Bigots

So remember my post a few days back about the girls from the orphanage who have made a habit out of coming into our room to look up pictures of Bollywood stars on my laptop? Go back and read it because this is juicy. Well I made the same post on Tumblr, and a user reblogged my writing on their anti-cultural appropriation blog with this comment underneath it:

This woman communicates to some orphans in Tamil Nadu using google translate and lectures them on some horseshit about “finding inner beauty” and the “evils of television”. She believes this is an example of her “uniqueness” when, in fact, it is a VERY TYPICAL example of your colonialist mindset. 

Did it never occur to you to use your google translate to find out about the lives of these girls? Their fucking names, for example? But I guess that wasn’t interesting enough to blog about in your little white girl blog. 


My response:

 ...This bigoted user thisisnotindia.tumblr.com, likes to reblog photos of what he/she considers to be cultural appropriation and adds vulgar, ill-informed, subjective, and extremely racist comments. For anyone out there who reads this, if any, I would just like to add my own justification because I think cultural appropriation is a very interesting topic but I really don’t see my work here in India as cultural appropriation.

I’m going to put this in list format to make it as simple for you to comprehend.

• First off, I don’t support nationalism but if you require some sort of proof, I’m Indian. I’m 12.5% Indian, my grandmother is from the Khasi hills in Meghalaya, so there’s your first mistake. 
• Second, I do know the girls’ names, two of them are Prasana and Gunasundari. There are 65 orphans and I have 144 students at the government school, and it breaks my heart that I can’t simply memorize all of their names. They ask me every single day what their names are, and I’m definitely starting to remember many more.
• Third, cultural value of uniqueness isn’t the product of colonialism. Quite contrary, research suggests that it’s the product of independence (Any research by founders of the cultural psychology field, Hazel Markus and Shinobu Kitayama, will back this up.) 
• Fourth, Not only are Westerners guilty of cultural appropriation but I think globalization also plays a huge role in this. You could easily say the reverse, that India has appropriated many aspects of Western culture.
• Lastly, and this is something I have really had to come to terms with over the past three years of studying cultural psychology, is the very fact that there really is really no objective measure that defines where ”Western” countries end and  ”Eastern” culture begins. We’re all humans, we’re all part of this universe and if what we want to achieve is coexistence and peace, and I surely question this user’s motives, then we need to realize that we’re actually all the same. And by realize, I mean make it real. And the first step is to put ourselves in the other person’s mind, and try and see things from their perspective. That’s what I’m doing here in India, and I’ve learned countless lessons already. I’m truly grateful, and I hope that this person can one day see where I’m coming from too.

I privately messaged this person and said: Please take a minute to read my response to your comments on my writing about my experiences working at this orphanage in Chennai. I hope you can remove yourself from your subjective reality for several minutes to think about the negative consequences of your hate-filled remarks. Peace be with you.

This was their response, which is totally out of context leading me to the conclusion that this is probably just a troll. Wow, is this my first time being trolled for real? I think I handled it pretty well. Either way, it's just frustrating that humans can be this awful for no reason other than their own selfish pleasure.