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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   25714 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 4, 2023

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Growing up in the '90s, at my primary school we learned roughly equal amounts about Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa come December - despite Hanukkah being at best the third most important Jewish holiday and Kwanzaa not really being an actual thing. In my year we had no Jewish or black kids.

Ironically we did have two Zoroastrians but we never got to learn about their cool religion.

Our local library still does this, despite everyone in the area being Catholic, Protestant, or irreligious. Also, the "Christmas" part of things was super generic, just reindeer and trees, while Hanukkah and Kwanzaa were more specific. I don't think I'll be taking the kids this year, last year they found the only person in town who celebrates Kwanzaa, and she spent a long time talking rather quietly, until the kids were so restless I had to leave. For Hanukkah, they played a dreidel game to win chocolate coins, so that some kids got a ton more treats than others, like they were trying to emphasize things people were most likely to make fun of Jews for.

I would much prefer to do something for Christmas in December, Passover in Spring, and Ramadan/Eid as an interesting roving holiday. Passover is way more interesting, and told by multiple religious traditions. Lacking that, I would rather just have Festivus decorations than fake representation (this is basically what my school district does, with lots of elf stuff, and I'm not really into it, but it does basically make sense as a December religious truce).

Passover in Spring

Easter is a pretty big deal in Christianity, as in the biggest feast ever to religious christians.

I know. And they're related. If it were up to me, we would celebrate that too. Pascha is the best holiday. But if the library is going to celebrate a Jewish holiday for equity reasons, I would rather it be a good one. Sukkah also seems pretty neat.

DEI isn't about reflecting what's meaningful in other cultures. I'm pretty sure that's cultural appropriation. DEI is about making a token acknowledgement of other cultures while you do something for the mainstream. Hannukah is a perfect example of that; it's not actually a very big deal in Judaism, but it's pretty hard to mistake it for being Christian.

Same deal here. Someone really wanted Kwanzaa to take off.

My Kwanzaa related education in Southern California consisted of "Kwanzaa is a holiday that happens close to when Christmas does... it celebrates African culture." And that was about it.

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