My first reaction to the
“yoga as cultural appropriation” story out of the University of
Ottawa was to say this is ridiculous. Political correctness gone
mad. Not that I'm a big fan of political correctness even when it's
sane. Let everyone appropriate, I thought. Let's all borrow from
each other, cross-fertilize, be creative.
But then I listened to a Métis woman on a CBC podcast denounce this sort of thing as oppressive,
colonial, insensitive, etc. That didn't convince me. Her political
framework is so different from mine that we speak two different
languages that don't even connect. However, something else she said
did give me pause, making me think, ironically, that she was
appropriating my culture.
Early
on in the podcast the CBC interviewer was asking some introductory
questions just to set the background and introduce us to the speaker,
who casually remarked that she'd spent the day “shlepping” around
town.
“Shlepping?”
I thought. How dare she use the word shlepping? That's a Jewish
word, my people's word.
Of
course, this brought me up short, caught in an internal bind of
cognitive dissonance. Here I was in theory celebrating cultural
sharing and opposing the notion of cultural appropriation, thinking
let's all share each other's cultures, but then when someone not of
my culture suddenly used something I thought of as mine, watch out.
Isn't
that hypocritical, my non-Jewish girl-friend asked me? Well, yes, I
said, I suppose it is, except of course I don't like to think of
myself as hypocritical, which would suggest I was violating my own
principles. But maybe the principle here is simply don't take my
stuff. If other people are borrowing each other's stuff, I shrug and
say, Whatever. But if you take my stuff, or my people's stuff, well,
that's different.
Not
that I even speak Yiddish. Not that I even use “shlep” myself,
or “oy vey,” or any of the expressions I heard older generations
use. I grew up in a much more assimilated generation, speaking
English, not Yinglish. Still, it bothers me for some reason when
non-Jews say “oy vey” or “shlep.”
Some
words bother me less, I think, like “shtik” or “kibitz”;
maybe because they've become English. But then for the woman on that
podcast, maybe “shlep” just seemed like an English word too. “Oy
vey” seems a bit different. If a non-Jew uses it, I sense mockery,
which may be quite unfair, but there you go.
Of
course, if someone is indulging in mockery, if their intent is to
ridicule in an anti-Semitic way, then that's obviously bad. But the
woman on the podcast had no such intent, and yet her use of “shlep”
still bothered me, even though in theory it shouldn't bother me at
all if I'm being true to what I thought I believed: that we should
all just share our cultures.
So
where does that leave us? I don't know. I am left pondering. I
checked online. People do talk about this sort of thing, I mean
whether using Jewish words or wearing the Star of David is
“appropriative” or appreciative. (And I guess the third
possibility is offhand, without even thinking about it.) People
debate it; some say non-Jews shouldn't do or say these things.
I
don't like telling people not to do or say things. I'm against
censorship, I'm not with the recent campaign against so-called
micro-aggressions. As a writer, I find that a very dangerous path,
leading to the shutdown of creativity.
And
yet as the member of a group, however assimilated, I feel unsettled
when someone outside the group uses the group's terminology or
symbols. Perhaps it's even because I am so far from my
Yiddish-speaking ancestors that I hold onto this last little
distinction or marker. Perhaps. Who knows? It troubles me.
