Ok, I should preface this with the strange inspirations I have been considering this week. However, in the Spring, there was a MS contest and one of the entries was a girl writing about genocide, who had no concept about ethnic identity. I don't think there is global consciousness about ethnicity among white European cultures, except for the Spanish inquisition. When Disney released Frozen II, my newsfeeds was flooded by liberal people complaining about colonialism, it was so puzzling. Since the Scandanavian cultures have their own indigenous Sami tribes who are accepted and have their own place and rights, it could have been said that it was a clash between nomadic lifestyles and settled lifestyles of a port city, but if all of the people involved are Scandanavian, there is no colonialism happening. In fact, the Norwegian Eurovision entry in 2019 was a Sami rap group, using imagery from traditional mythology, that was perhaps not so coincidentally very similar to imagery Disney used in their film.
My European background comes from Germany and Scotland, with some Slavic and British influence, and one presence of a Filles du Roi descendent. I have never taken a DNA geneology test, because my father has traced our family, and there is a book about my German paternal family. With the exception of my great-grandmother whose family comes from Jurst, except that town is incredibly difficult to track down from oral tradition because it has been spelled five different ways. No one talks about the Polish genocide of the Germans living in Poland following the World Wars.
The British certainly never talk about the Highland Clearances that sent the Scottish part of my family scattering, or the cultural appropriation the world gives British credit for Scottish contributions. It is overall astounding how uneducated people are and how quick to make anything black and white. One reason I have loved the similarities in my book, which came after I had designed the world, not before, to ancient moment in time when Persians innovated everything from religious philosophy to government administration that the world has immitated everywhere for millennia, is because of the way I identify with similarities I see in this anecdote.
Growing up, my mother would ask her mother where they were from, and her mother would say "Prussia." Trying not to speak German at home or avoiding any connection to Nazi's was their survival instincts in the same Jim Crow culture from which there was no escaping for having better non-racist values. My mother could not talk about being German for her life. When I was an adult she made very barbed and bitchy remarks to me about being German that appeared to come from nowhere except her deep darkly rooted shame. I have one close friend whose father is Iranian, and he had a very prominent career in the SEC. Every person from Iran who I have encountered in the US would never say they were Iranian. They would always say they were Persian. Persian. Prussian. Not the Enemy. A shield to try to escape harassment, which never works in the midst of people who either use racial slurs or do not understand complex non single stories of peoples and their countries. So when I built a world and saw how closely similar it bore to a moment in time when Persia brought innovation to civilization, I felt that kindred pride to the people of Iran who cannot claim their own identity out of fear, when there is so much from their culture in which they yearn to take pride.
Nothing about these poorly educated mindsets should appear in literature or publishing, or for that matter, in the minds of the readers - or viewers in the case of Frozen II, who think that domestic conflict between civilization and nomadic tribal cultures have similarities to British colonialism, who don kilts and run around pretending to be Braveheart, and call Scottish people abroad British. Ignorance about cultural appropriation, about the treatments of ethnic people groups, has long reaches all around the world, and deep into the minds and atttiudes, even of those who claim to hate it.
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