To differ with Oberlin college students
I agree with Fredrik deBoer up to a point, but only up to a point.
I was quoted in a couple prominent publications yesterday, repeating my complaints with Oberlin’s protest against the supposed cultural appropriation of bad cafeteria food. Predictably, this resulted in both a lot of praise and a lot of criticism on social media. I don’t take either too deeply to heart. But I am disappointed that, from both critics and supporters, this has resulted in a common refrain: that I must be something other than a leftist, that to differ with (for example) Oberlin college students on the question of cultural appropriation must mean that I’m a closet whatever.
In fact, I critique that practice because I am on the left.
Same here. I think a lot of accusations of appropriation are wrong and decidedly unhelpful – which is not to say that all of them are.
But after that comes the point where I stop agreeing.
In fact, I critique that practice because I am on the left. I’m part of a small but growing collection of people who feel that the left has lost its way, and that it must be steered back to its traditional roots: in materialism, in class solidarity as the basis of political organizing, in recognizing that racism and sexism can only be meaningfully addressed through structural economic change, in privileging the material over the symbolic or the linguistic, and in defining our purpose as building a mass movement — and thus necessarily reaching out and convincing those who are not already convinced.
I agree that class solidarity is one basis for political organizing, and is badly neglected by the left these days, and should be recuperated…but I don’t agree that it should be the basis, to the exclusion of other categories. I absolutely don’t agree that racism and sexism can only be meaningfully addressed through structural economic change – that used to be the standard left approach and look at the result: sexism and racism were all but ignored. I don’t think I agree that the left should privilege the material over the symbolic or the linguistic, because I think they all matter. I think it matters that popular culture is so packed with all-dude entertainment, as if women were a tiny insignificant minority. I think it matters what culture we grow up in.
That said, I think his post is a useful corrective.
If these students were Spanish and saw what the English do to paella, they would have a stroke and drop dead. I wish everyone’s problems were so “serious”. The sandwich isn’t authentic! For fuck’s sake.
Oh, my, I can only imagine what the English do to paella…
(HP sauce instead of saffron? Bangers instead of mussels? Skip the garlic?)
Now we can have English cooks at the barricades, protesting their hurt ‘feewings.’
The current Left seems to have paralyzed itself over continental ‘symbolic and linguistic’ bunkum. A renewed focus on the material could be a huge renewal. Perhaps we could be resisting the roll-back of women’s rights rather than policing pronouns.
Any discussion of English sandwiches is incomplete without quoting Douglas Adams:
I remember the time I innocently bought a sandwich at the Salisbury railway station, only to find that it had been sitting under the light in the display cabinet long enough that it was warm, but it was something combined with mayonnaise. I handed it back untouched and had to ARGUE to get my money back.