People keep telling me its pointless. So much of what I spend my time doing looks like futile fluff on fb. This is also known as pissing in the wind, but I refuse to believe its all for naught. I will publicly own up to finding some white privilege filters stuck to my glasses many, many times in my life - and it shocked the shit out of me every time I finally noticed they were there. Nearly all of my bias came from sheer geographic and cultural isolation that just didnt offer ANY experience with cultures outside that of Scandinavian/Czech/Polish/German settlers farming the plains of Kansas. aka Immigrants. But white ones. I invite and encourage and maybe even demand that you do the same and find other people that can show you how filmy your glasses actually are. Here is Cultural Awakening #1, and a theme song for the occasion: The Nutsch Family Summer Vacation of the mid 80s was spent planting pine trees in the mountains of Colorado and New Mexico. My mom tried to prepare us before we headed to the second site in NM, knowing our only experience with Indians (Native Americans) came from vintage books, some western movies, and whatever that one solitary television channel had brought us. She said, “Indians are not how they are in the movies, they are just like us, they wear the same clothes as we do, and go to school and live in houses and work jobs like everyone else. They don’t ride around on horses and shoot bows and arrows and live in teepees and grind corn with rocks.” She had to be cringing at the high rate of probability that her posse of overly intelligent and highly verbal children would say or ask something incredibly embarrassing. The Nutsch kids filed the information away, and were ready to meet the Natives without betraying just how very insulated our experience was. We arrive at the camp site, and are unloading our car, when the tree planters started coming in from the mountain for dinner at the cook tent. They appeared over the small hill to the west, and right there, in front of our big-as-dinner plate eyes, came a half dozen Native American men, shirtless, with blowing in the wind hair down to their waist - just like mine and my sister’s except shiny and black, and everyone last one was carrying their sharp field tool with a handle as long as a spear. Those Indians walked right up to the four little white kids from the prairie, and one held his palm up, and said “How. As our mouths hung open in astonishment and bewildered confusion, they moved on past us - then broke out into hysterical laughter. So did my Mom. I was 10 years old, and have been madly in love with Native American Indians ever since, and have tried to absorb as much as I can about the nature of that cultural experience in this country. Mostly because my parents led the way in modeling the behavior, and showed real sensitivity in trying to train us to see people, not color and stereotypes. Are you doing the same for your kids? Or are you talking about Michael Brown as a thug, and a thief? Check yourself...Cultural Awakening #2 coming up as fast as I can bang it out. https://youtube/watch?v=EZDBXm11WXY
Posted on: Tue, 25 Nov 2014 16:42:05 +0000
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