I sat and watched the Hessen regional news last night via HR. In the middle of the news piece....they came to offer up a 5-minute piece on cultural appropriation.
You see....we are in the middle fasching season (Karneval) and one of the top forty costumes that you might see....is a German dressed in an American Indian outfit.
Somehow, HR had found someone to come lecture folks on how this was inappropriate to wear the Indian costume. Then they came to 'blackface' and added that as inappropriate. But they added some moment where a guy was in a sheep outfit....with blackface, and how 'black sheep' are a 50-50 situation....being somewhat appropriate.
After the news ended....they cut and went to a full 2-hour fasching show, which led off with a cowboy-saloon piece, and the theme for the whole show was 'western'. I lectured the wife for about 30 seconds....this was highly inappropriate for Germans to dress as cowboys. I was quickly 'corrected' by my German wife....'cut the crap'.
The problem is....if you viewed an entire audience at one of these Mainz fasching events....probably one-third of them are in some costume that is culturally inappropriate. Clowns are OK....Spanish bullfighter outfits are inappropriate. Nurse outfits are OK, but women dressing as men is inappropriate.
The trouble with this BS....you start a necessity to judge just about everything you see, and continually get into a lecture mode. Maybe at age 20....I had the potential for you to spend 30 minutes lecturing me....today? At the 30 second point of a lecture....I'm drifting off and thinking zombie movies or the best Yankees line-up.
No comments:
Post a Comment