I am feeling especially frustrated with the English language today. I feel like there are not enough words to articulate what I want to say in a way that isn't polarized. For example, it is hard to call someone out for cultural appropriation without all of the baggage that comes along with that term. Theres no word to use to say "hey, what you are doing is problematic, but has nothing to do with your character, or even you, it's simply a product of a subtly racist society we live in today". There's just "cultural appropriation", which requires so much to explain what I want to actually say.
My brain is also very motion sick right now. Not physically, but I feel like the entire day I have been having these huge discussions on race, blackface, cultural appropriation, pop stars, rap music, etc. and right now my head feels like a soup with a bunch of words like "society" being tossed around. I really hate that word. "Society". What a horrible word. Do you know how many times I have heard and said that word in the past day? In the past week? Year? The hard part is that there is so much I want to say about our world today and how different cultures interact with each other, but it is hard to say anything without using the world "society". And what a bland word I mean come ON! It's just like a throwaway term that gets tossed around during any discussion that mentions the order of things and the social norms. It's a necessary word, but it has zero power to it. Basically, society needs to clean up its act. Both the word AND the actual society! But back to my original point that my brain is feeling motion sick. We had this assignment in my rhetoric class that investigated 4 different videos: Scrub Me Mama, a performance by Nina Simone, and Ariana Grande music video that features Nicki Minaj, and The Story of OJ music video by Jay Z. Obviously all 4 of these videos make comments about race, specifically black skin. Well, the Ariana Grande music video doesn't outwardly mention race at all, nor was it intending to, but we used the video as a jumping off point to discuss how female sexuality and dark skin are related, and how they are both portrayed in ~society~. So I have been spending the past day writing online discussion posts and responding to other posts on blackboard, and then leading a discussion on it in class today. And there will be times in class where I want to bring up a point, but at this point my brain is so overwhelmed and nothing is true or false really its all just ~SOCIETY~ and I am motion sick in my brain.
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