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inclination towards appropriation
Wednesday, June 17 2015
My cleanup jihad continued today with a focus on the first and second floors of the house. A deep clean wasn't necessary, but a good vaccuum was.
This evening, Gretchen's friends Jasmine and Maryann from the New York City vegan world came over for dinner. They recently bought a house in Germantown (across the Hudson), but they still have an apartment in the City. This was the first time they'd been to our house. As usual for this time of year, we sat out on the east deck for both snacks and dinner, though the air was still enough for mosquitoes to rise up out of the vegetation (Jasmine described our backyard as looking "like Jurassic Park") to attack us. Dinner featured a "gentle slaw," French onion pie, and asparagus, though there were a couple other courses in there, including two rounds of desserts. We spent a fair amount of time discussing the case of Rachel Dolezal, the woman who has been posing as black (even becoming head of the NAACP in Spokane) even though she was born into a lily white Christian fundamentalist family in Idaho. Evidently she came to black culture through the pathological Christianist adoption compulsion of her parents, who surrounded her with adopted black siblings, one of whom she eventually took custody of (huge Quiverfull families are often deeply dysfunctional). You have to have sympathy for someone raised in such an irrationally abusive hellhole, and becoming "black" might have been Rachel's way to assert an identity completely separate from her crazy parents, even if (in its own way) it was also deeply crazy. Though both Jasmine and Maryann claimed to obsessed with the Dolezal story, they were unaware of two of its most interesting features: the parents' fundamentalist Christianity and Rachel's artistic plagiarism, which is (in my opinion) of a piece with her inclination towards appropriation. Later we would go on to compare and contrast Dolezal's issues with identity to the path taken by Caitlyn Jenner. As Maryann pointed out, if Rachel Dolezal knows "nothing" about being black, couldn't it also be said that Caitlyn Jenner knows "nothing" about being a woman?
The oddest thing about Jasmine and Maryann is their age difference: thirty years. The former is in her mid-30s and the latter is 65. Still, they more common culture than you'd think. For example, they both love music from the golden age of musicals. So there are fewer failures of pop cultural references than might otherwise be the case.
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