Tiny Sombreros

Cultural Appropriation 

It is time for me to post a few words again, as promised, and although I am not sure what subject I was going to attempt to write about, my attention has been diverted to the rather large one symbolized now by sombreros. I should have said ‘diverted again’ since I learned about them in March, but before I had acquired  a knowledge of the very basics of blogging. The sombreros have surfaced again - in Australia.

Back in March, with spring being what it is in Maine, some students at Bowdoin College felt like having a party and sent out an email invitation which included pictures of small sombreros. They wanted to play games and have fun and the fuel was to be tequila; hence the sombreros. Perhaps they had already imbibed some for surely they would have realized that they had committed two campus crimes, ethnic stereotyping and cultural appropriation. I was aware of the former, but have to confess, not sufficiently sensitive to the latter.

I wondered for a bit about how such things might be regarded on the campus up the road (from which I am now retired), but then I recalled a recent Christmas party invitation issuing from that institution. The theme was to be ‘Motown’ and one was to come appropriately attired. Fortunately for the sendees, some of the attendees had second thoughts, the costume idea was abandoned and the email did not go viral. I did not risk attending, but one assumes that if songs such as “Sexual Healing” or “Let’s Get It On” were played, the volume was very low, or otherwise the partiers would have been pilloried like the students in Maine and still be standing in stocks outside the library.

Sombrero Solidarity

I am consoled by the fact that there are a few people who are even less sensitive than I, and one of them is the keynote speaker at the Brisbane Writers Festival, Lionel Shriver, who just showed up wearing a sombrero.  The topic was to be “Community and Belonging”, but the speaker focused instead on “Cultural Appropriation” and clearly was not sympathetic to that notion.  An attack ensued, people walked out, the arguments were censored on the Festival website and a “right of reply” session was quickly organized to combat the speaker’s views about rampant political correctness.

Apart from the fact that even Brisbane, Australia is not safe, it is interesting to learn that Lionel is not a male like me and has little excuse for such insensitivity. She changed her name as a teenager, perhaps because she didn’t get the train set for Christmas. Also interesting is her argument which “was especially critical of efforts to stop novelists from cultural appropriation.” Her latest novel has been criticized because she writes about a black woman and she is white. As well, one learns that Chris Cleave, an Englishman, has been attacked because his popular novel is written from the point of view of a Nigerian girl. Apparently members of one ethnic group should not write (even fiction) about the experiences of members of another, plus there is this argument: "It's not always okay if a white guy writes the story of a Nigerian woman because the actual Nigerian woman can't get published or reviewed to begin with," she wrote.” [she being celebrated Australian writer Yassmin Abdel-Magied]. My guess is that that remark will really piss off Lionel because she has clearly not had it easy as a writer. Shriver also makes a good point, which even the very sensitive surely should understand, when she argues that if she couldn’t create characters “Otherwise, all I could write about would be smart-alecky 59-year-old 5-foot-2-inch white women from North Carolina.”

See: “Lionel Shriver’s Address on Cultural Appropriation Roils a Writers Festival,”

Rod Nordland, The New York Times, Sept. 12, 2016.

“US Author Lionel Shriver's Brisbane Writers Festival Speech Prompts Walk-out,”

Nathaniel Cooper, Brisbane Times, Sept. 11, 2016.
Ms Shriver, about whom I knew nothing, appears to be a very interesting individual and I encourage you to check her out.

P.S. I realized as I was typing this that some of these arguments are not new. Almost 50 years ago there was a huge debate over the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel,  The Confessions of Nat Turner which was written by a white southerner, William Styron. But, I have digressed enough for today.