Common heritage

As a Google search confirms, the word ‘heritage’ has been in use for some time as an alternative to something like race or ethnicity or culture or even identity, but I only really became aware of it recently.

At first I thought that the references to men ‘of Pakistani heritage’ in relation to ‘street grooming’ were something new, even a mealy-mouthed response to an embarrassingly distasteful subject. But now that my ears have been sharpened I realise that it just may be one of those changes in the use of language which allows the once-embarrassing to become a topic of comfortable discourse.

We each have a heritage (or two or three or four …); heritage is heritage whatever its colour or religion or … & we can all be free to choose which parts of that which our ancestors have bequeathed to us we wish to lay claim to.

It is not nearly as restricting as an identity.