"Happy, smiley multiculturalism."

Lowri Turner on being the mother of a mixed-race baby

Someone recently linked this article to me, and I am actually so hopping mad to be beyond reasonable critique. Back from India so recently, with my mehndi just fading off my hands, the whole thing makes me furious. It's so easily, breezily grounded in the "uncontroversial all-white sphere" the author mentions, and so... racist.

Obviously I don't object to all of it - she says some very worthy things about the ideal world idea, the ideal fading of demarcation lines between societies, but it's one thing in particular that gets to me. Quoting in full:

Our daughter will have to cope with being the product of two very different cultures. She will have to negotiate her own cultural identity, and I know too little to really help her.

I am intending to leave the Indian side of my daughter's upbringing to my in-laws. This may seem a cop out, but, frankly, I'm too knackered to do otherwise. If I had adopted her, social services would probably whip her away. However, working and bringing up three children, I haven't the energy to learn Hindi or make my own lassi.

Yes. Yes, this little girl will have endless confusion over her cultural and ethnic identity. If she's human, she will. But her doting mother hasn't the energy, being too busy, to help her; and I wish I could slip into academic mode here, but I can't. I was in India and I was the dispassionate observer, as usual, because I couldn't fit in among the language and my parents' snappy reversion to their old cultural roles. I wanted to go out, and I couldn't. I wanted to be understood, and I wasn't.

But that's something else, that's the problem of a displaced adult. I was five, and I was terrified, I was terrified, and I have never forgotten it. How could you? How could you forget that feeling of being adrift, rudderless, in a plastic world where everything is alien, everything, food and skin and forks and language, how can you forget the sudden, displacing feeling that you are different? You never forget that. Instead you potter along, consciously and unconsciously looking for a culture that's not just half-your-parents', half-your-friends', but all your own. I'm fannish and Oxonian, without qualification, but what about when those things aren't enough? What do you do then?

And the glib remarks, the reduction of a billion people's cultural consciousness into Hindi and lassi. You don't learn another culture and then become part of it - it's not that easy, how could it be? You learn about another culture in the same way you learn when someone explains a joke - you get it, sort of, but your experience isn't equivalent to that of the person who just laughs. And being part of two cultures isn't a multicultural utopia, it's like being the only person in the room who didn't get the joke.

Often literally.

So Ms. Turner, screw you and screw your fucking white privilege. Let's hope you see reason before your little girl loses herself entirely.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

So, in a quite unprecedented spurt of organisation, hathy_col and I went to see Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix tonight. Much like when we went to see PoA, we quite possibly terrified everyone we were sitting by, especially in this case by talking about Kirk and Spock and, er, whales during the adverts, and zombies, aliens and Triffids during the trailers.

( OotP, yay! )

I guess we should also include people like me, i.e., people who say, "Sirius dies!" in the crowded cinema before the film's even started. It was an honest accident - for some reason it didn't even occur to me that there might have been people who didn't know that - and oh, spoilers. Nine more days. Oh, my.