It was a weird Thanksgiving. Amidst the turkey orgy and the soon-to-follow stupor it caused, with a semi-awake overdose of football for dessert, I started worrying about cultural appropriation.
That term describes one of the latest things that makes certain people get really, really angry. It is defined as people taking or adopting aspects of a culture that is not their own, such as white people wearing their hair in corn rows or trying to rap.
Apparently there is a new squad of Culture Police trying to snuff this out.
It got in the news last week when the University of Ottawa student government (Don’t these things always start at some university?) pressured a yoga instructor to cancel her class because she was not from India, the birthplace of yoga.
This was followed by a story that a Canadian retailer had pulled a sweater off the racks that featured a “stolen” sacred Inuit Indian design. Â
Until last week, I had blissfully lived all this time without ever hearing the phrase. Damn, I thought, one more minefield to navigate in my declining years. Or, brightening up a tad, I could make lemonade when handed this lemon and write a mocking column about it.
What the heck: Let’s go for Door No. 2.
All that turkey we had eaten was probably culturally appropriative. If we are to believe the long-ago Pilgrims’ PR machine, it was the native Americans, also called Indians, who introduced the invaders to turkey and saved their sorry, freezing hides that first winter in America. Same thing with yams and pumpkin pie. According to latest dictates of the Thought Police, we had no right to appropriate those items for our own feast.
Fleeing the dining room, we collapsed into our chairs for the football fest. Luckily, the Washington Redskins were not playing, but there were games featuring the Dallas Cowboys, who at least appropriated an American institution for their nickname. They were playing the Carolina Panthers.
The other games featured mostly critter names – Lions, Eagles and Bears. Safe territory so far, at least until the crazed, animal rights people check in.
Soon a play occurred that made me uncomfortable. I should have gotten “a trigger warning.”
That is the other new phrase I learned recently, again undoubtedly having originated at some university. A trigger warning is something that is supposed to be issued in case a topic or action is about to be introduced that might make some people feel uncomfortable or bad about themselves.
For example, if a class discussion is about American commerce, using phrases such as “land of opportunity” or “you can be anything you want to be” might make some people feel bad if things haven’t worked out well for them or their families. Teachers are supposed to avoid such phrases, issue a trigger warning, then tiptoe into the subject. You can’t be too careful, or too sensitive, apparently.
Back at the football game, one of the teams was about to attempt a field goal. It sent in its kicker, the typical skinny white guy who handles that specialized job. He backed up from the place where the ball was to be spotted, then moved to the left a few steps.
As all of his skinny white American cohorts do, he was getting ready to attempt a soccer-style kick.
Trying to get into the spirit of cultural appropriation, I thought, “This is not right!” Who invented soccer? Surely, it was someone in Europe or South America. What business does this skinny white American have in simulating that kick?
What was worse, he made it!
I kicked off my slippers in disgust. When we were kids, they were called moccasins. Uh, oh.
Life is so much more complicated now. I thought my Catholic upbringing had infused a more-than-healthy share of guilt, surely enough for one lifetime. It turns out the nuns and priests of that era were pikers compared with today’s university eggheads and other wingnuts who dream up or embrace stuff like cultural appropriation and trigger warnings.
Back then, those fine religious folk were concerned only with pounding guilt into Catholics. All the rest were going to hell anyway, so it didn’t matter for them.
Today’s self-appointed guilt dealers have a much bigger tent. In the name of protecting the feelings of every aggrieved splinter group, they want everyone else to feel bad about pretty much everything they do, say, buy, wear, eat or entertain themselves with.
They have ready markets, too, in the budding industries of Anger, Outrage and Taking Offense. It’s getting pretty hard to utter two sentences in a row without being called out for Cultural Insensitivity or some other capital crime.
I can’t figure out who commissioned all these Offense Officers, or what made them into the humorless, self-important, finger-wagging class snitches that they are. I also wonder why anyone with half a brain listens to them, except for comic relief.
Still, the conflict they create is so stressful – I’m thinking about taking up yoga.
