"
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