as a general rule. if what we’re calling ‘cultural appropriation’ sounds like nazi ideology (i.e. ‘white people should only do white people things and black people should only do black people things’) with progressive language, we are performing a very very poor application of what ‘cultural appropriation’ means. this is troublingly popular in the blogosphere right now and i think we all need to be more critical of what it is we may be saying or implying, even unintentionally.
There is nothing wrong with everyone enjoying each other’s cultures so long as those cultures have been shared.
Eating Chinese food, watching Bollywood movies, going to see Cambodian dancers, or learning to speak Korean so you can watch every K drama in existence is totally fine. The invitation to participate in those things came from within those cultures. The Mexican family that owns the place where I get fajitas wants me to eat fajitas. Their whole business model kind of depends on it, actually.
If you see something from another culture you think you might want to participate in, but you don’t know if that would be disrespectful or appropriative, you can just…ask. Like. A Jewish friend explained what a mezuzah was to me, recently. (It’s the little scroll-thing near their front doors that they touch when they come into their house. It basically means “this is a Jewish household.”)
“Oh, cool,” I said. “Can I touch it? Or is it only for Jewish people?”
“You can touch it or you can not touch it,” she said. “I don’t care.”
“Cool, I’m gonna touch it, then.”
“Cool.”
It’s not hard.
You want to twerk, twerk. I’ve never heard a black person say they didn’t think anybody else should be allowed to twerk. Just that they want us to acknowledge that they invented that shit, not Miley fucking Cyrus.
this is a good post.
Thank you, I was trying to sort this out in my head but you explained it very well.
me n the girls walkin into target headed straight to the clearance bread rack
jerrod how long did it take you to photoshop all that bread
Did it the lazy easy way:
It may be less than stellar, but I have a strict personal rule: “don’t put longer than 30 minutes’ effort into a fetish joke”. The second you hit 30:01, the exposure becomes lethal and the fetish becomes unironic.
– A literary analysis claiming that Jekyll was gay and strongly insinuating that Hyde was his drag persona
- 500 words on how Despacito has changed the American music industry (in Spanish)
- Literally didn’t even write an essay just turned in a picture of that scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail where the cartoon angels are playing the trumpet w their asses
– We were supposed to make a ‘diary’ from the pov of a character in Romeo and Juliet. I chose to write as a gay servant who was hopelessly in love w Romeo and plotting to murder Juliet. It’s entirely handwritten w my left hand and stg every single word is spelled wrong. One page just says ‘today I saw a geese’. There are no fewer than 6 thinly veiled sexual innuendos.
Sorry to be the person to add unsolicited personal stories to posts, but I do very similar things with essays that I’m quite proud of and wanted to share, so here are a few of mine in chronological order:
– the assignment (freshman year) was to write an instructional essay about a mathematical concept we had used that year, “preferably the quadratic formula.” I wrote a 5 paragraph instructional essay on how to add single digit numbers. I received a grade of 105 for creativity and accuracy.
– the assignment was to write a summary of the uber-important grade-wide government simulation as a reporter from a mainstream newspaper. I chose the onion and wrote about the European Union changing its name to the European Disunion because they felt bad about all the anti-brexit voters who got let down
– we were supposed to watch a historical movie and write a compare/contrast essay on how accurate it was to actual historical events. I chose Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter and did not mention vampires AT ALL until the last sentence of the essay.
– in health class we were assigned to write a “letter” essay convincing a teenager not to try drugs. I wrote an impressively sinister 6 paragraphs posing as the FBI agent stalking the teenager filled with lines like “they’re trying to hurt you. don’t ask me how I know- I always know. I’m here even when you can’t sense me. Drugs kill more effectively than the yakuza- and I would know.”
These are incredible
@the-muffin-puffin YOU CAN’T JUST SAY SOMETHING LIKE THAT AND NOT FOLLOW UP
in 4th grade, for our science unit about cell structure, my informational essay was told in the first person, as if someone was narrating their day job, and signed it “Mike O’Chondria”
The best essay I ever graded was an English-language proficiency essay (so basically just, prove you can write in English to a certain degree of skill and know what an essay is) for Texas high school standardized testing. The prompt was “Someone who has had an influence on your life” and the teen in question wrote about his girlfriend, Mary Jane.
The entire essay was one long metaphor for how he loved to smoke pot all day erry day, including downsides like “Sometimes after we hang out for a while I’m so tired I sleep through my alarm” and “I’m always hungry for snacks when we kick it.” It was brilliant and I gave it the top score allowed.
I took a class where, in addition to full-length essays, every other week we wrote a two-page response paper prompted by class discussion. When we read Moby Dick, I started mine with:
Moby Dick is a tale, told perhaps over
ale, of a male who set sail on the tail-end of a trail of a very pale whale. He
would not bail or derail, but nor would he prevail; indeed, he would fail—
wholesale, in a sea-gale!—to curtail that Holy Grail of a pale whale.
But he
railed! Oh, he railed—did not quail or turn tail—‘gainst the heavenly scale of
that mighty white whale. And the fate that it promised, in which doomed was he
to fail…
In conclusion, I should never have
access to a rhyming dictionary.
Seriously though, Moby Dick is a subversion of a classic Greek tragedy…
why are star wars planets more boring than earth and our solar system like sure we’ve seen desert, snow, diff types of forest, beach, lava, rain, but like…
rainbow mountains (peru)
red soil (canada/PEI)
rings (saturn’s if they were on earth)
bioluminescent waves
northern lights (canada)
salt flats (bolivia, where they filmed crait but did NOTHING COOL WITH IT except red dust?? like??? come ON)
and cool fauna like the touch me not or like, you know, the venus flytrap.. and don’t get me started on BUGS like… we have bugs cooler than sw aliens
BASICALLY like???? come on star wars you had one (1) job where are the cool alien species
I KNOW!! I did a report on filming locations in Star Wars last year and just made a list of places that looked so surreal they could make a convincing other planet. You covered some on my list but if I could just add a couple more:
Tsingy di Bemaraha, Madagascar
Zhangye Danxia, China (similar to the Rainbow Mountains in terms of appearance)
Chocolate Hills, Philippines
Giant’s Causeway, Northern Ireland
So many missed opportunities with cool ass things on Earth, Lucasfilms smh…
Earth is effing amazing!
Quebrada de Humahuaca, Argentina
Lake Retba, Senegal
Tepui, Venezuela
Tianzi Mountains, China
these would make amazing Star Wars planets OR fantasy material:
Tsingy du Bemaraha, Madagascar again (but a different part)
(those are razor-sharp, if you were wondering. very little of this area has been explored because YIKES)
Lake Natron, Tanzania
(looks cool, but is alkaline enough to Kill Your Shit)
Lake Baikal, Russia
(the deepest lake in the world, seriously)
and I’ll wrap it up with Son Doong Cave, Vietnam, the largest cave in the entire world.
it puts anything Dagobah has to offer to absolute shame:
(seriously, the largest chamber is 660 feet high. you could jam a fucking skyscraper in there and still lose it)
anyway I really like caves thanks for coming to my ted talk
