I don’t know if someone has posted this upthread. I’m ordering his books today.
“Growing locks, especially for “mainstream” black people such as the author, is therefore an act of resistance and also of affirmation. It is what Ralph Ellison — quoted here by Ashe — would likely call a “freewheeling assault upon the traditional forms of the American aesthetic.””
As if there is one American aesthetic. Such silliness. Pop quiz - which one of these best represents the ideal body shape of the “American aesthetic”? Cindy Crawford, Gwyneth Paltrow, Kim Kardashian? Obviously none of them “own” it, since all 3 coexist simultaneously and successfully in their own spheres.
And some guy growing dreadlocks is not an assault on anything. He may be making an aesthetic choice that the person behind him in the grocery store might not find appealing, but so what? Let’s reserve the word “assault” for, like, when someone picks up a weapon and bashes somebody else. This is the same over the top dramatization as when it’s said that gay marriage is an “assault” on straight marriage.
What is the American archetype? Is it bikinis on the beaches of sunny California, like Brian Wilson sang about? Is it John Cougar Mellencamp’s small town Indiana? Is it the quintessential New England town square with a coating of snow, as in a Rockwell painting? Is it the view of NYC as gritty glamour as depicted in the opening of Saturday Night Live? Is it the good-time trucker and his girlfriend at a bar in the south listening to country music? There IS no one American archetype of anything. So I get a little sick of tired of assumptions that there is one American cuiture, or one white cuiture, that I a) aspire to or b) must adhere to.
*Mr. YOSHINO: First of all, Farai, I just want to underscore what you’ve said, which is that the demand to cover is not just something that’s specific to gay people, but it’s something that all civil rights groups confront. And in fact, it’s something that all Americans confront. So here I’m thinking about, as you say, the African American woman who is told that she can’t wear cornrows or dreadlocks to work, or the Latina who is told that she can’t speak Spanish in her English-only workplace.
I’m thinking also about women who are told to quote, unquote, “play like men at work.” And so what we really see here is that all of these groups, even though they are ostensibly protected under American civil rights laws, have yet to be protected against covering demands as such. And so what I advocate in the book is that if the employer says, well, you as an African American woman have to take out your cornrows, this was a 1981 case, then at a minimum I would want the employer to have to state why that would be the case. *
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5292076
eta: I am editing to delete my personal thoughts because I have not lived this. At this point I really try to listen but it continues to be difficult.
“So here I’m thinking about, as you say, the African American woman who is told that she can’t wear cornrows or dreadlocks to work, or the Latina who is told that she can’t speak Spanish in her English-only workplace.”
I think once you start talking employment, the goalposts are shifting. We are no longer talking about cultural appropriation. Employers do have the right to “shape” the workplace a certain way - for example, I can require you to cover your hair on a factory floor, I can dictate how you answer the phone and in what language you conduct business in, I can dictate you wear a certain level of dress (no jeans or sneakers in the office). Not being a lawyer, of course, I don’t know where it begins and ends.
That’s an interesting article–written in 2011. Although he describes the “particular tribe of America” as believing that white America “at all turns plotted our fall,” the rest of the article suggests a move away from that narrow attitude. However, I have to say that in “Between the World and Me,” written in 2015, it’s back. Did the outlook for racial harmony get worse in America between 2011 and 2015? I think it did, in some important ways, with the focus on incidents involving the police and young black men. Ideological polarization also (in my opinion) made it worse as well–although one thing Coates doesn’t really acknowledge enough is that plenty of white people are on the same side of the ideological pole as he is.
I’m a huge fan. His Atlantic articles (as well as the book) have been revelatory to me.
http://www.elle.com/culture/books/a29572/what-i-learned-from-reading-ta-nehisi-coates/
Some stuff you cannot makeup.
The question is when will the KKK show up and accuse the priest of appropriating their dress code because the KKK might believe they had white robes first? Just like people erroneously believe Rastafarians had dreads first and own their usage.
Love the title of the piece: “Proof that colleges are making people stupid.” I think this aptly applies to the female in the video discussed in this post as well.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2016/04/proof-that-colleges-are-making-people-stupid.php
Has it not occurred to people that this “privilege” meme that is all the rage is just teaching how to segregate each other in another way?
Look at the image of the form in the article. This is not teaching anything constructive; this is simply making other kids jealous of others. And I bet, there are kids who are friends who never cared what their friends have and just liked them because they were nice and fun to be around, until being taught this stuff. And the result, the kids create segregation in relating to their friends.
I find it interesting that people who are supposedly all about coming together are the most adamant of making sure kids are viewing each other in the most segregated ways possible - by race, by class, by money, by clothes, by culture, by hairstyle, literally by every difference under the sun.
