Nostaglic InRANTation: Stop Co-opting My Culture!

STOP CO-OPTING MY CULTURE!!!
Current mood: aggravated
Category: Life

to serve your desires of journalistic career advancement or to add an avant-garde twist to your sense of fashion (if I see another white chick outfitted in an ode to 80s garb-crushed black flat boots with black tights and an oversized amorphous sweater rocking a Palestinian kuffiyah as a scraf-I’m going to “ka-sar” some “ras”!!!!)

One of the most insulting things happened to me today in my Anthropology Principles class.

Scene:

An overly-crowded classroom of underwhelmed anthro grad students waiting for their caffeine jolt to kick watch the clock tick and tock in the absence of substantive material to write. There’s an obvious disconnect between the people’s interest and the topic at hand. As such, I’m taking every opportunity to catch up on my email replies and research on Malcolm. However, something did momentarily tear me away from myspace profile browsing practices.

In a discussion concerning the difference between interpretation and language, an older Mary Quck Gates-type (okay, only two people at most reading this blog will understand this reference, but the correlation is so pricelessly accurate it’s worth sacrificing some level of lucidity) chimed in with a “relevant” example to the discussion at hand.
She spouted off a phrase in Arabic which I initially couldn’t understand because of the barbaric butchering job her completely off-the mark accent produced. As such, I asked her to repeat herself. And instead of doing that, she decided to translate it for me. And yes, her pronouncement and translation were both off. She spoke and translated it just the way I would expect a white-breed and bread cultural elitist of an American to do…with a false sense of authority and understanding. And I don’t expect her to have a hold of the Arabic language comparable to let’s say a native citizen who studies medicine at a Syrian university (I say this because Syria is one of the only countries in the Middle East where Medicine is taught in Modern Standard Arabic-imagine the added challenge of learning medicine!!!), but to speak with an heir of authority (and consequently assume an interpretative authority) just because you are on your second year of Arabic study in a university, that is precisely where one’s comments come off as exceedingly patronizing.

More than my obvious need to expel the nefarious energy brewing inside of me, I wanted to know what people thought of perhaps my overly-culturally sensitive take on this. To be honest, my sensitivity levels have lately been off the richter scale-I mean I did almost cry in class on Monday at the realization of the futility in our discussion (and perhaps of my choice of academic study) and I have been girlishly touched by my father string of text message updates. On a side not, if I hear someone preface any discussion of power with, “Well, taking the Foucauldian notion of discipline into account…” I will mos definitely tear out my hair and resume my rampage of “ka-sar”-ing “ras”-es

Fin

Currently listening : Follow the Leader By Eric B. & Rakim Release date: 26 April, 2005