Blowhard, Esq. writes:
You ever get the feeling that everyone has gone crazy?
- White girls stealing pumpkin spice is racist cultural appropriation.
- The University of Vermont holds a retreat for whites to
self-flaggelatecritically examine their privilege. - The gender of Star Wars droids MATTERS.
- Cover Girl has a line of SW cosmetics.
- A penetrating legal mind who hasn’t spent two seconds thinking through the logic or consequences of her assertion.
- Another hate crime hoax.
- Ta-Nehisi Coates wins the National Book Award. Whoops, I have no idea how this link wound up here! I assure you that I’m on the Right Side of History in thinking that Coates is one of the greatest intellectuals in American letters and I deeply, sincerely encourage everyone to read his latest Harvard admissions essay. His book is currently assigned in eight NYU classes so you know it must be a classic.
Blowhard, Esq.
Callowman
Sherbrooke
Eddie Pensier
Enzo Nakamura
Epaminondas
Fabrizio del Wrongo
Fenster
Brundle Guy
Glynn Marshes
Paleo Retiree
Atypical Neurotic
Question Lady
Sax von Stroheim
Sir Barken Hyena
The Mistaken
Uncouth Reflections 
So the University of Vermont holds a retreat for only white people.
Racists! 😉
Like how the term ‘LGBTTQQFAGPBDSM’ contains a three-letter term that normally offends such people.
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No, it’s not racist. As explained to me by a close friend (true story) who chooses to subject himself to all-white meetings examining white privilege, the point of whites-only is to free minorities form the burden of having to examine it FOR white people.
“It’s not their responsibility, it’s ours,” said friend.
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Cultural appropriation is such bullshit. Following its logic, an argument like, “Hey non-Europeans, stop appropriating our automotive technology” is perfectly valid. People are gonna borrow good ideas from other cultures and mix them with their own. It’s called being human.
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The Peabody Essex Museum in Salem MA is about to open an exhibition on Native Fashion Now.
http://www.pem.org/exhibitions/180-native_fashion_now
It’s leading with your chin in the current era to do anything like this, given the lose-lose minefields, and the PEM might have to worry a bit in a more general sense that someone will sooner or later start to cluck over the fact that its history and collections go back to the China trade.
But the exhibition is on its way. It has been covered pretty extensively in the local media, sympathetically given our default respect for our betters in the museum world but gingerly nonetheless. I think the media wants to at least reference the sensitivities without too much judging so as to have deniability in the event the place is boycotted, as the kimono show was at the Boston MFA.
The museum website deals with this gingerly as well. For the most part, the show consists of native American designers using their native imagery to fashion high end fashion–a kind of permissible cultural mixing. And the website is quick to point out the tribal affiliations of the artists–hey, Patricia Michaels is Taos Pueblo!
http://www.patriciamichaelsfashion.com/about.html
But the show will also include an actual instance of “real” cultural appropriation: “Also examined is how non-Native designers adopt and translate traditional Native American design motifs in their own work, including Isaac Mizrahi’s now iconic Totem Pole Dress.”
Stay tuned.
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