Tuesday, November 8Forum on Equity and Social Justice in EducationOISE/University of Toronto LibraryGee, I think I'd better go. Otherwise I'll never know how "appropriation" looks, sounds and feels and I won't get to luxuriate in the appropriate guilt that an appropriator (appropriatist?) should feel.
252 Bloor St. W.
5 p.m. – Light refreshments
5:30 p.m. – Program begins
This event will focus on issues surrounding cultural appropriation. Discussion will include teachers, teacher educators, teacher candidates and community members and will focus on what appropriation looks like, sounds like and feels like. Please RSVP to Nina at cusforum@utoronto.ca.
Saturday, November 5, 2011
TDSB Invites You to Feel Appropriately Guilty For Your Part (Shame on You!) in Appropriating Aboriginals' Culture
This TDSB-advertised event, one of many planned for this year's "Aboriginal Education Month," isn't called "White Man Bites; Noble Natives Rock!"--but it could be:
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"Aboriginal" is, of course, a relative term. Early modern man is now thought to have originated in East Africa about 100k to 200k years ago, and spread out from there to occupy the land surface of the earth, displacing (maybe eliminating) the pre-modern hominids that already occupied much of it. The Americas, the last great land mass so occupied, appears to have been reached by humans about 13k years ago, according to the latest interpretation of the evidence by anthropologists. That was all a long time ago.
Why do I bother to relate the foregoing? Because that means that no peoples living in the present are absolute aboriginals: they displaced some previously existing clan-tribe-nation-culture. Life has been tough in many ways for most of mankind's time on earth, not least because of what one set of human beings can and often will do to another, weaker set. But, guess what? I am no more responsible for what one of my Toledo sword-wielding ancestors did to the Arawaks of Cuba or the Mexica of Meso-America than one of the "Mohawk"--I used the dubious quotes because most of the ones I've seen pictured look pretty honkieish to me--Occupiers of whatever Toronto park they're squatting on is for the genocidal displacement of the Hurons. Everybody's distant ancestors were (with, I am sure, some saintly exceptions) SOBs: that's how they survived to pass on their genes.
_I_, _moi_, _yours truly_ has done many regretful things that call for an apology. Descending from the Europeans who conquered the set of indigenes then in place in the Americas is not one of them. It happened, all I can do is to try to shape the world, insofar as I am able, so that similar things are unlikely to happen again.
The whole business of apologizing for one's ancestors is morally bogus, a ploy by collectivists to gain more power over the respectable, productive elements of society, and by parasites to shake down those same elements. They've been doing it for a long time now, since the 1960s in the U. S., because it has worked for them. The rest of us have got to learn to say no to the shakedown attempts, as, of course, Scaramouche and her fellow conservative bloggers have been doing--with significant effect--for some time now. For my own part, I refuse to concede validity of the "white people bad, everyone else good" meme whenever it crops up, e.g., in the workplace. (I've been sporting a full beard now, after an adult lifetime of clean-shaving, since 2005, when an HR type at the hospital in which I worked at that time gave a presentation on cultural sensitivity, which was heavy on the evils of Eurocentrism, as typified by European imperialism . . . whenever I am asked why I grew the beard, I tell the questioner that I did it to celebrate the conquest of the great Amerind empires of Meso- and South America by a few hundred Spaniards; it gives them something to think about.)
Some Aboriginals (Mohawk "warriors") are involved in the appropriation of a public park here in Toronto. They're doing stuff--burning bonfires, illegally occupying parkland--that would get others arrested. Their actions are both inappropriate and appropriation of another sort, though not, of course, the kind that weighs heavily on the consciences of guilt-ridden pedagogues.
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