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Friday’s Forum
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42 responses to “Friday’s Forum”
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Here in Baltimore we have a kinda unique institution, BROS, the Baltimore Rock Opera Society, which serves to support and stage locally written rock operas. It finds itself in a media blowup here as the recently hired leader, a white woman, went to burning man and posted pictures of herself with cornrows, and then when she returned, attended an event still sporting those cornrows. She was then fired, apparently for this act of “cultural appropriation”. There was an article yesterday and I was heartened to see that most of the many comments were negative about the firing, regardless of the race of the poster. One of the main opinion writers, a black woman who is not afraid to call out racist or thoughtless behavior in no uncertain terms, has a column up today, and she also thinks the firing was inappropriate
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I’m heartened to see that at least a few people are prepared now to stand up against this kind of nonsense. Cultural appropriation is a cause championed by people who generally have no fucking idea what culture is, or how it works, how it evolves. There are very few pure cultural strands that don’t weave through other cultures. The more you know, the less impressed you are by claims of cultural appropriation.
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FWIW, here’s the comment I added to the column:
There is a certain type of person that gets their only meager pleasure from slamming and demeaning others. Some of them attach themselves to a group and become the Purity Police, because they get a certain amount of justification and approval for their behavior. They latch onto the real goals and values of the group as a kind of mask, but in the process demean those goals and values. And it doesn’t matter the group – liberal, conservative, religious or lay. Every group larger than a handful of people is likely to have one or more in their midst. Platforming them marks an inevitable spiral downward as the people who were there for the original aims of the group quietly walk away, one by one, leaving only negativity.
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This type of thing is precisely what has the typical voter scratching their heads. She was fired over a hairstyle. Not reprimanded, not asked to reconsider, but FIRED.
Where the whole cultural appropriation thing drives me craziest is with food. Historically, food has been heavily influenced by trade, colonization, and migration.
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My 29 year old daughter is a pretty practical person, but she is an absolutist on this stuff. No white person should ever wear something “black”. One sad outcome of this, entirely specific to me: When I was in the Peace Corps in Ghana in the late 80’s living in a tiny remote village, I had a funeral cloth (a very long piece of cloth, black or red or a combo, 2 yards wide that was worn wrapped like a dress or toga) that I wore to funerals because it was expected as a sign of respect. And when I left, the village gave me a beautiful Jeremy cloth and long strips of Kente (strips, because they knew that in the US, people who knew what Kente was didn’t wear it as a cloth, but instead had it sewn into shirts or dresses). Some years later I was invited to a function where I could have worn these, but the cultural appropriation thing had started and I decided not to. I thought it would die down, but it has only gotten worse and worse. Finally, in my last move, I thought that someone should get some use out of these things that had been in my closet for 30 years and donated them to a high school.
Not a drop in the ocean in the grand scheme of things, but sad to me nonetheless
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The “cornrows cultural appropriation” panic is a rather daft American thing, considering plaited and braided hairstyles are quite common traditions in parts of Europe.
It’s rather amusing that no brickbats are ever slung about the adoption of European or American derived dress styles or whatever by persons of other heritages.
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I’ve never really understood the cultural appropriation thing. Cultures all borrow from other cultures, adapt things they borrow, change them, etc.
In pre-1492 Mesoamerica, cocoa was mixed with chiles, corn and other things to make a drink that was bitter and spicy for some reason. Europeans changed it to a sweet food that’s been insanely popular all over the world for centuries. What’s wrong with that?
I suppose one culture can take something from another and claim it as its own, or to have invented it, or even claim the original culture stole it. Kind of what Apple does with tech. That would be wrong.
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Sure. But the adoptions you’re musing about humorously are symbols of cultural victory not cultural defeat. I’m old enough to remember that dashiki suits came into American fashion because young black men didn’t want to have to dress like “old white people.”
I wouldn’t be surprised if some “cultural appropriation” bs flying around now is really an expression of similar victory/defeat fears and perceptions. When assimilation becomes a two-way street, it’s hard to be sure that the right people (taken any way you prefer) are still in control.
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It really has historically varied a lot more than the default modern (and especially modern US) perspective tends to appreciate.
For instance tea, and chinoiserie in general, became fashionable in Britain and France in the late 18th century, when China was still wholly capable of kicking European arses.Meanwhile a good deal of eastern European “folk” culture increasingly became a self-conscious means of asserting pride and identity against the various imperial rulers, Turkish, Russian, or German.
Also, more recently, the presentation of that as being part of a shared “European” identity.For that matter, a similar pattern can be seen in Ireland.
The English, meanwhile, have been cultural magpies since the Middle Ages. And early on as the defeated rather than the victorious.
