Mine! All Mine!

The issue of cultural (mis)appropriation came up very briefly in the discussion in my online class for which I’m writing this blog and I have a couple thoughts:

The first is how easy it is (for myself too!) to get out the thesaurus whenever there’s some uneasy about potentially unethical behavior. Cultural appropriation is itself a rather euphemistic term. It definitely sounds more acceptable than, say, stealing. Or cultural theft or rape or exploitation, for example. I think there are a lot of different levels of complicated realities going on when we (especially if ‘we’ come from a dominant cultural location) are trying to figure out how to engage and learn from all the cool traditions in our world. So I’m not saying it’s all necessarily 100 % exploitative, mind you.

But some of it is, right? In Unitarian Universalism we talk a lot about sharing religious and cultural resources. Sometimes I think this is a good term for considering our work and its relationship(s) to other collective groups. Yet sometimes I feel like we’re skirting a less pleasant truth, which is one about power and agency and who has it and how that impacts who feels free to use or share what. Even though words are important, I want to hang onto the feeling that this is life and death stuff and not a contest about nuanced vocabulary.

When this came up as an aside in our class discussion, it called to mind how disappointed I’ve been to find such a low functioning conversation about these issues at Starr King School. A couple years ago I took an amazing class from a fellow student of mine, Carol Bodeau. She’s this great teacher and activist who offered a class called Paganism in a UU Context. I sort of stumbled into the course in a less intentional way than how I usually pick classes and was totally welcomed and educated. We should all be so lucky!

ANYWAY, in Carol’s class we talked some about what is means for primarily white, non-indigenous folks, like many of those who make up and define UU communities, to get all enamored with the stylish depth of different Native American ritual practices. That conversation may have been the saddest and angriest I’ve been in a class at seminary. We acknowledged that there was this concept that some people held and believed in of cultural appropriation and then debated whether or not it was real and existed. I couldn’t believe that we actually arguing about whether or not power hierarchies and colonial gaze and imperialism was real! Or, if it was real, whether or not it impacted how we dealt with our own and others’ cultures.

It’s a whole other conversation to start from a perspective of accepting the reality of people sometimes not having control over their cultures’ destinies and having questions about when that is and/or isn’t going on in a particular worship service or ideology or whatever. But if we can’t even agree that occasionally dominant cultures take what isn’t quite theirs, then we’ll never get to a place where we can have that deeper conversation. And I want to!