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| In Rita's Garden on an Autumn Day |
I’m not sure how we got to the
subject of cultural appropriation, but we did. Naturally, it
led to questions concerning the meaning of free speech with
the controversies currently swirling around what opinions one can
express without the wrath of the political correctness police
descending like holy fire.
I’m
not comfortable with that absurd Chief Wahoo
logo nor with the Indians
name of the Cleveland American League baseball team. It didn’t
bother me as a young man so I have to remind myself that the debate
about cultural appropriation is a moving phenomenon; what was OK
once ain’t OK no more! (I suspect that sports teams’
appropriation of Indigenous-culture imagery and naming was never for
any other reason than to associate teams with the mostly-imagined,
legendary fierceness and fiery battle skill in the “braves”
Hollywood helped to create. Not a put-down, in other words. As far as
I know, the name, Cleveland Anabaptists,
wasn’t even considered.)
But I
remember being appalled at
Shakespeare’s creation of Shylock, a Jewish money-lender in The
Merchant of Venice who projects
every anti-Semitic stereotype that ever existed. I have to wonder if
the Lone Ranger’s side-kick, Tonto,
influenced my early childhood conception of the Indigenous of
America. In imagination, I suspect, I always wanted to be the Lone
Ranger . . . with a Tonto as
servant. In 1851, Stephen Foster wrote a song called Swanee
River including the line, “Oh
darkies, how my heart grows weary/Far from the
old folks at home. Can a choir
still sing this song to an inter-racial audience without changing
darkies to—perhaps—brothers?
If
I’m Jewish and I express indignation at the portrayal of a fellow
Jew as a despicable, grasping excuse-for-a-human-being, am I being
“over-sensitive?” If I’d been aboriginal and Tonto’s
portrayal nauseated me, would you have been justified in telling me
to “just get over it already?” Or if I was born with a black
face and I saw white faces blackened in a comic vaudevillian sketch,
would I have reason to be indignant?”
Two
things: Surely the test of whether a culture, an ethnicity, a race or
faith is being exploited for attention or gain rests in the judgment
of the one supposedly being exploited. What price do blond women
eventually have to pay for the gags and jokes that portray them as
having traded their intelligence for sexual availability? How
often and how much can a majority culture appropriate ancient symbols
and artifacts of indigenous faith and culture for decoration, before
they become meaningless for the indigenous people themselves?
And
second: If our writing, our art, our conversation should begin to
lean again on particularly-negative stereotypes of others in order to
attract attention or produce gain, how lacking in imagination would
we have had to become? Identifiable idiosyncrasies, strengths,
weaknesses, perversions, etc. cut across the human race; it’s not
necessary to invoke our prejudices to write or talk about any of
them.
The
invoking of the political correctness
mentality, the sensitivity about cultural/ethnic
appropriation, the debate about
the margins of free speech
are together signs that there lives among us a growing hunger for the
reconciliation of humanity—to each other and to the universe that
is our home. That there should be a backlash against these impulses
is to be expected; the politics of hate all around us a manifestation
of this reaction. In the peaceable kingdom that Christ envisioned,
people don’t use their tongues as swords, they protect one another
from offense and harm, they’ve traded their militancy for
gentleness, their judgment for mercy, their arrogance for humility,
their greed for generosity.
We
long to be born anew . . . and mostly don’t know it. The lamb and
the lion long to sleep together. (That’s a metaphor; real lions
long to eat tender lambs. I myself prefer them with mint jelly and
rosemary. Inter-species appropriation. I’m not proud of my repeated
culinary sinning.)
