Yes, I know my enemies!
They’re the teachers who taught me to fight me!
Compromise! Conformity! Assimilation! Submission!
Ignorance! Hypocrisy! Brutality! The elite!
All of which are American dreams!
-Zack de la Rocha, “Know Your Enemy,” Rage Against the Machine
As I was thinking about my 50th post here (yay! I made it a month-and-a-half), I was thinking about the game I’m currently playing and the writing collaboration that I am just starting. I was also thinking about some of the political statements I’ve shared here on my blog in the last 50 days or so, roughly the same amount of time we’ve had our new President. I had a term stuck in my head, because it’s a term that had always irked me. And then I realized why it bothered me so much.
I am sure many of you have heard of a zero sum game. Generally speaking, that’s what most people consider to be a truly competitive game, where the losses of one side are equal to the gains of the other side and vice-versa. There cannot be mutual benefit. That’s not how a zero sum game works.
I never liked that definition as it seemed too trite and limiting, but I realized today that the problems with race and cultural appropriation in America are all about a perception of zero sum game. Not in the literal sense that game theory (not “game” theory but “game theory”) would see it, but in the sense of impact, this is the precise problem that plagues 90% of online discussions of race. For example, the idea that Indigenous culture has been slighted is rejected by the majority because there is a sense, to White America in particular, that giving an inch on our understanding of history means that whiteness must suffer. To celebrate and be inclusive means giving something up–losing– in their minds, because their world is binary and they cannot allow themselves to give ground in the zero sum game of race relations. And this makes it difficult to talk about issues of difference as someone who IS different.
And yet the responsibility for discussing issues of race falls to me, even as my attempts to discuss it are viewed by some as a threat. I have often decried the need my field in particular has to make anyone who isn’t white and male a standard bearer for what that person is (in my case, the token Indian), and I have likewise expressed exasperation at the fact that if we have to wait on Cherokee issues until Cherokee discuss them, it’s going to be a long time to get to everything, and we’re one of the larger remaining tribes.
Why is THIS the thing I chose to talk about today? Because it matters but is incredibly uncomfortable.
I want to share a paragraph from an article I have in the publication pipeline that will sum up my views as well as I think I can:
It’s not that using Indigenous traditions in popular culture is so bad; it’s that for some reason contemporary society has a difficult time owning up to what happened when the Europeans came to this continent but still chooses to vividly remember the cultures it all but erased. Many Americans speak of “Indians” as if they died in the past, as if “we” are gone. And unlike a digital dragon I can strafe past or dispatch with haste, the legacy of colonization sits like a stone in American history, something we uncomfortably navigate and leave blocking so many paths to the past and the future. There are historical wrongs that cannot be undone, and to assert that we should wrestle with how we remember and memorialize them is to invite discomfort. I understand that. I’m not saying this would be an easy undertaking. What I’m saying is that we need to move past the discomfort and find a place of mutual understanding. Otherwise it’s never going to be us, and I’m always going to be one of “those people.”
And that’s where it ends, I think.
Am I one of “those people” or am I one of “us?”
I don’t get to decide. I’ve never been afforded that opportunity.
But that doesn’t make it right.