The word "ethnic" is weigh. It contains stories, inheritance, traditions, and sometimes tensions. When I hear it, I think about colour - the bright, living fabric, the intricate patterns, the smell of spices dancing from generation to generation. Even if you don't fully understand the words, you're still thinking about how you can hear them in your grandmother's story. It's more than a culture. Even if we are far from home, it is our identity, our roots, our soil.
Ethnicity can be both celebration and complications. Can be combined or shared. "Ethnic food," "Ethnic clothing," sometimes reduced to labels as if the mainstream is neutral and all other "other people." So, there is no culture that has no ethnic. The line may be blurry for generations, individual comes from somewhere. I always think how people take their ethnicity with pride, it include roasts, sarees, quilts, headstrokes, badges, etc. And people that hide their ethics, those that assimilate it, and assimilate it to "speak it in correct way" to "feel it." It's tired and this balanced act of belonging. In some rooms, their ethnicity is their power. In others, it's her burden.
But there is beauty in the differences between ethnicities - music that carries emotions in languages you don't speak, with dances you have never learned, but feel in your bones. Perhaps breathe and thrive next to them, not to fully understand all cultures, but to respect it. Ethnically, it's not just where you came from. It's about what you live within you. And if we look really closely, we all come together through history, migration, love, survival, pride, and we all see that we are a patchwork of ethnic stories.