San Francisco State investigates confrontation over white student’s dreadlocks

What the hell? What is going on lately? Are we in bizzaro world or something?

San Francisco State investigates confrontation over white student

Why should she care about how someone else wants to wear their hair? This white kid in my college cardio class has dreads, I think they are kind of cool.

 

This is news?

People need to mind their own business. If Mr. Goldstein wants to wear dreadlocks, then more power to him.

 

On the one hand, I look at this and say "So, two college students got into a verbal altercation and it makes international headlines for over a week?"

But, on the other hand, I'm also aware that if the roles were reversed and Mr. Goldstein had been the aggressor there would likely be protests and the same international coverage.

I'm not saying that response would be wrong, per se, but it's very likely. I believe a case can be made that, were the roles reversed, it would be completely justified to stand up and demand action be taken because of systemic failures throughout the country in protecting many, though certainly not all, minorities from unjust behavior.

But I think the current climate of "cultural appropriation" is a bit odd. I get why it was inappropriate and insensitive for our teachers to dress us up as Native Americans and Pilgrims when I was in grade school. I get why it was particularly insensitive the way cartoons portrayed Native Americans and other minorities for decades. But trying to lay exclusive claim to hair styles? Puh-leaze.

 

I'm normally suspicious when I hear someone complain about "political correctness." They're usually just mad because their intolerance isn't being tolerated. But college campuses are rife with this nonsense. A callous, crude, less-than-thoughtful, or even just off-hand comment becomes a "micro-aggression." People who adopt aspects of others' ethnicity (like clothing or hairstyles) are accused of appropriating others' cultures. Professors are often forced to reduce their words to the lowest common denominator of sensitivity--utterly robbing them of their ability to provoke thought and development in their students. (Just grade the assignments....)

What's sad is that the real losers in all of this are the ones doing the complaining--students.

I'm hoping that this is just a phase, that college campuses are taking this to an extreme in order for it to find its true equilibrium in society. But it doesn't feel like that. It feels instead like a generation of kids taught that nothing should offend, upset, bother, or even challenge them in their 1-person universes. I hate to get all generational about it, but it's in tertiary education that we see this potential for generational clash. (Enjoy school, kids, because business owners don't give up their power so easily.)

They're robbing themselves of the critical thinking that makes the university experience so valuable.

 

It happened in the context of that Florida reporter who was walking alongside Trump and getting into his face, who had her arm grabbed by a campaign staffer. That staffer had criminal charges of battery pressed against him. And that story was spun into a national crisis on all of the news networks.

So in the midst of all the national media self-righteousness about 'civility', this happens. I think that's the intellectual context. If you watch the video, it's more than a verbal altercation between two students. This black woman is pushing and grabbing the white guy, trying to prevent him from walking away as she hysterically berates him. She even pulls him down some stairs, which might arguably be dangerous.

Oh man. Not only would he be facing criminal charges, he would be facing one of those kangaroo-court student disciplinary panels and would very likely be expelled from the university. And the media would be going on and on and on about how this is proof how universities are not safe and welcoming places for minorities. (Ironically, whites are a minority at SFSU.)

Never mind that the ancient Celts and Germans braided their hair. The Romans described them as having hair like 'snakes'.

And it's a bit ironic that this black woman was shouting at the white guy in English (a European language) while dressed in Western dress, in a university of all places, an institution of medieval European origin. If any charges of 'cultural appropriation' can be made, I think that most of them could be directed at her.

And what's wrong with cultural appropriation anyway? One of the best features of the cultural 'globalization' that we are seeing is that all of us are exposed to the best features of other societies and civilizations. There are scholars at the very same San Francisco State who are studying Confucian ethics. That's not 'culturally appropriating' from the Chinese, it's an attempt to perhaps learn something valuable from them. The Chinese are certainly doing it themselves, where their burgeoning new cities are sometimes caricatures of out-of-context Western cultural forms. I eat Chinese, Italian and Mexican food all the time, even though I'm none of those ethnicities. I'm not going to apologize for it. I like it.

The demand that people not 'appropriate' from other 'cultures' (are blacks a single culture?) is an implicit admission that other cultures have nothing of value to add to the emerging global mix. There's even a hint of a Nazi-style defense of race/culture purity to it.

 

I get it from an intellectual standpoint. But, the campaign manager of the GOP frontrunner in a presidential election physically assaulting a reporter is kind of a news item. Add to that the fact that Breitbart inexplicably tried to downplay the incident and, essentially, throw their own reporter under the bus and it blew out of control. This, however, involves two students and a two minute encounter. I'm inclined to say that, had it not be recorded, it would have been lost to antiquity minutes later. However, the young woman, evidently unaware it was being recorded, made a statement in that video that sent chills down my spine as it sounded to me as if she were basically telling Goldstein that she was going to (falsely) accuse him of assault.

To be fair, if a white student assaulted a black student and was yelling about how slavery was a good thing (or whatever) then I think outrage would be warranted. If caught on camera I cannot imagine a world in which anyone other than David Duke would defend that sort of nonsense.

If the accusation were more moderated, and un-witnessed, then I think the water gets much murkier.

I think that belies a broader issue; namely that certain things cannot actually be said to be the domain of a single culture and where normal cultural cross-pollination stops and "cultural appropriation" begins. I've seen baklava on the menus of every Greek, Lebanese, Syrian and Israeli restaurant I've ever been in. They couldn't all have invented the stuff. So who appropriated baklava and why is there no outrage? Hummus is in the same boat. And the melitzanosalata I got from the Greek diner down the road tastes an awful lot like the baba ghanouj I bought at a Lebanese restaurant nearby. Anyone who has even an elementary knowledge of Greek culture knows how and why this is possible. And yet I've never seen an anthropologist cry foul over it.

Well, in fairness, she might not be speaking English or wearing western style clothing had her ancestors not been kidnapped and brought to the U.S. as slaves.* Of course, my family was German speaking up until just a few generations ago. Did we appropriate U.S. culture by coming here, identifying as American and speaking the language? So, cultural appropriation and assimilation are an interesting study.

Yeah, I don't know that I'd go as far as saying it's a nazi-style defense if for no other reason than the fact that saying things like that is a sure fire way to devolve the dialogue into an angry pissing contest. But I get your point and I agree with the spirit of what you're saying as illustrated above. Cultures are not static. And when cultures come into contact with other cultures they tend to borrow, adopt or otherwise be influenced by that contact. I'm sure if we discovered vulcans were real there would be some fashion trends incorporating elements of vulcan dress into our own clothing. Or maybe people might start listening to vulcan music. The Vulcans might even decide that they really dig some of our (human) foods. Maybe they'd fall in love with racquetball.

At the end of the day the kid had a hair style. He wasn't wearing a dashiki, talking with an obviously fake and mocking African accent and making really bad rasta jokes. He wasn't mocking a culture. He was simply incorporating elements of another culture into his life. And, as a guy with an interracial family, I don't see that as being a bad thing. In fact, I think if more people were at least open to borrowing something, even intangibles like ideas and concepts, from other cultures we would be better off overall.




*This is an assumption. For all I know she's first generation American and both of her parents emigrated from somewhere in Africa and her family was never enslaved. I make this assumption, not as a statement of her as an individual but more broadly in the context of the overall subject.