This has to be the single dumbest article I’ve read in 2014. I’m not even kidding. And I read a lot of articles every day, many of which are far from enlightening.
By reading that piece, you’ll learn a little bit about belly dancing but you’ll learn a whole lot about butthurt. The author really, strongly resents the fact that people who don’t look like her find something interesting about a culture that’s not natively their own.
Volokh does a great takedown in the Washington Post, but the logic of it is probably lost on Salon and its readers.
If the article wasn’t in leftwing Salon and it wasn’t so obviously anti-white (the title gives that away a little too easily), the Buzzfeeds of the world would have marched on that thing with Twitter torches and Facebook pitchforks and silly cat memes and torn it right down. They like to destroy total strangers lives’ over dumb tweets, after all. This here thing on Salon is a whole racist article.
I’ll just say this: Jarrar’s objection to white belly dancers is every bit as valid as any objection I as a white dude of European descent could muster against Vanessa Mae, the ridiculously talented and amazing Singaporean-born British violinist who is also an Olympic skier for the UK. Which is to say, not valid at all.
Jarrar must hate this serial “appropriation” of other cultures. Or she’s just, you know, easily offended about nothing and Salon has become a desperate, racist rag.
For the record, I have no objection to Vanessa Mae. At all.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member