#first gen problems

Most of the time a white/European person bring a CA convos to some personal from any minor culture, it's not because they want to learn more about the world or how cultural theft actually harms people. They want validation. They want their viewpoint about cultures or CA to be validated. They don't think about CA outside of their experience. To them, CA is defined only by the narrow scope of their experience, and biased by a very human determination not to have an undesirable trait.

To be fair, I have had scholarly conversations with people about this. These folks are typically well-traveled people, from a minority culture themselves, or have some other reason to be aware of how colonization as a mindset works.

But here's what happens. These people want validation for being a modern day colonizer--desiring the ability to look at, enter, and take whatever they admire from a foreign culture and wear it as their own, benefit from it themselves without impunity, and call any or all of those actions respect. They enter the conversation tense, nervous and ultimately, no matter how they are treated, won't get their viewpoint validated. Worse yet, their fear is confirmed. They participate in a Bad Thing (tm). So it gets emotional. Instead of realizing they're feeling guilt and disappointment in self, instead of realizing it is exceedingly hard to unlearn the mind fuck that is today's society, instead of realizing this person is a friend, or even.. just a person, they fall back on their position of power, like a mother's skirt. And this, this is the point that breaks friendhsips, people. This is the point that perpetuates CA and inequalities and all the shit they are trying to progress past.

They'll attack the friend to whom they brought the conversation. Discredit their viewpoint or otherwise dismiss or devalue the argument that invalidated their viewpoint and hurt their feelings. All because they didn't have the conversation they thought they wanted to have.

And in that action, they damage a person far more than they think they can. They enact the same forced power that the cruelest colonizers use. They decide the rules of what is legitimate and what isn't, without fact, without research. God that shit fucking cuts, too.

I have been told that I don't know what I'm talking about....about things from my own culture. Esoteric shit I grew up with. I've been told that I make people feel small and ignorant because they don't like hearing that their viewpoint isn't fair or just. (I'm seasoned at this convo, and I'm hyper sensitive, and plus I'm a black woman so the number of times I've been called a bitch or an asshole when I'm 100% kind is another rant all in itself. Point is, that reaction...ain't me.) I've been told that my definition of cultural appropriation is wrong, too broad, too inclusive. Allllllll these defensive behaviors right? Attack attack attack because their emotion is too tied to the need to be ok, over the need to learn.

My advice to people from minority cultures: don't engage this conversation. If you feel it coming up or you're asked point blank, ask them what their definiton of CA is, what they know about it and how they've learned about it. If they haven't done due diligence, they're not having a conversation about bindis or dreadlocks or yoga, they're having a conversation about their egos and it's probably not worth the blood pressure. That friend will expose some ugly shit if you continue, and that's on you. Change the subject, the education is out there. It doesn't have to come from you.

To my white/European people, Google. Is your friend. But do it like a scholar. Read about where there term comes from, what the intellectual discussions are. No forums. No personal websites. Books. Sociology books. Actual research. But if you've read this far and you're not coming up with some pithy remark about how I don't know shit, or thinking how I must actually be a bitch and that's why this conversation is hard for me, you probably don't need to.