Everybody talks about the “American Empire”, but unlike most empires, the American Empire was an empire of cultural influence, one that put standards on Everything American culture encompassed, from language to mannerisms and so on and so forth. I, a person from a minority background, count as an example of someone affected by cultural imperialism causing me to become a “weirdo” or “whitewashed” in two of my own communities, the inner Bengali community and the broader Muslim community. I started pronouncing things in an Anglicized manner, “Mus-lum”(muslim), “Mecca”(“Makkah” in my religion), refusing to say “Bangladeshi” instead of “Bengali”, withholding my language, etc., etc. Hell, I even just called myself American and wanted a full-on Americanization of myself.  However, through time, I began to appreciate everything that came before me, my cousin being a helping hand in this case. It all began this one day 5 years ago, when I first saw him after COVID hit, at a park near his teenage aunt’s house in Plainview. He talked about travelling to other countries like Turkey and the UAE, their unique characteristics about foreign countries, culture being an important one. He was interested in travelling, even to muslim countries in particular, because he was Muslim, like me, and was critical of US intervention in the Middle East. However, it then  turned into a conversation where the US of A was lacking in things other countries had. “You see, my guy, ” he began to say, “in most muslim countries, they put the Athan(call for prayer) on the loudspeaker.”. He also found it ABHORRENT that many Americans speak only English. I bet you’re wondering how this even has to do with anything about shifting back to cultural roots. Well, here’s the thing: in a conversation I forgot the most about, he insisted on using cultural terms the way they were originally pronounced, like “Filastine”(de-Anglicized form of “Palestine”). He just said it sounded better, but to me, it meant something bigger than just that: it was stripping away the western-world-updated version of those words, bringing in something more..natural. It made me realize that my ancestral/ religious history needed to be told only by someone that understood it: me. It was only people like me, Bengali/Muslim, that understood our culture, and that WE ALL represented it. By using the more streamlined, polished pronunciations of our words, we are removing the cultural aspect of it, making us look like the colonizers who were Disgusted with our culture and wanted to eradicate it from existance. So then On, I made sure to respect and speak my culture, while also respecting the Conformed version of it, well, when it came to others outside my culture. I even went on to take as much part in it as much as I could, feeling the sense of self-satisfaction I had just by being who I was always meant to be, such as speaking my language with older adults, praying in the mosque(or masjid, in this case), reading the Quran, so on and so forth.

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