Los Angeles Undergraduate Writing Faculty Deborah A. Lott’s essay “My Cultural Appropriation” was published in the online journal Scoundrel Time.
As I began to take small-scale social action, my world and my limited notions of other people grew. The movement enabled me to engage with a world larger than my family, my school, my community. The civil rights movement was not “my” cause, but it helped me to overcome my own shame, to move beyond a limited vision of my own power and my own identity. It helped to save me—but that was not its purpose. I hope that those demonstrating now will find their experiences meaningful in some of the same ways. But I also hope they will have more clarity than I had about the limits of empathy and the dangers of projection.