Is this not what the female in the video that started this thread is doing? She is segregating just like she was taught to do. And interestingly, she will wonder why certain people do not want to deal with her and it will never occur to her that the reason is she is blaming other students for things they are not even doing or had nothing to do with. Very misguided and can only lead to a selectively narrow life experience.
The parents were right to blow a hole through this stuff.
http://www.live5news.com/story/31655316/parents-complain-after-teacher-hands-out-privilege-survey
Sure. Not many white kids know what it’s like to be followed around a store or be in a car with parents pulled over frequently, or get, as my friends call it, “the talk” about dealing with police so you don’t get shot, or live in a certain area because housing was denied to them in a better area, or a myriad of other things.
I think most black kids know all this.
But dreadlocks have zero to do with it.
(post 178) I would like to ask the young woman who posted the warning whether she would be more afraid of a priest or a KKK member with a whip.
I wonder whether in a place where one group, which is in the minority elsewhere, is in the majority and holds the levers of power in that place, that group could be considered racist in the specific context. There are places where non-white people hold the power and, frankly, there are places where non-white people hold a lot of power under threat of violence, rather than institutional power, and I would say that can be racist. I totally agree that the first prong of racism is acting on the belief that one’s own race is superior, but I also think that the power to do something about it is where it rises to the level of actual racism, instead of just being a jerk.
I also find it interesting to see the demarcation being “white” versus “non-white” because there are people who are “white” in terms of visual appearance who are African American, Hispanic, Asian, whatever. I’ve posted before about a friend of my son’s whose family was the victim of one of the most publicized racial crimes in this area. Totally a black family culturally, religiously, socially. But the mom is “white” and the daughter is blond and blue eyed, but has worn dreads at various times in her life. So is she culturally appropriating?
" So potent was this hate that even we, the despised, were enlisted into its cause. So we bleached our skin, jobbed our noses, and relaxed our hair."
I wonder why there was never a similar outcry among Jews who often got nose jobs as well. It’s interesting how they seemed to see it more of a personal aesthetic where they desired improvement than a “we are despised by society.” Why having that nose wasn’t seen as part of “Jewish culture” the way that big lips / big bottoms were perceived as part of “black culture” as discussed up thread. It’s interesting how it morphs.
IDK if that’s really true PG.
http://forward.com/culture/322317/how-the-all-american-nose-job-got-a-makeover/#ixzz454BwNlmr
https://medium.com/the-archipelago/i-got-a-nose-job-to-escape-my-past-acb34839d612#.8ak18bs5q
https://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/shofar/v025/25.4schrank.html
http://www.jewishjournal.com/articles/item/making_the_cut_20050121
http://jezebel.com/5916532/the-decline-of-the-jewish-girl-nose-job
I am really interested in your thoughts on this, PG. Lots of folks, including academics, seem to have explored the idea.
eta: crosspost
The last link that alh posted actually makes the point I wanted to make. Ok, fine, the definition of beauty USED to be one thing - but now the definition of beauty is seen to encompass a lot of different things, and people celebrate different inherent aspects of themselves, whether it’s a plain nose or “ethnic” one, a small bottom or a big one, long straight hair, Afros or dreadlocks, all different body shapes, different colors of skin, etc. This is a GOOD thing compared to years ago. So this new whining about how “Big lips used to be seen as ugly but now Kylie Jenner’s lips are big and that’s ok!” misses the point completely, IMO. Society’s standards of beauty are more individual now - celebrate your own style and look. There IS no one standard bearer any more.
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This thread is still … dreadful.
I’m black and I absolutely LOVE this cultural appropriation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pL2B6qv0m2I&nohtml5=False Am I missing something??
^^ Thanks for sharing; that gospel group is great.
Ah, you must have missed out on the grievance culture education meme, which is good thing for you, as life will be much more enjoyable. And better yet, you will not be prone to act like a bully like the female in the video which started this thread.
Specifically, what you missed is the critical race theory gobbledygook spread via academia that only white people can appropriate. Therefore, I surmise that this video would be seen as two oppressed, underprivileged (rememberer only white people can have privilege) minorities sharing culture. Note this construct requires saying that Koreans are somehow held back by white people even though they are in their own country doing this.
And people wonder why when serious employes see this type of education and such degrees on race theory, we run the other way. This type of education makes students, such as the one’s at Harvard, think a soda machine built in Israel is an attack on Arab students in the Harvard dining hall.
I am not changing the subject, but it is the exact same meme that we must segregate and see/filter everything (clothes, food, buildings etc.) through the lens of of race that makes the female and Harvard student think such silly things, That strikes me as an exhausting and depressing way to live one’s life, as well as a good way to get yourself in trouble like the female in the initial video probably is.