The Wallflower Report

So I didn’t get to post anything the last couple of days. Apparently Paris ran out of things to be offended about in real life so she decided to look on the internet. Luckily for her it didn’t take very long for her to find something. Unluckily for everybody else who maybe wanted to do some browsing or update their blogs or whatever she kept finding more and more.

Thank God she finally got to the point where she was too pissed off to even look at the screen any more. This was caused by something called “appropriation”.

According to my friend the dictionary, “appropriation” means “to cause to die or lose consciousness by impairing normal breathing, as by gas or other noxious agents; choke; suffocate; smother.” But Paris was using it what she calls the “sociamalogical sense”, which means when somebody who is White And Privileged takes bits and pieces from other people’s cultures because they think they’re cool or something. This is, she tells me, a Very Bad Thing.

I asked her if she meant like when we went to the world culture fair and tried all the different foods and she was like no that isn’t the same thing, because we were appreciating other cultures and that’s different from appropriating. She said it was more like when people act like cultural heritage is a commodity to be bought and sold. So I’m like, oh, I know what you’re talking about. Like the silk fans with the Chinese writing she bought for her walls and the folding screens she uses as walls for her loft.

She says that isn’t appropriation either, though.

She tried to tell me that it’s more like when white kids act like they’re really into rap or the blues or other music that isn’t “theirs”, and that made it a little bit easier to understand. Because like she also has all these “World Sound” CDs of music from different

Oh, she’s looking over my shoulder and she says that her CDs aren’t appropriation, either. Guess I’m not getting it. Now she’s telling me that it’s got something to do with how big Japanese music and video games and movies are with people who’ve never been to Japan and didn’t have any interest in Japanese culture until it became cool. I was pretty sure it was the Japanese that were sending their games and movies over here in the first place but apparently people on the internet are just going over there and stealing them. I guess I can agree that’s bad.

And now I feel kind of bad because I’m guilty of appropriation, too. I mean I eat at Outback Steakhouse all the time and I don’t have a drop of Australian blood. Well, I mean, I’m still like waiting on the results of the DNA test on the stinger I bought on eBay but I have a feeling I got ripped off there so for now I’ll say I don’t have any. And yet once a month or more if I can I’m in there, plopping down somebody’s money trying to buy a piece of a land I’ve never even visited.

I mean okay, I know you can’t get real Alice Springs Chicken outside of Alice Springs, and it probably isn’t an Ayers Rock Lobster if it wasn’t pulled off of Ayers Rock (or Subaru as the natives call it) but at the same time I think we have to recognize the important role Outback Steakhouse plays in exposing us to another culture and maybe even preserving their vanishing beliefs. Like when Foster’s sponsored that program where they had the thirty second educational spots on the Australian language. That has value.

So I guess you have to sort of strike a balance between appreciating and appropriating, right? You have to keep an open mind and be willing to learn about and experience other cultures without trying to lay claim to them.

Like when I go to Outback and the waitress goes, “Who had the the Boomerang Shrimp?”, I’m going to stop saying “That’s mine.”, and start saying, “I will be appreciating that this evening.”

~Ariella Rasputin Wallflower

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 18th, 2008 at 12:48 pm and is filed under Miss... Mics... Assorted. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.