I know when I first felt the breath of the beast on the back of my neck.
It was early November, around 2008, before any Critical Theory had bubbled into the real world. I didn’t quite understand what I was hearing. But I knew it was bad.
I was getting a haircut at a salon, and my stylist was a young, bubbly woman, maybe 20 or 21. As we chatted, she told me a little of her background. She was from a small Texas town outside of College Station. A year or two before, in order to afford cosmetology school in Houston, she’d moved in with her grandmother. Then once she’d completed her schooling, she’d moved to Austin, gotten a job, and started making friends.
This day was just a few days into November, so I asked her if she’d done anything fun with her friends for Halloween.
Her demeanor changed. Her whole body sagged.
“I went to a UT party with a friend. I didn’t know anyone. I went as a Geisha. I always go as a Geisha because I have this great dress. I do my hair and makeup.” She was intimating that she looked the part, and she looked good. She had the costume down pat, and she was proud of how she looked.
She went on, “But these girls at the party…they told me the costume was inappropriate. It was cultural appropriation.” She sounded confused. People usually loved her outfit and responded well. This was the first time anyone had criticized it.
She also sounded ashamed.
As I sat there, I could feel myself getting so angry. How dare they scold her. And for what? What’s the big deal about “cultural appropriation”? At the time, I didn’t have the words or ideas to describe why I was so angry. I didn’t understand what I was seeing in the formation of that miasma.
I replied lamely, “Their behavior doesn’t sound right. I’m sorry.”
Knowing what I know now, I wish I could go back and tell her (and myself) how she was on the frontlines in the first clash of a Cultural Revolution. She had just had a run in with a beast that was about to be unleashed on all of us.
And I wish I could travel back in time to that party because I know what I would say to them: Get over yourselves, you bratty, snotty girls!
In their zeal to protect something that didn’t need their protection, they hurt someone who was actually sitting in front of them—a real human being.
To protect some person from history who was a million miles and million years away, they scolded and shamed someone who didn’t have the vocabulary to tell them to sod off. That for all their postmodern university discussions of power and privilege, they hadn’t learned anything at all—because there they were, asserting their power and using their fancy privileged college words to humiliate someone innocent.
They weren’t smart girls; they were mean girls.
I didn’t like them then. And I certainly don’t like them now.
If you want to understand our present Cultural Revolution, imagine those co-eds today. They’ve gone to grad school and have been further rewarded for parroting the progressive dogma. They’re now mid-30s, sporting their SUVs with unironic “Kindness is everything” bumper stickers. They work as binary-denying teachers or human-resource martinets or city-government petty tyrants.
They might not have school-aged kids of their own yet, but they have all kinds of ideas about how to raise yours. They are upholding HR regulations that police language and microaggressions and enforce progressive company culture. And they implement government policies that promote Equity! in transportation and housing and health care. They are mostly she/hers, a handful of they/thems, and maybe a stray he/him.
All serve on a DEI committee, and all are making slide decks about power and privilege and cultural appropriation all damn day long.
That haircut. That story. That shared confusion. It was a long time ago, but the memory has stayed with me. I had no idea what my stylist’s story, so innocently told and heard, foretold. But now I know. Now we all know. It was the breath of the beast, a beast that was lurking and stirring.