Leslie: Every time I walk down the street, I need everyone, all the time, to like me so much. It’s exhausting.
Ben: I’ve been nervous for 35 years.
April: Just ‘cause you’re accurate does not mean you’re interesting.
Andy: Ah… numbers. The letters of math.
Ron: I’ll keep all my emotions right here. And then one day, I’ll die.
Ann: Brush your teeth. Now, Boom! Orange Juice! That’s life.
Chris: I try to stay a little optimistic… Even though I will admit, things are getting pretty sticky.
Donna: Aw, I love how you just wear anything.
Tom: It’s 100% easier not to do things than to do them.
Jerry: My vibe is more like, “Hey, you could pour soup in my lap and I’ll probably apologize to you.”
Jean-Ralphio: 2029? That’s not a real year. By 2029, I’ll be drinking moon juice with President Jonathan Taylor Thomas. I’m not gonna be writing you a paper check.
Craig: No! That’s the thing I’m sensitive about!
Orin: Because it’s the one thing you can’t replace.
Perd: One feels like a duck splashing around in all this wet! And when one feels like a duck, one is happy!
Joan: Everyone get outta my way. I just wanna sit here and feed my birds.
as a general rule. if what we’re calling ‘cultural appropriation’ sounds like nazi ideology (i.e. ‘white people should only do white people things and black people should only do black people things’) with progressive language, we are performing a very very poor application of what ‘cultural appropriation’ means. this is troublingly popular in the blogosphere right now and i think we all need to be more critical of what it is we may be saying or implying, even unintentionally.
There is nothing wrong with everyone enjoying each other’s cultures so long as those cultures have been shared.
Eating Chinese food, watching Bollywood movies, going to see Cambodian dancers, or learning to speak Korean so you can watch every K drama in existence is totally fine. The invitation to participate in those things came from within those cultures. The Mexican family that owns the place where I get fajitas wants me to eat fajitas. Their whole business model kind of depends on it, actually.
If you see something from another culture you think you might want to participate in, but you don’t know if that would be disrespectful or appropriative, you can just…ask. Like. A Jewish friend explained what a mezuzah was to me, recently. (It’s the little scroll-thing near their front doors that they touch when they come into their house. It basically means “this is a Jewish household.”)
“Oh, cool,” I said. “Can I touch it? Or is it only for Jewish people?”
“You can touch it or you can not touch it,” she said. “I don’t care.”
“Cool, I’m gonna touch it, then.”
“Cool.”
It’s not hard.
You want to twerk, twerk. I’ve never heard a black person say they didn’t think anybody else should be allowed to twerk. Just that they want us to acknowledge that they invented that shit, not Miley fucking Cyrus.
this is a good post.
Thank you, I was trying to sort this out in my head but you explained it very well.
Thirty minutes before my show, I like to watch somebody else’s show. I usually watch a pop show, like an Ariana Grande show or Whitney Houston. Just to kind of like get my energy up.
the thing i love about t'challa wasn’t just that he took killmonger to see the sunset, it was that he was in tears as he listened to killmonger’s story - that he was arguing that killmonger wouldn’t exist if t'chaka had simply shown compassion, that he understood the black panthers of the past had maybe been wrong. you can feel his empathy for people, and why it makes him the black panther whose story is being told; the most special thing about him isn’t his powers, or his suit, because there were black panthers generations before him. his fighting skill isn’t revolutionary - he gets beaten. the thing that made him special was that he has a big heart. t'challa is a good person. genuinely, a great one.