See also the massive Turkish and Arab/Moorish cultural influence on south-eastern Europe.
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I think “cultural appropriation” is generally nonsense, but there are cases where using someone’s religious or tightly held iconography as fashion is tacky and even offensive. (I’m struggling to find a good example — weddings on plantations come to mind, and accidental SS iconography… I don’t think I would put cornrows in that category, but I don’t know how it is viewed by black folk)
If you represent an organization, you have a responsibility to not be offensive in general (and ideally not tacky).
That said, firing someone without first having the conversation of “oh, honey, I know you just like the pretty such-and-such, twin lightning bolts, or whatever, but…” is insane overreaction. It’s almost always cluelessness rather than mocking.
If they keep it up… then fire them.
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Related real life example: somehow people at one job I was working at were always talking about a “final solution” as in “we need a solution for this dumb technical problem that we won’t be fixing again next year” — they were clueless, stupid, uneducated people (and probably like 2 Nazis). I did disrupt a meeting by asking a senior director to look up the phrase he was using… he was surprised (and Indian, so he had more reason to be that clueless than most people using that phrase there).
I don’t think corn rows are on the level of minimizing the Holocaust, but there is a line, somewhere. (Although if Black folk can make that case for corn rows, I would change my views on that)
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but there are cases where using someone’s religious or tightly held iconography as fashion is tacky and even offensive
I’ll give you the ultimate offensive cultural appropriation – the Nazi swastika. When I lived in Shanghai I was a block up from the Jing An Temple which, as you can imagine, was a big deal in the neighborhood. I was there a couple of months and had gotten used to walking across the street to get a cup of coffee in a beautiful office building (just visible in the picture above). One day as I was leaving the sidewalk and stepping onto the granite walkway around the building I suddenly realized it had a border of swastikas! And then I started looking around and saw swastika iconography everywhere. After a shocked moment I remembered that the Nazis had appropriated it from the Buddhists. Still, I never really got used to seeing it
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I kind of experienced something similar while reading Sagan’s book Comet (spoiler alert, it’s about comets), he speculates on a peculiar comet which was rather prominent and observed in many places, and might have looked like a swastika.
He repeats the word swastika like seven million times in that chapter. I found it rather unpleasant.
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Swastikas are pretty common in Hindu and pre-Islamic Iranian iconography (which is where the Buddhists got it from) as an emblem of the sun and of the universal cycles various.
Nazi cultural appropriation was both absurd and yet based on some common strands in European and Indian cultural history.It was also the badge, once upon a time, of 273 RAF Squadron.
But for non-Hindus or Buddhists to use it now is generally a pretty obvious signifier of malicious intent.
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The Department of Justice is looking into investigating prosecutorial overreach in the Watergate investigations. https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-doj-watergate-nixon-b3060133.html
They must be trying to reassert Nixon’s famous dictum that if the President does it, it is (automatically) legal. Constitutional checks and balances are no longer operative.-
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Wut?
Zombie Roger Stone animates the administration?
One might point out to those poor fools that on that basis the entire American Revolution was a farce.
Return to the embrace of the British Crown, oh ye misguided rebels! Repent, and you may be forgiven your sinful objections to prerogative power!
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This piece by Phillips O’Brien at Substack is pretty scary. The U.S. has invited NATO members to a meeting in Poland to discuss the state of the alliance. They omitted five: Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia, the three states most under threat from Russia; and the UK and France, the two nuclear powers. O’Brien sees it as a divide and conquer, pro-Russia, strategy coupled with an effort to get them to Buy American for weapons.
These omissions left many scratching their heads. These are all strategically crucial states who are vital to the future of NATO. The Baltics are, per capita, some of the biggest spenders in Europe on defense, and the UK and France maintain some of the largest and most effective military forces on the continent. The article that broke the story mentioned the confusion behind the omissions. …
Unfortunately, this confusion is unwarranted. The five selected for omission are, within the context of what the Trump administration is trying to achieve in Europe, rather brutally effective. The Trump administration is trying to keep these five out of this discussion because they are vital to European defense being more united (and less reliant on the USA). The US is trying now to divide European NATO for its own purposes and has already spent months putting its plans into action. This is just the most recent step in an American strategy. As such I thought I would go through US policy using the ends/ways/means paradigm so you can see what the intention is, and why it very well might work if European states do not act intelligently in their own interest.
The Trump administration is too often portrayed as stupid and buffoonish. When it comes to the future of NATO, that is far from the case.
