#44 Do it for the culture

What is culture?

The beliefs, customs, arts of a particular social group, place, time or person. The values and social practices associated with a particular field. Refinement acquired through intellectual and artistic training. Professional care and training.

It is also:

The act or process of cultivating living material in prepared nutrient media.

It’s cultivation. Tillage.

A prepared environment where living material is present and growth extracted.

And if you look to your left, you’ll see an individual.

So, what I have been calling culture vultures are simply organisms doing what organisms do in a prepared medium.

Culture vultures, in my social experience, describe personality types or groups of people that feed off of cultures. What they are extracting is not cultural artifacts or traditions exactly. They are extracting belonging itself. Individuality. A vibe. An identity.

The examples for culture vulturism are countless. A lifetime’s worth. I have chosen two here – Carly and Jermaine – not because they are the most egregious or the most defining but because they both are representatives of much larger populations.

Carly.

I will credit her with one accurate observation: ‘They are culturally appropriating you as an individual.’ She said it clearly. She meant it sincerely. She then spent the remainder of our sessions doing exactly that.

Weeks of picking my brain. Emphasizing my insights. Repeating them back to me as lessons. We were similar in age. She held a social work degree and license. What she did not hold was any discernible proclivity for interacting with another person as an actual individual.

Along the way there were other things. Identity cultivation, maybe. A sage stick marketed to me like a cultural norm. A wildly theatrical authentication of a literal doodle. Persistent pestering for the content of my EMDR safe space. Repeated pressure to join an LGBTQA+ group after I expressed clearly and more than once that I do not align with that community – that I had actually felt targeted by it.

Jermaine.

The last time I spoke to Jermaine I was gathering resume references. I was still in a state of mad stupor as I was slowly awakening to the real evils of the world. He always played himself up as a hip, father figure. This made it hard to break a sort of instilled sense of trust. 

During our conversation I was hugely shocked at his ‘I mean Quel, what did you expect? You were a public figure. Think about all we had you doing.’ in response to me talking about my mother. This was deeply perplexing. He had as adequate an understanding and background of my home environment as he did my academic and work accomplishments. It was frustrating to be “checked” by someone so “fluent in the language of my accomplishments” while remaining deliberately illiterate about the conditions that surrounded them.

I mean he sat back jollily as two students we worked with – both related to him – sexually latched on to me. Warren got close enough to secure a long, violent and debasing intimate attachment. I think this was all in preparation for that whole ‘Oh, you 18 now. That means you old enough for me to date.’

He helped frame me as a public figure twice simultaneously. Once as the resilient, educated, positive young woman everyone was supposed to aspire to be. Once as the promiscuous, troubled girl everyone felt entitled to take from (or copy).

The pedestal and the target.

Built by the same people. Managed by the same people.

Conclusion

Jermaine, here, represents what happens when the people tasked with developing you are more interested in what you could represent than who you are. He watched where I lived. He watched how I lived. He watched with the specific attention of someone cataloguing what could later be useful.

All of it is the same mechanism as Carly. Just stripped of the professional pretense. Carly had a fully formed and unspoken expectation of who utilized her services.

This is what makes these particular examples so difficult to name cleanly. There was no forced entry. The doors were opened by structures designed to appear charitable. Social services. Youth development. The language of uplift and opportunity.

No license. No ethics board. Just open exploitation wearing the guise of something like mentorship.

A prepared medium. Living material introduced. Growth extracted.

Doing it for the culture, maybe.