Kissing Cousins, or how a redcoat became a turncoat

Culture is a many splendored thing, an ever changing thing, a thing of rough serration.
Culture is accumulation or sublimation, affirmation and assimilation.
Replete with many influences, focuses and words
Our tragedies hard remembered, transforming or disfiguring by turns.

Cultures get names they are black, white or youth,
We name so we can shame, we separate and we segregate, and thus we sieve the truth
But trying by defining, or controlling by enrolling means we lose even that we thought we knew,
Cultures confound, confuse and astound and are never just ours, false, or true.

Culture is shared value, shared history, community and reality,
Some of it good some of it bad, some ugly and some pretty 
Like our history the strong get to write and to say, where the line is drawn that makes us pure, 
But less truth intrusion means an easier inclusion in the closed circle we call, "our" culture.

Can a leopard change spots, can a zebra turn white or a tiger be loosed from her stripes,
Are we trapped as we are, or loosed to the stars to be free of our roots and our stereotypes.
I'm a man born to be, stout, white, English and free I'm a rebel and always will be,
But in one week or so I will change in my flow, when America naturalizes me.

So much has been writ of our cousinly ties and our shared and yet broken connections
How two cultures so close, could be severed and torn and go in two different directions.
But of course I've run foul of my own simple mind when I fail to see all of the mix,
It's not two but two thousand cultures or more that make up this complex matrix.

So let me be clear what is going on here, so my readers won't howl, fuss or rasp,
I will not be Lakota, Chippewa, Cree, Dakota, just a common or garden old WASP.
Yes an oath will be sworn, and a hand will be raised, a new anthem may come from my lips,
But when all's said and done, as a new murican,' I will still love my old fish and chips!