For every inroad made, another is lost. A generation of education in tolerance and multiculturalism has not bred a new culture of respect. It has only opened a new front. In the digital Garden of Eden that is the social web, all the wonders and beauty of the world are on display. The great cultural fruits of the world are hanging there ripe and tantalizing. Like an infinite storehouse of baubles and gems. But their bright colors and richly textured resolution is a phantasmagoria. We are gazing at a dream through dark glass. What we imagine to be real, to be an image fully resolved, is still nothing more than a lurid two-dimensional facsimile. The global village is not Utopia. It’s Epcot. But this is the dream that wants to be dreamed. We do not want to know more than the brochure version of a place. We only want what is easily reduced and more easily consumed. Anything more than that is too much. We are scared that reality might consume us.

So it is here against the shadows of the cave that the story of our future war plays out. The new battles over authenticity are not about what is real. They are merely new fronts in the long struggle against colonization. We are obsessed by the notion that somewhere in the past there is some wellspring of truth that is somehow purer. That the Platonic ideal of everything lay somewhere hidden on the road behind us. That we either have already lost or are losing now. But we are not engaged in this absurd attrition because the world is awash in fake signs and empty symbols. They are the fever, not the virus. The struggle is not over competing answers to the question. We must look at the question itself. Beyond the notion of master’s house and master’s tools, we must ask, “On whose land is this house built?” Are the boards of master’s walls cut from master’s trees? Where did he get them? Did he grow them himself? The trouble is not that we have lost the way. The trouble is that we were forced onto a road that we were not walking in the first place.

We look at the inauthentic as if it were some perverse monstrosity that exhumed itself from the void. But it is never a mistake. In fact, it comes as no surprise. America is the country of flattened surfaces. People are continually reduced to their most base denominators. It is a nation for whom complexity is anathema, and to live here, to be here, you must give something up. That is why heritage has a half life. What is remembered in the span of just a few generations? What differences are you not allowed to keep? If your traditions are too strong, your food too inaccessible, will you be allowed in? American mythology tells us that it is the great democratizer. But in myth is the only place that American democracy resides. The true function of America is not to democratize. It is to homogenize. Many a politician recites the litany that we are all a nation of immigrants. That everyone is from somewhere else. But anyone who wants to be here, you will have to forget where that was.

It is a struggle against irony. It is a struggle against a twisted story where the older generations were told that in order to be American, they would have to let America wash their ethnicity from them. (And even then they would have to wear a hyphen like a scarlet letter). Then in two generations, when their language was fading and their traditions weak, a new generation of white people would try to rediscover what our forebears were told to give up. Not in a colonization of land, but of memory. For a handful of trinkets called the American Dream, we gave up our heritage so that master could build his there.

So the authentic is not the difference between what is true and what is a lie. The truth lives in your blood and your bones. It lives in the tired skin of your mother’s hands and the weary lines of your father’s face. The narrative of your heritage is not up for debate. Your family did what they had to for survival. A survival pitted against racism, prejudice, and exile. Reject the premise that this is about who gets to be the authority on your reality. This is about white people having the tendency to take. And you have the right to take it back.