A last note about the thing

[ritaxis]

A followup to this post  What I forgot to point out is that, by declaring that my link was what she wanted, the poster killed the thread, so that if I had wanted to discuss it further, I couldn't, since "found" threads are locked and moved to a separate area.

Not that it would have been good form to continue the discussion in that corner of the forum anyway.

Comments

[trinker.livejournal.com]

...incidentally, this is why I don't bother to soft-pedal in corners where I don't have an established relationship that I'm trying to preserve. Putting things in "best case scenario, maybe you just need to be informed" tends to result in the sort of thing you experienced. IME, and not a judgment on you.

Feh on the OP.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

I think I actually did hit the right note. I wasn't intending to go on an extended educational crusade in any case. That meant that everything I wanted to do had to be in one post, and it had to be the kind of post that bystanders could read and think about and get somethign from (at least one person did, I think). It wasn't the time and place for a theater of rage.

And, really, given my relationship to the subject, a theater of rage response would have been kind of disreputable. My relationship is iffier than no relationship, after all. I'm not the white girl who just got religion on the subject. I'm not an innocent here. Appropriation is my world. I have nothing I have not appropriated from somewhere: if it was not for appropriation, I'd have nothing to eat, nothing to listen to, and no thoughts to think. However, there is a distinct difference, which I don't entirely know how to define, but which I think I can model.


This kind of forum has a separate place for off-topic and to[pical discussions, but I never go to those sections because I find the discussion too callow and shallow. And it seems kind of forced to have much of a political discussion with people with whom I usually just talk about how many sims can get on a lot at once and where that beautiful blue floortile originally came from.

[trinker.livejournal.com]

Theater of rage is not what I meant, and I'm slightly irked/hurt that this is the way you characterized a "not-soft-pedal" approach.

I think there's a large spectrum of possible response ... Let's call it a 0-100 between "enthusiastic support of the problematic" all the way to "towering calls for the annihilation of the perpetrator".

With "soft pedal" being somewhere in the middle, *along with* "more pointed, not nearly as solicitous of tender feelings of 'perpetrator' and clearly siding with the more-disprivileged" (for which I don't have a good short expression).

I think a lot of people flounce when problematic is pointed out, and I'm coming more and more to "neutralizing the issue too much seems to have no effect". (Or, "hewing to the idea of not triggering 'the tone argument' seems to result in watering things down to the point of ignorability".)

As far as I'm not an innocent here. Appropriation is my world. I have nothing I have not appropriated from somewhere: if it was not for appropriation, I'd have nothing to eat, nothing to listen to, and no thoughts to think.

Maybe I'm misreading you, but it looks to me like what you wrote falls under the major reason why I'm troubled by the simplistic approach to "appropriation" that I've been seeing. I think there's a *huge* difference between "o hai I learned a littul about ur cultur im an expert mor than u naow bcuz im from the privileged group!" and "I didn't grow up listening to this, but I appreciate the way it sounds". Flattening those two suggests that there is no difference, and that there can be no calling out problematic appropriation, because we all do it unless we hew strictly to a narrow culture of heritage.

That said...I understand all too well about staying out of many "discussion" areas because of the level of discourse. And maybe for the sims group, what you did *is* about as pointed as feasible - not my net.culture, not my judgment.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I've been thinking about this on several tracks at once. One of the things I was thinking about is how this other thing I brought up and you did not, the theater of rage, is in fact useful at times, and I considered deploying it there, so I was actually responding to my own thoughts there, not yours. Probably I was responding to my own thoughts all the way down the line, I think, now that I see that I find myself agreeing with almost everything you're saying here.

I want to stay mostly around 60-75 on that scale, with occasional dips to 40. I don't know how to calibrate, though. I think that I was more likely around 50. I do think that deferring to the tone argument is a way to let the eliminationists and apologists win, too: I wasn't so much worried about whether someone would call me on my tone but whether anybody would get what I was trying to tell them. Not necessarily that child, though it would have been nice, but anybody at all reading the exchange.

Like you, I've been troubled by the simplistic discussion of appropriation that has been taking place. I want to say to some people, wait, don't you have a right to Hermes and Prometheus simply by virtue of being human? So doesn't that person over there have a right to Iktomi and Coyote (for example, or Anansi, or whatever)? But there's clearly something else, something people do that is based on privilege and arrogance and ignorance, and that's what the sims child was doing.

The thing I want to say about having no innocence in this, and that I mean when I also say at times that I have no standing, is another thing that is possibly not about this issue at all but which gets triggered for me when this issue comes up. This (http://www.geocities.ws/lakota_culture/luis.html) is my father. Where other people can claim ethnicities or nationalities or communities -- I'm an anthro-revolutionary or some damned thing by heritage. And honestly, that's pretty problematic. Right now, I largely make a living off of being "understanding" about other people's cultures. I'm practically what we used to call a "poverty pimp." (except I'm not. Except I can't exactly explain why I'm not. Because I'm actually a teacher? I don't know).

Anyway, this is too complicated for me. But the thing that started this off seems pretty simple now that I've veered off into thinking about these other things.

Do I make any sense at all?

[trinker.livejournal.com]

Oh my. Yes, that was very clear. Thank you.

That was an *astonishing* literal eye-opener of a Web page. (I read some other bios via Google. I understand what you meant about appropriation on a personal level for you quite a lot better now. Complicated.)

I see the problem with 50 is that it's an awful lot like 49. But others will see 55 as the same thing as 100. I've been pondering the line between "if you have to have the message massaged..." vs. all the training and experience I have in management, where yes, packaging critique can make a huge difference. I think it comes down to things like hierarchy and privilege and willingness-to-engage. (And all things which English with its faux egalitarianism makes difficult to discuss.)

The Prometheus vs. Anansi disparity seems to me to be the same issue. The view of Greeks and Romans is civilization and universality; Caribbean/African mythology is viewed as exotic and revealing of the Other. My current theory on this is that we need to demote Western values to being not-universal, but white/Western/colonial, and place it within a range of diversity, rather than approaching things as default/Other-diverse. (I feel that the current paradigm is "diversity = including those dark people as if they were equals". *shudder*.