DailyJim: Cultural appropriation or appreciation?

Hello, everyone. Welcome to another Daily Gym. Today is Thursday, September 12, 2024. It is hot. I am back in Detroit, Michigan. And I didn't think it would be this hot in September. And also yesterday, I was in London, and it was freezing. So, I guess that's the price for traveling around the world. Hey, the body doesn't understand the time, the place, the weather, anything. So, today I wanted to talk about, maybe I talked about this before, but screw it, I'll do it again, cultural appropriation or appreciation.

So, I am sitting in the parking lot in my car of a supermarket we have called Whole Foods. I'm about to go into Whole Foods, and this is kind of the first time that I've been in public since I got back. Yes, I was in the airport last night, but it was quite late. It was 10 o'clock at night. Most of the stores are closed, not too many people around. But I'm sitting here wondering how people are going to react to me because, was it a week ago? I think it was a week ago today. I had my hair braided or plaited, as they would say. I was going to do lines or cornrows, as some people call it here. But instead, I did what they call box braids. And some people said that I was looking like Travis Scott, if anyone knows who Travis Scott is, the famous rapper. And so it was interesting when I was in Nairobi, I went out to the salsa dancing event. And when I showed up, the reactions were very mixed, actually very polarized. There were my My African friends, my friend from Sudan, my friend from Somalia or Canada, Somalia, Kenyans who came up to me, they're like, wow, man. Like even the one guy said, mashallah, which is an Arabic Muslim expression for like, wow, like make blessings to God or something. I'm not exactly sure how to translate, but quite impressed. My friend who is a fashion designer is like, here, put on my sunglasses, take a photo. Like, I like this look. You need to model for me, blah, blah, blah. I was like, okay. And then my white friends were like, what are you doing? My white British friend is still making jokes about it now. And kind of, I don't know, it was just jokes. It was, I would say, more disapproving. But then I was wondering, okay, how are people going to react when I come back to the U.S.? Because I think Africans who are in Africa may have a different perspective on me wearing hair like this than black Americans might. And so I'm still unsure how people are going to respond, black Americans or white Americans or other Americans, in terms of...

Whether they find it to be a cultural appropriation or cultural appreciation. And I think this really gets at the heart of this idea of emotional attacks and assuming other people's intentions with what they're doing. I think the idea of cultural appropriation is to assume that the other people are taking parts of our culture or the other person's culture to exploit them, That the intention is to exploit, that the intention is to forget about the cultural heritage of something or to not know the cultural heritage. But there's this aspect of disrespect. There's an aspect of not caring. And I think the opposite is appreciation and looking and believing that other people's intentions are to appreciate, to admire, to respect, to really care deeply and want to be part of instead of want to be above. Above, so wanting to join instead of wanting to kind of surpass in a way or even look down upon.

So I'm curious how people are going to respond to it here and whether people will say anything or if it will just be in the looks. I think I got a few looks when I was in Philadelphia.

I think maybe in Detroit as well, but not really sure how people are going to respond. For me, it's more like I have this long blonde hair that's medium curly and it was hot. And it's fun to try to experiment with different hairstyles. What else could I experiment with with this long hair? So for me, having this hair that's not nearly as curly as a lot of people of African descent, but also curly enough.

It would hold quite long so it's still holding it's about a week later so um it doesn't have anything forcing it to hold so uh sorry i'm sweating like crazy in this car but uh yeah so the idea is really just to understand and try to explore and sometimes just experiment with life and see how people react to the way that we're showing up in the world and i know when i had a long bushy beard people looked more suspiciously at me um we can do this with hair we can do this with clothes just yeah i think what if we looked at the world and saw people appreciating us and realize that a lot of times people aren't doing things to to harm us but really they're doing it out of admiration or envy or jealousy and um trying to be like us instead of not trying to pretend that we don't exist but again i think a lot of this comes down to people's emotional states because i don't think there's a whole i don't think everyone in the black community would be like, hey, look at this white guy with the braids. He's disrespecting us. I think some will. Some will feel offended. But I think others might feel grateful or others might feel curious or others might feel playful or others might feel just other things besides maybe angry or frustrated or whatever it may be. Anyways, we'll see. It's an experiment. And I'm also I'm also experimenting with how much I can sweat before I get off this stupid. It's not stupid. Sorry, I'm saying it's stupid because I'm sweating. But I will talk to you all on Monday. Take care.