Today in Cultural Appropriation

This seems like a good point of the thread to fully disclose that, as a child, I once dressed up as Stevie Wonder for Halloween. There are photos. It's horrifying. Black face and sunglasses.

I don't know that my mother - who teaches in a predominantly minority school district - would recognize it as even slightly offensive, to this day.

 

I'm told I was a "Chinaman" for Halloween when I was like 3 or 4.

Thankfully, I don't believe there is photographic proof of this.

 

Yep, it's there. It's one of the insurance commercials. I'll post a video when I can remember which commercial.

 

There's a SOFI commercial that has a black man/white woman couple/family. I don't recall seeing it but I recall reading about a State Farm "engagement" commercial several years ago.

 

Notice the nuclear black family -- with a husband/father -- sitting around the breakfast table eating cereal, everyone full of morning smiles.

It's the little things.

 

tv commercial interracial couple - Google Search

I like the one for Consumer Cellular, who still sell flip phones to old people. There is a white grandfather and a biracial granddaughter.

 

These commercials are important. One of my best friends' sister and mother no longer are on speaking terms because the granddaughter went to Prom with a black kid. This shit still happens, with regularity.

 

This step is taken every day, all the time, by sincere, intentional people across the spectrum of race, gender, sexual orientation and body ability.

There must be - there will be - an upshot to all of these conversations.

The real question is: Who controls the upshot, and how to do they control it?

If White Conservative Person A does the listening - the hard listening - and still arrives, however enlightened, at their original political bent, will they get credit for the listening? Will they have taken the step? Or, short of re-education, does that person still not get it?

The conversation on race does indeed hit a nerve with white people. When I ask some why:

1. Well, some of them are racists

2. America is above all a culture of constant busyness, and people don't know where the conversation fits into their overall lives of "my kid's got practice four nights a week, I gotta mow the lawn, I need to get groceries, we're going on vacation next week, and...what major, overarching American problem do you want me to solve again?"

3. The rules of the conversation change, and it seems more like a rhetorical shell game than a desire for actual conversation. In other words: The goal of the conversation is to prolong the conversation, in perpetuity, with no particular end in sight, other than some profiting financially or socially from the conversation.

No.3 probably describes my tension. Maybe you've had a lot of conversations on race in America with people of color. I have, too. There are those chats, which are one thing, good, too - progressive, on a small level. And then there is a larger conversation, driven by academia and celebrity and Twitter, that doesn't match up with the conversations I've had. It matches up more with the conversation we're having here.

Ta-Nehisi Coates just wrote 5,000 words on Kanye West - I read em all, and it's as least as much about Michael Jackson - and I'm pretty sure everybody lets him write whatever he pleases. Near the end of the piece, he writes what already become a well-known paragraph on what white freedom is. He goes on a rhetorical roll - writers can do that, especially when they've hit a mental groove - and writes some frankly outrageous implications about white freedom is and has been.

West calls his struggle the right to be a “free thinker,” and he is, indeed, championing a kind of freedom—a white freedom, freedom without consequence, freedom without criticism, freedom to be proud and ignorant; freedom to profit off a people in one moment and abandon them in the next; a Stand Your Ground freedom, freedom without responsibility, without hard memory; a Monticello without slavery, a Confederate freedom, the freedom of John C. Calhoun, not the freedom of Harriet Tubman, which calls you to risk your own; not the freedom of Nat Turner, which calls you to give even more, but a conqueror’s freedom, freedom of the strong built on antipathy or indifference to the weak, the freedom of rape buttons, pussy grabbers, and fuck you anyway, bitch; freedom of oil and invisible wars, the freedom of suburbs drawn with red lines, the white freedom of Calabasas.

There's no collective progress in that paragraph. There's great writing - in service of perpetuating the conversation so Coates can write another essay, at some indeterminate point in the future, about the same things - but if Coates in the leading black voice on politics in America, white people are supposed to read this and think...what? They either nod their head, because patronizing head-nodding seems like the thing to do, or they rightly wonder "whoa, OK, so, my life is really without consequence, criticism, responsibility or hard memory?" or they just shut it out.

 

Indeed.

This is why it can feel like chasing one's tail - and can be so frustrating - to try to earnestly dialogue with poster Rick here, for example. If he gets you to reach a point of agreement with him, he just inches his flag a little bit further to the hard left. You will never catch Rick. The entire conversation is rigged so that Rick remains Woke Zero. That's the point of it. You are being earnest. He is furthering his brand.

 

Couple of years ago we were at the Easter vigil service the local Episcopal diocese puts on at Scholz Garten in Austin. It's soooo stereotypically Austin, but we don't mind. Our older kids' circle is into it, and in the main they follow the liturgy, albeit with some ... interesting ... departures on occasion. One such was the appearance of a young "slam poet" (a nice black guy with dreads and ironic fedora) who riffed on "black power" and "black pride" and "black is beautiful". How that was supposed to fit into liturgy was beyond me.

What was funny was watching the crowd. Keep in mind, we're talking Episcopalians ... seriously bourgeois "white" folks, regardless of their skin color. But as he worked to and through his points, apparently the way to show your agreement was to snap your fingers (kind of a groovy "amen"). And oh my were they snappin' those fingers. It was all I could do to not burst into laughter, imagining their self-satisfaction as they piled into those Volvos for the ride home.

 

*wanking motion*

My position in this thread has been completely constant.

 

Did I hit a nerve?