The administration does not want to pull the USA all the way out of NATO, for instance, as some have hypothesized. They want the US influence to keep European states buying US weapons, disrupt European strategic autonomy and keep European states divided and weak. Thus, they will not have the US “leave” NATO and what they are doing is more dangerous. They are keeping the US in NATO and trying to stymie any European wide effort to reframe European security.
The US is using NATO to keep Europe divided and reliant—and ultimately weak. That is the purpose of the whole policy.
O’Brien goes on to note ongoing U. S. support for far-right parties as part of the strategy to keep Europe divided.
Furthermore, it should be noted that the US has recently announced that it will be financially supporting the populist right movements in Europe with financial grants. I kid you not. Both the US and Russia could be soon supporting the same political movements with money (and they might already be doing so).
I see that JD Vance has threatened to withdraw support from NATO if Europeans regulate Musk’s X and such. Talk about unrelated issues.
I find this deeply frightening. And not something a D Congress can easily control.
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It’s rather silly.
Attempting to exclude the UK and France from an effective NATO summit is just daft.
Meanwhile, I assume it includes the markedly US-sceptic Spain, the rather independent minded Meloni government of Italy, and the two surging defence spenders in Europe, Germany and Poland.
Poland is still reflexively US-aligned, for sensible reasons, but the recent US troop deployment games there and in Romania are causing doubts.
While the German government is extremely irritated by Trumpian support for the AfD, and has zero inclination to abandon its alliance with France.As I’ve said before, as European defence spending increases, there will be a growing political incentive to buy from European defence companies, who enjoy a pay-day as much as US ones do.
And can lobby hard to that effect.
This is still more the case if the US is viewed as self-serving and unreliable, if not actively antagonistic.
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I just now came to a decision. It’s been fun for the past month or two, but I’m going to disconnect from my login and return to lurking. (I really am not quite sure how I structured my log in to announce Jax’s passing, so this path in will be lost to the ages.)
Try to remember me fondly, or not at all as your preference lies. As for me, I’ll go back to pondering whether liberalism (classical or otherwise) really opposes attempts at preserving the aristocracy or merely yearns for one less bougie and vulgar as the current one.
TTFN! 😀
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Well, from the English pov, the original liberalism was all about preserving aristocratic liberty from royal authority anyway.
It just mutated over time, as so many things are wont to do.
The Glorious Revolution became a glorious (or perhaps inglorious, depending) evolution.Lurk long and prosper!
😉
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Funny, but true, sadly, story.
In the 70’s, when I was in high school, I wore my hair as an afro. And a big afro. Like Sly Stone, Jimi Hendrix, Jackson 5 afros.
I was a football player, who had a big afro. So a few years ago, I was going to put on my old letterman’s jacket, and wear an afro wig to a Halloween party, but was almost talked out of it by several friends who said it was cultural appropriation. I explained to them that I was going as myself. When I showed them the photo of me as a 17 year old with my big afro, and a photo of me as a 19 year old with my big afro wearing my college football uniform, they finally shut the hell up.
I’ve emailed the photos to Dr Taylor, Kurtz, and WR and texted them to M. Reynolds. They can cofirm the size of the afro.
I tried to go as myself for Halloween, and was accused of cultural appropriation.
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I have an amusing picture, somewhere, of myself in the early 70’s, aged about 15 or 16, with a “afro” in probably similar style.
It perhaps derives from my “Black Irish” ancestry from Donegal
(A lovely girl from Galway once told me “and sure, you look like a Donegal man” 🙂 )
And on my mothers side from dark and curly haired Cymry.
I also believe there’s some Italian-Scots (lol) on the paternal grandmothers line.I liked the look; others at school less so.
Got me into some fights, lol.I cut it shorter in the 80’s and 90’s
And now all I have left is frizzy grey around a bald top.
“Oh what it is to be young.”-
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Yeah, but a lot of them had to be styled that way.
See the “Liverpool perm” in the early 80’s UK
eyeroll
Mine was just: let it grow.
Never got all the way to dreadlocks though.
Some other guys I knew in the 90’s did.
And again, with them, it wasn’t artificial, just how their hair naturally was.
Brits have messy heredity, due to Celts, lol.
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Fortunately for myself, “football” in the American sense was not an option.
Still managed to come second in the inter-school freestyle swimming though, despite the drag ratio.
I still cherish overhearing a couple of girls saying, after getting out of the pool, “he’s quite cute”
But then the inevitable “even if he is a bit of a twerp”.
lol
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@EddieInCA I can confirm!!
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For the first time since their inceptions, the Kennedy Center Honors won’t be held at the Kennedy Center.
I don’t know if this deserves a blog post on Prof. Taylor’s The Dumbest Timeline, but it’s certainly illustrative of it.
