How Appropriate

It’s not appropriate to accuse me of cultural appropriation. That is a denigration of my culture of appropriation. My culture is theft. As a generation whatever of American Mutt, my traditions are rooted in the things we’ve stolen. Liberating your land and freedom, to make room for our own. Pilfering your labor, so your sweat and tears can feed the leisure we planted. Hijacking your song, rinsing it clean of sorrow and blood. Running it through decades of autotune until we can dance to it without rhythm or irony.

My culture confiscates your language and throws it away like a broken toy. Make you decry the atrocities visited upon you with our tongue. Then we’ll skip over your speeches like footnotes and praise only your eloquence and appropriate diction.

Show some respect for my culture. It’s biblical. My culture is the rapacious locusts sent to plague the Egyptians before moving on to devour every other shade. My culture is the Angel of Death, stealing your firstborn in the night, setting the second to work, sticking the third in fourth-rate schools to wipe their slate clean and fill them with nothing but the desire for privileges they’ll never have.

Don’t get me wrong. No mythologizing here. There are some very fine people on both sides. And all Peoples have darkness. Because they are people. But my culture. My culture will steal those shadows from beneath your feet and wear them for Halloween. My culture will shrink your gods and treat your traditions like decor. Interchangeable tchotchkes hung up on the wall with a thief’s pride. Devoid of story and passed on to future generations through flea markets. Bought for a song and a dance. My culture will take anything it can get its hands on. As long as the color scheme seems appropriate.

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A/N: This was inspired by the lovely, well-written piece below. I obviously took it in a very different direction, in meaning and tone. I'm glad that Vocal gave it a TS or I might not have come across it: