by flagamuffin

Yesterday, while driving through campus, I saw a group of what appeared to be exclusively white students, male and female, maybe fifteen or twenty people in all, walking across campus in costumes that evoked sixties hippie culture. However, one of the dudes wore what appeared to be one of those awful Native American Halloween costumes (for which, by the way, my first Google search link was a shopping page with a wide array of options). Had I not been worried about arriving late for my daughter's audition, I might have gone over and asked that dude what it would take to get him to think about what he was wearing on our campus. Yet, as I drove on, I felt a moment of doubt. Well, I thought, maybe I was wrong, and his was just one of those fringy hippie garments like the others.

Then, with about three and a half seconds of reflection, it occurred to me that perhaps white privilege was not invented in the eighties and there could have been a touch of cultural appropriation happening during that now-romanticized free-love era. This would mean, of course, not just the one but ALL of those students were re-enacting the imperialistic embrace of an oppressed culture. And then...yeah. Thanks a lot, cis-hetero-patriarchal-white supremicist-ableist-capitalist society, for all these stupid harmful blind spots.

The thing is, I only wish it took three and a half seconds to figure this out. It finally dawned on me this morning, because the incident still bugged me. Offended by the one, egregious example, I lost sight of the many. The massive. The comprehensive. The pervasive. And I suppose this is how we can angrily condemn the SAE chant incident without taking a long hard look at the machinery of the whole damn privileged system that benefits us and rumbles along just fine with one less frat house in its engine.

And by "we" and "us" I mean me. I have to.

Borrowed from the page of my most ridiculous facebook friend. I imagine he'll go after the beatniks next, for copying (that is, mocking) the French romantic poets. Only if it occurs to him.