You noted: "...when people of X culture mangle or critique or just re-cast a story, that their credibility means you must give their take more than the time of day..."
Yes, exactly this. Which means blowing time on taking apart stuff you dislike. A minority person may be forced in self-defense (sometimes for your own safety) to study the dominant culture's assumptions, critiques, and re-readings of texts that came from your culture. Or they mistakenly assume it did. In some horrifying cases, it has nothing to do with your culture, but *they* don't know that--viz., comments about Osama Bin Laden or radical Saudi or Iranian clerics, spoken in hostility to somebody whose parents were Sikhs from northern India. As a member of the currently dominant law-setting culture, where I live now I can feel safe wasting my time doing other trivial things besides sitting for 14 hours at a stretch in the local Church of Power and Money Extraction, and ignoring their proselytizers, but this is not the case in all parts of this country.
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Date: 22 Mar 2011 04:51 am (UTC)Yes, exactly this. Which means blowing time on taking apart stuff you dislike. A minority person may be forced in self-defense (sometimes for your own safety) to study the dominant culture's assumptions, critiques, and re-readings of texts that came from your culture.
Or they mistakenly assume it did.
In some horrifying cases, it has nothing to do with your culture, but *they* don't know that--viz., comments about Osama Bin Laden or radical Saudi or Iranian clerics, spoken in hostility to somebody whose parents were Sikhs from northern India.
As a member of the currently dominant law-setting culture, where I live now I can feel safe wasting my time doing other trivial things besides sitting for 14 hours at a stretch in the local Church of Power and Money Extraction, and ignoring their proselytizers, but this is not the case in all parts of this country.