Cultural sensitivity and an apology

Any person, of any race or background, should be willing to examine their potential biases. That goes doubly for a white person, straight person, or male person. That I am all three means I should take a step back and consider things about eight times before saying them.

I don’t guess I did that today.

I wrote a piece for the site earlier today that was immediately criticized by a friend as potentially racist, and then another friend quasi-confirmed it (“I saw what you were going for and personally I thought it was hilarious, but the headline was definitely insensitive”). I added a postscript, asked a question on Facebook, back-and-forthed with the first friend for a bit, and I just didn’t see it.

But whether I, personally, see it is somewhat irrelevant. It’s worth considering how something can be perceived by people who aren’t you, and I missed that with this piece. (In the spirit of full disclosure, the piece is screenshotted below, but I’ve deleted it from the site.) I wrote about why I, personally, think chopsticks are a cultural tradition whose time has come and gone, and why I think the majority of Americans I see using them are doing so (a) to blend in, “because I’m supposed to,” or (b) to enforce an artificial slowness on their eating, and neither of those, to me, is a good reason to use them.

In the phrase “the majority of Americans,” though, the “of Americans” part is doing a lot of work, because there is a large majority of people in the world who aren’t Americans, and many of those use chopsticks not to blend in or slow down, but because that is their cultural approach, and denigrating it as a straight white American dude is like saying the attire of Muslim women or the haka in New Zealand is inherently dumb, and I should just put on a MAGA hat right now.

At least, that’s what I was told. I struggled to see it, and I struggled to see it even after I added the postscript to the original piece. (To be fair, the person who raised the complaint to me is also straight, white, and American — though not male — but I don’t think that negates the criticism.) I don’t think chopsticks are dumb because they are an Asian custom; I think they are dumb because their time has (arguably) come and gone, and the fork exists (in fact, existed before chopsticks), and why not use the easier method?

I will admit that that sentence is very “I’m a white dude and this is my angle,” though I would happily (and respectfully) engage in the point with anyone who thought I was being insensitive.

But that I’m willing to do that is only so relevant — opinions and written pieces need to stand for themselves, and today’s (particularly the headline: “Admit it: Chopsticks are dumb”) did not, clearly, hold up under its own weight, and that’s on me.

So here’s my first official apology on the site: I’m sorry. I started to write “I’m sorry if I offended anyone,” but holy shit is that a copout. I clearly wrote something that offended people, and that I did not mean to is irrelevant. I apologize for cultural insensitivity. I’ll try to do better next time.