If you are white and were born after women were given the right to vote: don't. Just: don't.
Dear Middle Aged Lady in Mom Jeans who performed a singing rendition of Sojourner Truth’s speech “Ain’t I a Woman” to the accompaniment of her cargo-jorts-and-action-sandals-clad husband on guitar at the farmer’s market on the Sunday before the Fourth of July who introduced the travesty that followed by saying, “All the ladies in the house, when I say ‘ain’t I a woman?,’ you respond ‘ain’t I a woman,’ in keeping with the African-American tradition of call-and-response.”:
Don’t.
Ever.
Not even at home, with your husband asleep in the queen-size Sealy Posturpedic you share with him, and you in the basement whispering.
Your appropriation was made all the more egregious by the contextualization.
Where the fuck did you learn about call-and-response?
Would you introduce your rendition of “Rapper’s Delight” by saying, “this song, of course, comes from the urban African-American tradition of ‘the dozens’ and such toasts as ‘Shine and the Sinking of the Titanic.’”
In closing, let me say this: the closest you’ve ever come to slavery is that one-year period when you couldn’t stop buying shit off the home shopping channel.
And that’s roughly as close to real slavery as, say, your husband is to fashionable.
Which is to say, approximately the same kind of distance covered by the history of human civilization.
Or, maybe, the evolution of single-celled organisms to whatever comes after we kill ourselves off.
I hate you.
