Today in Cultural Appropriation

I say this a lot (off of this board) in conversations. The U.S. has actually come a long way, just over my lifetime, in terms of racial discrimination. I don't get the "culture" thing; I think it is contrived nonsense. The world changes, people move around, they intermingle and adopt ways from others. But in terms of race (and this is NOT to say that we don't have any bigotry), I find so many things remarkable. We have had a black president (which was a great thing), which was unthinkable when I was a kid. I comment a lot about little things. ... for example, I am constantly noticing the make-up of people in TV commercials. The other day, there was one with a white dad picking up his black daughter from school. You see interracial couples in a lot of commercials. Those were things you didn't even see 25 years ago. I don't think the change is because of people browbeating others about their insensitivity -- even if there is sometimes a place for that in extreme instances of bigotry. I think its because those commercials reflect the changing make-up of the population those companies want to sell to. Which is an AMAZING unspoken commentary to me, at least, about how far the U.S. has come. I am thinking that within a generation of my burial, almost everyone in the U.S. is going to look vaguely Puerto Rican because changed attitudes, and globalism creating a true melting pot, in which races mix in a way they didn't in the past. With that will come something completely different culturally for various groups of people (depending on what they choose to cling to, what they choose to adopt). Things change. Change isn't necessarily bad. It isn't necessarily one group dominating another group and forcing itself on them.

 

I can't speak for those good ol' whatever you called them whites. But to the extent that you have some angry people out there clinging to forms of bigotry, I think they are fighting a losing cause. It may not feel like it at times when you see incidences of bigotry on any given day. But you really need to take a step back and look at it within a bigger context. Attitudes have changed a great deal. Some of it was because of an amazing civil rights movement (I am thinking of the impact of Jackie Robinson and Martin Luther King Jr. and their methods) that laid the seeds for what happened over a few decades following their pioneering roles. And a part of it occurred because as the racial makeup of the U.S. continued to change (largely due to immigration), MANY people's attitudes toward race organically changed. That is always the best kind of change. It's not beating people over the head to accept something they intractably don't want to buy into. It's people changing on their own, as they see the world around them changing, and realizing it is in everyone's best interest to move on from discriminatory things in our past.

Yeah, you have some ignorant people still out there. But we all know its a fringe -- even if it is scary at this point in time. But let's not overstate their influence, because if you take a small step back, you have Jim Crow laws having been in effect within some of our lifetimes. America is actually evolving slowly and organically into a place I (at least) like better. My dream is something color blind -- no preferences. Just a level playing field. No forced preferences. Eveyone FREE to pursue their dreams on a level playing field. The impediment to that is sill that way too many people (and I have seen this a bit on threads like this), don't understand that a level playing field is just that. It doesn't guarantee outcomes. It just gives everyone an equal chance. If we could ever get to that -- and it was ingrained in our national consciousness -- it would be an America I could be very proud of.