“Triggering Passages”
“The over-riding fear is that cultural, ethnic, and racial differences will be continually commodified and offered up as new dishes to enhance the white palate – that the Other will be eaten, consumed, and forgotten” (Hooks 380).
“With our liberal instinct to avert one’s gaze from the intensely raced and exuberantly racist affect of these images, my guess is that at least some of those cards that our contemporary culture would deem as most offensive have been suppressed or destroyed; thus, we have no way of knowing the scale of the distribution of these images relative to what remains in archives and collections” (Tompkins 150).
News Media Context:
“Polar Bears and Climate Change: The Photographs That Moved Them Most”
Under the Endangered Species Act—which the Republicans in Washington have said they will seek to ‘modernize’—polar bears are listed as a threatened species. http://time.com/4684019/polar-bear-photos/?iid=sr-link1
Discussion:
Native peoples culture is at the constant risk of over commodification by Euro-Americans. Non-Native fisher people continually play this out though their reluctance to acknowledge the right of Native fisher people to exercise their treaty rights. Non-native fishers want to consume the fishing quota of Natives with the idea that all people deserve fair catch of all the fish; this nullifies and consumes the treaties of Native Americans. The first people will loose their entire culture with this consumptive thinking.
It is our greatest defeat, as a civilization, to incorrectly or creatively forgets our history, or the history of our oppressive society. As Tompkins pointed out we only covet historical artifacts, which incorrectly depict life and culture, while leaving out those extremely oppressive and racist artifacts. As liberals we want to help in the freeing of oppressed groups but we don’t want to acknowledge our own continued involvement in those systems.
The same way we conveniently leave out our own history, we also leave the histories of species behind. As a species we have seen the demise of countless species, without ever recording their life cycles. The biggest loss is those species, which are directly linked to the culture of certain people or groups. As we consume those cultures, we also consume those species. Both culture and species are lost to time, to be forgotten forever.
Works Citied
Grabriner, Alice. ” Polar Bears and Climate Change: The Photographs That Moved Them Most”. Time. February 27 2017: Page (1). www.time.com. Web. February 27 2017.
Hooks, Bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. South End Press, 1992. Print
Tompkins, Kyla W. Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century. New York and London: New York University Press, 2012. Print
Thanks Linsey, that was both accurate and very depressing.
Well, I think you said it nicely in your last few sentences, “The same way we conveniently leave out our own history, we also leave the histories of species behind…The biggest loss is those species, which are directly linked to the culture of certain people or groups. As we consume those cultures, we also consume those species. Both culture and species are lost to time, to be forgotten forever.”
Let’s not forget ourselves as a spp. Is it fair to think, beyond arbitrary societal lines, that we are a self-consuming spp? We, despite how non-compliant some of us are, as participants in the typical capitalistic system (yup, brought up capitalism again) are consuming ourselves into extinction. If I want a coffee I have to agree to the terms and conditions that brought the coffee to the co-op, those methods heavily dependent on fossil fuel, and the disarticulated economy necessary to produce both coffee plantations and ships/planes/fossil fuels. If I want to purchase the coffee rather than steal it, I need to earn my paycheck by driving my fossil fuel dependent car to the farm where I’ll use more fossil fuels to produce compost before laying down the carbon based irrigation lines brought to the farm through fossil fuels and using the diesel tractor to till up the soil and expose the buried carbon to the air, allowing it to volatilize and add to global warming.
If you look at the various forms of agriculture or food procurement that has surfaced in all of humanity’s existence, you’ll notice that farming the way we do on the Organic Farm and across the globe, requires that we consume more calories than we produce. Our system is flawed. Everything we do and depend on is flawed. We’re a very inept spp, it’s actually very pathetic. But, another time.
We see it now, we feel it now, and depending on who you ask, people know it; if left unchanged, the human race will eat itself into extinction, and I mean this literally: the human race will consume its own body until there is nothing left. Why? Well, that’s a topic for another rant. And what, we think we can hide from that inevitable truth by adjusting the contents of a museum to change every use of the word “negro” to “african american” (that was a poll that was going out a few years ago, I’ll get back to you on that)? If we were really an altruistic spp we would do away with ourselves and leave the planet to heal. Alas, we as a parasite on our own spp and the rest of the planet, will hold on to our pathetic wants and needs and 85% cacao chocolate bars until it kills us. Because that’s just the kinda people we are. Because we don’t own the few pairs of shoes necessary for a select variety of occasions. We want to consume more, unnecessary objects, and it’s our right as Americans participating in free markets to make these purchasing decisions of our own volition, be damned the externalization of our capricious desires and those consequences.
So I guess what I’m saying is…why are we feeling bad for the black rhino but not the dinosaur? Don’t worry about the salmon and those cultures relying on them. Give it time, we’ll be addedd to the extinct list soon, only to have, as you say, “both culture and species lost to time, to be forgotten forever.”
Thanks for sharing Linsey
Shani A