A few sites I frequent have put up this site's recent post on how to confront a person who dressed up as an Indian for Hallowe'en. There is plenty that could be said about the site as a whole, but illustrations of points I have previously made always strike me as more fun to point out. Adrienne K casually mentions the point that she's a Ivy League Researcher, and yet she descends immediately to sneering at this guy who is so not cool, and actually does include "eyeroll." Whatever her IQ is, she's still in highschool socially. So I see no point in analysing her unreason further. Her purported reasons are irrelevant, even to her.
I may be overestimating the frequency of this put-sophomores-in-their-place mentality among SJW's, but I'm not making it up.
Speculation: late in my college career, I still toyed with the idea of going on and making my living in theater somehow. As a jack-of-all-theatrical-trades, there weren't any obvious routes to that, but I was then even more arrogant than now, and sure I could pull rabbits out of hats. Yet working with traveling companies coming in and famous guests brought in for lectures and other visiting scholarship, I decided that the farther up one went in theater, the worse people were. I think that may be the case with SJW's as well. Lots of nice-enough people who get a little thrill from looking down on those immoral conservatives, but generally aren't insufferable may be common. The genuinely infuriating people I know in the flesh, who seem to have a streak of real evil underneath their kindness, occur with more regularity among the powerful: psychiatrists, well-paid attorneys*, consultants, administrators.
So we assume that Adrienne K is one who wants to move up on the SJW scale over time, prizing her feelings over those of others.
*The attorneys who represent my patients are generally liberal, but seldom insultingly so. At worst, they speak as if all intelligent people must believe as they do and believe the bumper-sticker criticisms of conservatives. But most of even those don't bring up politics all that often.
Some of your later posts got me to thinking if this could be related to a desire to be seen as Doing. Something. Important.
ReplyDeleteOne of the easiest ways to accomplish that is to take a Something that you are already Doing (or just Are) and make it Important by denigrating what other people are doing.
Vis the death rates for less-educated whites, making things like raising a family, supporting yourself (and others) on your own earnings, supporting a church and/or community used to be considered important, and certainly now seem less so.
Don't know if you read, or read about, science fiction, but there's been a big brouhaha for the last three years over the Hugo awards for best novel and other categories. The SJWs accuse those who don't agree with them as all the usual epithets. Those others mock the SJWs.
ReplyDeleteIt could be that because for most of my life I've lived relatively near to Oklahoma or to Navajo, Ute, Pueblo, Apache reservations in Colorado and New Mexico that I have a bit more sympathy for the disdain at "Cherokee Grandmothers" and a downright disgust of the "Cherokee Princess" gambit. The princess gambit seems to not be in "style" right now, but I remember when it was.
ReplyDeleteI also felt just a little bit sorry for Elizabeth Warren's family gossip (not lore, it was gossip) that led her to think she could claim native American ancestry. That sort of story was spread in my father's family too. The thing is that it wasn't completely untrue -- two of my father's paternal great-aunts did marry into Choctaw families long ago so I have cousins who do have some remote 'native' claims. However, everyone seemed to really WANT my father's mother and grandmother to be Indians -- and it was the "high cheekbones" thing. They weren't and nothing in the genealogy even hinted at it.
My DNA results confirm it -- no native American ancestry. I think it's quite ironic that I now have 2 grandchildren who are 1/16th Cherokee through their father. (Their other grandmother was born and raised on the reservation in Oklahoma.) My very own little Cherokee princesses!
One of the commenters on that site has a valid point about blood percentages, the rolls, and the resulting per capita U.S. government, casino, and oil money.
Yet it greatly annoys me that Ms Southern California Harvard would sneer at the adorably generic Indian costume that my step-sister made for her little girl -- whose grandmother was born on the Choctaw reservation, though raised in horrible poverty and abuse by the "white" side of her family.
There's nothing simple about the relationships, but to try to reduce it to "cultural appropriation" is incredibly simple-minded.