Culture And Identity In Everyday Use By Alice Walker

Culture and identity shapes and molds society as we know it today. Culture and Identity includes social class, generation, religion and nationality. It also gives us an understanding of how other races and organization work. The best way to fully understand one’s culture and identity is to not judge their ways of doing something or how they handle a certain situation. With this being said, there are many different things we can learn from culture and identity, it opens our mind to new possibilities and opportunities. Our world is a melting pot for different cultures and identities making it unique.

When it comes to culture and identity in the readings we have read, we can see that the identity
This story basically tells of a mother on the porch waiting to be reunited with her eldest daughter, Dee. In the story, there are no signs of a father so you have to assume that the mother, narrator, raised the girls most of their lives. As soon as Dee returns Mama and Maggie, youngest daughter, notice a change in her right away. She was very well dressed and came with a certain surprise, an Arab guy named Hakim-a-barber. In a way I see how Dee/ Wangero Leewanika Kemanjo and Beneatha from “A Raisin in the Sun” are similar. Both characters try to force education on their families, feeling as if they know more because they went to school. The thing with Dee that has drawn interest to me is that she that she feels like she subjugated by her people because of her name, ergo her changing it to Wangero. In a scene Wangero tells Mama of this by saying, “I couldn’t bear it any longer being named after people who oppress me.” Wangero feels as if she was given a slave name and they only way to solve the problem was by changing it. One thing I found that had showed culture in way was the scene where all the characters where eating expect Asalamalakim. Alsalamalakim says he doesn’t eat collard green and claimed that pork was unclean. On the other hand we can see Wangero stuffing her face with chitlins, collard greens, and corn bread. Many cultural differences are present in this scene, the consumption of these kinds of food have come from the African descent. It’s not hard to see that the conventional education of Wangero has split her from her family making her character come off as mean. Besides that you can see that Wangero main goal is only to restore the heritage and cultural she felt that her family has lost and she is only trying to convince Maggie and mama to see things from her