We Can't Let Stuff Like This Get By in Mainstream (White) Media

Cultural appropriation never looked hotter 

The disheartening news that Mindy Budgor, a rich white American chick, decided to forego her very comfortable lifestyle to rough it in Kenya and become the "first female Maasai warrior" because she was bored with her high-paying job and fancy car has been sweeping the Internet for over a week already. The book (what else?) Mindy wrote about her experiences is called Warrior Princess: My Quest to Become the First Female Maasai Warrior (take comfort in the scathing, one-star reviews). 

Luckily, Mindy's story has been exposed far-and-wide for the white-saviour-complex-solidifying, self-indulgent, and offensive schlock that it is. But these critiques have been almost entirely from black bloggers (Try Spectra Speaks and Madame Noire, to start). 

Friendly Glamour magazine apparently didn't flinch when excerpting part of Mindy's lovely story. Neither did the mainstream-as-apple-pie Today show. The first golden moment in the Glamour excerpt arrives when our little warrior explains that her inspiration was insecurity:

If you'd told me a year earlier that I'd be deep in the bush, hair knotted from days in the forest, running in the direction of a 1,300-pound animal that could make short work of me, I'd have told you to get your head examined. Yet there I was. And I'd never been more sure I was in the right place. 

I hadn't always been so certain. As a young girl in Maryland, I wasn't the daughter my parents had hoped for. They wanted skinny and polished; I was what my mother referred to as pleasantly plump. They wanted a ballerina; my first day of ballet class, I got booted out for knocking over an entire row of dancers with a spontaneous cartwheel. (I switched to ice hockey.) No matter what I tried, I just never fit their picture.

Aw, guys! It's okay that Mindy made a mockery of Maasai culture (and made light of actual challenges of living in the bush -- see here) by using it as a token for self-edification before heading back to her white, wealthy lifestyle. Because when she was a kid, she just didn't fit in. Boo fucking hoo. If you're gonna try a little sob story to justify your quest to exploit Kenyans' customs for your own gain, at least try a little harder than that. 

But the clincher in this Glamour piece is the caption under Mindy's glowing portrait (in Kenyan robes, of course): 

"I tried to soak up as much of the Maasai's wisdom as I could—including their way of living in the moment," says Budgor, here in New York City. Coat, dress, Zero + Maria Cornejo; necklace, Victoria Simes for Zero + Maria Cornejo; belt, Salvatore Ferragamo; ring, Budgor's own (made from the horn of the buffalo she speared)."

Please, for sanity's sake, tell me this was written tongue-in-cheek! We have here a light-as-air, couture-ified description of an artifact taken from a white woman's "travails" in Africa, and of a culture that is facing state-imposed extinction. The cherry on top, of course, is that tired noble-savage BS about "living in the moment" that apparently every culture of dark-skinned non-Westerners is able to master, and that us "corrupted," educated, comfortable, future-having Whites just can't seem to grasp (Poor us!!). 

But this is all actually besides the point. I re-kindled this dying blog-in-training to riff on something else, which was unearthed in an article on Racialicious the other day by Spectra Speaks, whose anger-fueled tweet-rant about Mindy's book was spot-on ("Dear Western Saviorists, Stop Reducing Africa to a Play Pen for Your Personal Development"). She tells us:

Never has it been more essential for Africans to tell their own stories, actively share their perspectives online and via traditional media outlets as well. In so doing we at least make it harder for ridiculous narratives like this to be perpetuated without stirring up controversy. That said, there are other voices who really should be engaging the author of this book.

The emphasis is mine, and her point is astute. We can't stop self-righteous fools like Mindy from going to Africa to "find themselves." But we can try to make it harder for these people to get positive press, and for their stories and books to be lauded in mainstream media and women's magazines.

Which is why Spectra thinks "there are other voices" that should be opening up dialogues with this author. She means white voices. She's right. Unless white voices as well as black voices start calling out exploitative stories like Mindy's for what they really are, shameful and pathetic instead of inspirational and "empowering" (ugh, that word!), the mainstream (read: white mainstream) will never get the point. Because what we've got now is a cheery-as-kittens profile in Glamour and a "what-an-inspiration-to-all-women!" segment on Today. And that's not good enough.

We should already be at a point where a young woman like Mindy would be discouraged from writing such an insulting "memoir." We should be at a point where an editor at Glamour, upon seeing Mindy's book, would flip through the pages and throw it directly in the trash, just as she might throw out a memoir by a white supremacist. Or where a producer at Today would avoid profiling such a self-righteous, culturally-insensitive young woman for fear that another similarly-positioned person might try to "discover" herself in the same flawed, fundamentally racist way.  

Ironic, indeed, that I'm hemming and hawing about white people needing to speak up and transform the media on a forum that nobody reads. But if I ever get lucky enough to be a taste-maker in the national media, I'll take Spectra's words--and my own convictions--fully to heart.

In the meantime, let's hope Mindy doesn't sell a single book.