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

[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*.