The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #158332 Message #3745526
Posted By: wysiwyg
20-Oct-15 - 06:08 PM
Thread Name: In defence of cultural appropriation
Subject: RE: In defence of cultural appropriation
Richard, it's not up to us (us white folks) to judge how a people torn from their homeland and original cultures go about reclaiming their heritage the best way they can see how to do it. I (and many others) don't think it's so different from Jewish Holocaust survivors choosing to learn Hebrew to re-create their culture in the land of their forebears.
The Africans stolen from their villages to satisfy the greed of European-heritage people originally had as many languages as the surviving Jews had among them when they went "home." Their descendants find ANY way of rebuilding a sense of oneness with Mother Africa deeply meaningful, and that's about them-- not about how others view it from outside that experience. (White folks are so often so eager to say that our way of seeing them is better than their way of seeing themselves!) How often do you surrender your agency to someone else's view of what you should be or do?
The African term for the experience parallel to the Jewish genocide we now call the Holocaust is 'The Maafa.'
~Susan