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What I want to do with my life is to speak across cultures, and encourage others to do the same, because I spent my formative years in like nine different wildly different cultures.

And my dream is for the dominant culture of America to be one where people from all the cultures I've lived in---and the many many people outside those cultures---feel comfortable and welcome. This is perhaps a way of imagining an America in which I, mongrel, feel welcome.

What's necessary for that? 1) Social rules of engagement that have ALL of us in mind. As long as hegemony is restrained, these will begin to develop naturally in diverse spaces... for whatever identities are allowed to be expressed in those spaces.

(For instance, in a lot of progressive elite college settings, racial identity is... not exactly welcomed in, but the right to be welcomed is recognized. The same is not the case for class identity. Poverty is not always---or ever---welcome in the classroom.)

2) I suspect we will also need to have spaces---"safe" spaces---where our cultural norms are affirmed, not questioned. Protected, not challenged.

I think this is as much an authentic and legitimate psychological need of conservative Southern white Christians as it is of QTPOC who migrated to the Acela corridor (often to escape the aforementioned, lol).

And already, I am afraid that the wild differences and contradictions of the cultures that constitute America make this goal Quixotic at best.

And then along come the Marxists, who tell me there is a fundamental material contradiction between many of these groups, and in that contest, there can be no peace, only domination by one side or the other.