Complaining About Complaining

In the research for my book, I’m reading a lot of opinions on cultural appropriation. Here is what I love: learning! Learning about new things people are saying that I simply didn’t know in terms of their culture, learning about how someone is feeling in regards to societal trends, and learning how all that effects their decided opinion. Here is what I don’t love: the whining! Not too long after college, I had distanced myself from academia, writing, and intellectual pursuits because I was getting nothing out of circling around a subject over and over again, whining the whole circumference.

People do have the right to complain. Yet, I also have the right to learn extensive juggling techniques; does that mean I should? NO. Now that I’m a decade older and more practiced at keeping a level head with a wide-reaching perspective, I enjoy the rhetoric from a place I can respond from. I’m blessed to have had a little of everything in who I am: I grew up in a lower socio-economic class and I’m the first generation daughter of a brown-skinned refugee, half white, a woman, a gay one, Muslim, and–dare I say it–a yogi.

With that declaration in that particular word, yogi, I have stirred another stroke in the messy melange that is: who is allowed to say or do what? This is where the opinions  on cultural appropriation come in. Can a more privileged people utilize a piece of the culture of another people? The naysayers claim that it takes advantaged of a disenfranchised people for the benefit of the more privileged ones (which, you guessed it, are usually the whites). The defenders of cultural appropriation proclaim that gatekeeping the boundaries of a cultural to protect said cultural also protects the more privileged one, thereby furthering the actualization of racism.

Why am I writing about opinions? Oh, you’d better believe it is because I really want to get mine out there, too! The moment I’ve been waiting for: complain not, forgive all, and live through small, personal interactions in order to create positive change. By having blanket-statement opinions, it serves no one, especially when it is backed up with whining. All real truths are paradoxes and therefore require 0% whining and 100% acceptance of the absurd. To access everything, go through one thing. To access big scale change, start with real life interactions. (I get that I’m being a little ironic here, writing about not writing about things but just shhhh). An interaction can be a simple, non-blaming conversation with someone you think is appropriating your culture for gain, getting to know them as a human being, and reveling in our shared commonality. We are all just beans of energy; step back from the circumference of complaining and into the circle of wholeness that allows for interaction, resolution, and harmony. Telling white people they’re bad and wrong creates them as that for YOU!

Picture at a white baby and a black baby. One is definitely born with privilege. Are you going to start complaining about or even at the white baby? Or will you lovingly accept both babies and treat them both the best you can?

Babies grow up into adults that do make their own decisions and yes, some of those decisions are bad. Someone that abuses their privilege knowingly on my watch will definitely get a talking to. Someone abusing their privilege unknowingly simply requires kind education. Not blame. No human is to blame for their own birth. The white baby didn’t wish for whiteness when it was in the womb or before it’s conception. Neither did the black baby. Neither deserves blame OR pity and if we begin to assign those labels which do come from a place of pre-judgment, then that’s what we create each baby as.

Without blame and without pity, what can we create people as? That, lovely reader, is your choice. And a choice is powerfully not a complaint. What do you choose?