I am sure that you have all heard the raving of a lunatic in your lifetime but until recently I had never thought much about how the nut cases affect their children.  I mean I have thought about how I affect my children but I try to tone things down when I am with my kidlets… and sometimes when I am with my wife.  But get me out with some friends or at a political meeting and all bets are off.  Anything could come out of this mouth.

Yet I have never felt bad for my children… not as bad as I did for a stranger 30 seconds into reading another mother’s blog post.  Undoubtedly you have all heard the NY Post report that we aren’t allowed to wear Moana costumes for Halloween.  I read the article by the New York Post knowing that they were a left-leaning rag that existed solely to push my buttons… but I read it anyway.

By the time I was done I had to find corroborating evidence that this story was someone’s actual opinion and not something they stole from The Onion.

The NY Post Misrepresented the story

Would it surprise you to hear that the NY Post misrepresented the original story?  They did.  They toned it down.  You read that right.  In the original blog, a mother named Sachi Feris with a seemingly unending line of followers, proved to me that she is one of the most racist people I have ever read about.

It is fine to be left-leaning, raving leftist, or even a socialist.  I don’t love the left ideology but I teach it to my children.  I absolutely have a bias when I teach but I want my children to know where the balance comes from in our world.

While I take pride in having ADHD and so-named my blog A2Z with ADHD, this mother named her blog “race conscious”.  Why on God’s green earth do we need to be race conscious unless we are leftist, racist, ass hats that need to constantly watch what we say so we don’t offend everyone?

I am not race conscious.  I honestly cannot think of a single time in my life, or my years of teaching my children, that I ever for a second thought about my race or anyone else’s.  I think of people as people.  I judge them for their actions and I respect them for who they are.  I do love that these people want to take care not to offend anyone but it should not be the thing you think about before every action you take and every word you speak.  It should be an after-thought or something you apologize for if you offend someone.

And you certainly should not be teaching children that they need to second and third guess every thought and word so as to not “appropriate” someone else’s culture.  For crying out loud it is a child’s Halloween costume.  She is not wearing it to make fun of Polynesians.  She is not wearing it to mock their religious beliefs.  Hell, my daughter didn’t even know that they were real people and the story was based on actual history until we talked about it.

Cultural Appropriation

I have to be honest and tell you that I had never even heard of cultural appropriation before reading this article last year and after a ton of research I have come to a conclusion: reading and listening to the crap that comes out of a Social Justice Warrior’s mind can do some damage to a healthy brain.  Thankfully I don’t need to worry about that.

At the end of the day, I am unconvinced that this actually exists outside the minds of these whiny politically correct fanatics.  I could not find a single example of what these people would classify as cultural appropriation where I would agree with them.  One of the most disturbing examples from recent history was when the Prime Minister of Canada went on an official visit to India and didn’t bring any shoes.

That was a lie, he probably brought shoes, but he didn’t think they went with his Bollywood costumes.
Was Justin Trudeau making light of Indian culture?  No.
Was he trying to insult Indian people?  No.
Was he just being a world class d-bag?  Absolutely.

Whatever you want to say about Justin Trudeau and his pretty hair, I do not believe that you can say that he is guilty of cultural appropriation, although he tried very hard and easily met the criteria of many Social Justice Warriors.  It was odd to see these left-leaning critics attacking one of their own online after his 4th wardrobe change in as many days… odd but well-deserving.

But we need to stop on the appropriation crap.  Nobody is trying to assume your culture or belittle it in any way.  They are simply trying to look Polynesian, or Indian, or Japanese, or Native American, or Russian, or… pick any damn country on this planet.

You might have read my post about wearing Scout uniforms for Halloween.  Probably not as only 4000 people in the entire world have read it, but I will end this costume talk with one word.  Enough.

That was much nicer than I wanted to be to these clowns whining about what my daughter wears for Halloween.  Let’s face it, I am from Canada and no matter what my daughter wears for a costume, after two or three layers of down, fur, and wool, she looks like an Eskimo.  You can say Inuit too if you want.  You can even say that she looks like a Dorset if you want, but we don’t talk about them much because they were the original inhabitants of Canada’s North and it is likely that the Inuit from Alaska wiped them out and Canadian Liberals keep trying to get us to believe we owe them something… but we don’t talk about their genocidal past.  That wouldn’t be politically correct because they aren’t of white European decent.

Welcome to my ADHD.

The fact is that nobody has a clue what my daughter looks like on Halloween at -18C (or 0F for my American friends) because her costume will be under 4 layers of winter-wear.

So I let her wear her Moana costume in Disneyland this summer, hoping that some liberal SJW mother would say something to me and I could get thrown out of the happiest place on earth… but nope.  We just got to enjoy Disneyland.

Complaints about the movie abound!

There are many complaints about the movie.  Many are stereotypical about Polynesians like why is Maui a big fat guy when historically he was a skinny teenager in legends.

A Native Hawaiian, Trisha Kehaulani Watson-Sproat, was quoted by smithsonian.com as saying, “Our men are better, more beautiful, stronger and more confident. As much as I felt great pride in the Moana character; as the mom of a Hawaiian boy, the Maui character left me feeling very hurt and sad. This is not a movie I would want him to see. This Maui character is not one I would want him to watch and think is culturally appropriate or a character he should want to be like.”

Here is my take on the whole “why do white jerks portray Polynesians as big fat guys” complaint… it was a character drawn by a cartoonist.  And he looked a whole lot more like the actor voicing him (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson) than any skinny teen character would have.  And let’s not forget that Dwayne Johnson is of Polynesian descent.  Nobody would call Dwayne fat yet he had no problem voicing that character.

As for the Costume…

Let’s finish this by putting some perspective on the whole costume thing… kids can be kids.  They can dress up as almost anything they want to dress up as.  If I had a kid who wanted to dress up as Hitler we would have a talk about it but if they truly understood who they were dressing up as, why would I stop it.  This is a little girl who wants to dress up as a Disney  princess who espoused the best qualities of her people in the animated feature film.

Unlike most other Disney princesses, Moana was not a damsel in distress.  On the contrary, it was her who saved Maui.  She did not have any love interest in the movie.  She had a goal and a passion and what more could a little girl want out of a hero.  I loved that the movie started such great conversations about these amazing people sailing half way around the world in glorified canoes a thousand years ago.

For Sachi Feris to teach her daughter that she can’t play a Polynesian princess for Halloween because she is white, and actually take issue with her playing white-haired Elsa (Frozen) because she is a brunette, she is teaching her daughter that a Chinese girl couldn’t wear an Aurora costume, an Native American girl couldn’t wear a Jasmine costume, an African girl couldn’t wear a Pocahontas costume… please for the future of our planet could you people just stop acting like you got hit by a stupid stick.

Let these kids use their imaginations and stop talking about racism unless you are a racist ass hat that somehow isn’t ashamed to speak out loud about how your people are better than everyone else because of the tone of your skin.  If that is you, please keep talking so we can identify you easier.

The rest of you left-leaning psycho liberal housewives, please let your kids grow up and play with my kids in a world where color doesn’t matter… because it really doesn’t.  I can not say it better that Morgan Freeman…

The Last Word

As for cultural appropriation, there is no such thing.  Nobody is pretending to be a Polynesian princess, they are dressing up as a cartoon Disney character who is confused about her role as a “princess”.  And in Canada, on this frosty Halloween, they will be even more confused about identity.