Over-thinking, or legit issue (regarding social awareness in my writing)

One of the reasons I dislike cultural appropriation as a concept is because taking ideas from other cultures is a big part of how culture develops in the first place! Which isn't to say there aren't bad or harmful ways of doing that, but it so often gets over-simplified into "using things from other cultures is bad, but only when white Westerners do it".

 

I forgot about this thread.
Yeah, it actually happened yesterday. I was shelving books and someone asked for cozy mystery recommendations. I took her to the mystery section and pulled out a few books. One of them was written by a black author (cant remember the author off top of my head, but the book was Game of Cones). About a woman who solves mysteries out of her ice cream shop. The cover has the hand of a black woman holding an ice cream cone.
The lady asks "is this book by a black writer?"
I said yes
She said "oh, no thank you"

 

Same here. I don't give a damn about the author. I don't care about their gender, I don't care about their skin color or their sexual orientation or anything else. I care if they can write. The idea that anyone ought to care at all is absurd and frankly, pretty racist of the people who only want to read certain people's work or give it additional recognition.

Stop falling for this identity politics BS, stop caring about immutable physical characteristics and start just accepting all people as people. It really isn't that hard.

 

You've got some dumb customers.

 

indeed

 

Not caring about such things is a luxury. Identity politics have been around for a long time, it's just that it was mostly white / male / straight / cis people reinforcing a view of their stories and experience being the only one that really mattered.

 

This was true up until we put an end to it with the civil rights act of 1964, and the equal employment opportunity act of 1972. That was in America. Most of the other free Western countries put similar laws into place as well. Much of the rest of the world still runs according to the older local customs and laws that were of course set up by whoever rules the countries.

 

How do you see the Civil Rights Act as putting a stop to this? Seems to me it went on well past that time.

 

Well it was the whole point of it! I won't go into more depth because that's debate room stuff. I will only say that making discrimination illegal is about as far as a law can go unless you want to create a totalitarian state where government takes control over every aspect of our lives.

 

True. More for debate room stuff. Don't see the Act as affecting this (or being intended to). I'll desist

 

Does it make a difference that I added the equal employment opportunity act of 1972 (apparently after you read the post)? That one made it illegal to discriminate on the basis of skin color, race, ethnicity, gender or I believe religion in hiring, promotion, college entrance and graduation. Of course all of this is about equality of opportunity. That's all that can exist if you want to still live in a free country.

 

Too bad there are a lot of people who don't.

 

Don't what, live in a free country? What do you think should be done about them?

 

Pellecanos, i read, is actually from D.C.
He's VERY accurate about the parts of DC he writes about (good parts and not so good parts).

 

Sorry.

 

Don't want to.