Then this performer guy got up there and told a story about how his brother was a born again Christian. He then rather mockingly invited the audience to open their hearts to the spirit of the Lord. After several seconds of silence, he asked the audience to show the spirit of the Lord (by which he meant, I think, for the audience to vocalize themselves in a mockingly foe interpretation of ecstatic Christianity, white people style). I smelled a practical, experiential, and theoretical rat.

Suddenly, I got really fucking pissed off. I got pissed off because I had quite a strong hunch that none of the people in the audience had ever experienced first hand a religious environment where that which they mocked would actually be practiced. I tried to explain to my friends why I was so suddenly angry, but I couldn’t really articulate what was going on. The only words I had was that the situation was super politically incorrect. After some thought, I now know part of the answer by why I was so bothered that evening.

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One of my really good friends from Virginia Tech (my first year roommate, actually) was a Pentecostal Christian. She was white. Her home address was something, something, Old Rough Road. She really lived at the end of an old road. There was a sign a couple miles from her house that said "State Maintenance Ends Here." Dana's mom was of the stay at home variety, despite that her father, a postal worker, obviously struggled to support everybody in the family. They all talked about Jesus a lot.

Dana is really nice. When we first got to talking, I was polite, and tried to avoid matters of religion, as I had decided that somehow all organized religions are stupid. I learned that year, however, that her church community, particularly the music they made, meant a lot to her.

She went home a lot on the weekends, and I'd sometimes go home with her and spend the night. Just about every part of Old Rough Road looked over the mountains; it was an excruciatingly beautiful view of the Shennadoah Valley. It was a good place to do homework, and to get off of campus. And I went with her to church a couple of times, because that is what Dana's family did on Sunday mornings.

The first time I went to her church, I found myself disoriented; I felt really out of place, and I knew I just didn’t have the Bourdieuan habitus to fit in. Because almost everybody their in her little church was really involved in what was going on, what with the singing and praying and all. They were swaying and saying "thank you Jesus" and clapping their hands and doing other stuff that I'd just never seen before; the first time I went to her church, it was autumn, and yet some folks had sweaty armpits visible through their clothes from vibrant, energizing worshiping and whatnot.

I kept waiting for someone to break out the veminous snake to pass around. Nobody tried to pass around a snake that time; but by the end of my freshman year at Virginia Tech, I meat plenty of people who knew of and had even attended churches like that. Dana had certainly been to some of them.

I didn’t know anybody there except for Dana and her Mom and Dad and her sister and her brother. I tried to follow along in the singing and improvisation without sticking out. I didn’t know any of the songs, but I didn’t want to offend Dana’s congregation by not being involved in the service. But I just didn’t know how to move my body. I had not grown up going to a church like Dana's, and I felt anxious at having my class and aesthetic roots so vividly exposed. It soon became glaringly obvious that I just didn’t have the habitus, or the cultural capital, necessary to fit in.

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Anyway, so at this concert, the musician guy tried to rile up the crowd into a thick lathery furor of sarcasm, condescendation, and rebuke. And this guy who I sort of knew said "phrase God" or some such thing. And I just knew something was off. And people started yelling quasireligious epithets during the song, which was sort of a mix between a hymn and old time music.

I still can't articulate what about the crowd's response to the song that let me know something was wrong. But I had been to church enough with Dana to know that people were yelling at the wrong parts, and they weren't standing up (which was crucial for the experience, anyway). The people on the stage were all drinking Heineken beer.

These folks were interacting mocking the real culture of Pentecostalism (on the ground, everyday people sort of popular culture), but all they had to work with was the image of this religion fed to them through the media (widely disseminated popular culture). I have learned this semester that the popular culture of everyday people is premised, in part, on interaction with and the creation of relationships with, other everyday people.

They weren't even trying to understand this form of religious celebration. And though a lot of the ideology I heard Dana talk about at her church seemed to be not quite my cup of tea, I also knew there were some very positive things about her community. Dana’s church got her Dad to stop drinking, and cited lots of Bible passages to reinforce the idea that he should treat his wife and his kids better. Living in rural Appalachia has the potential for incredible isolation, and the church was a major outlet of social interaction.

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At that concert last Friday night, a lot of things suddenly became really lucid. It was kind of like seeing a disturbing scene within a mirage. And I wanted to forget the picture in the mirage. But once I saw what was actually there, I just couldn’t see anything else. And once you know the mirage is a mirage, it can be quite difficult to go through life pretending you don't actually know what is there.

Last Friday night, I thought to myself, most of the people in this audience don’t care about appropriation of other white people, as long as their own coveted whiteness isn't seen as stupid.

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And then I realized that a lot of my white new age friends in high school decided they didn’t want to be like WASPs or Catholics or whatever anymore. So they'd like read some book about Buddhism and declare themselves Buddhists. And I think this to some extent involved a reification of the "Other".

Hampton Roads, the area I call home, has plenty of Pentecostals. I do not think it is a coincidence that none of these friends ever decided to switch within the Christian spectrum. I also do not consider it a coincidence that none of them made any active effort to participate in the religious communities of say, the local Buddhists, or to hang out with the Buddhist kids in town.

I realized that night that if a white person spends a majority of her or his time with other white people, s/he can quite easily look at some essentailized model of some “other” culture, as a means of living out her or his life without loosing an ounce of one’s whiteness. Whiteness does, after all, have a long history in this country of taking things from people without an apology or second thought, and declaring that action to be best for all parties involved.

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And that night, I realized that appropriating the "Other" for an individual form of protest against the structures of one's authorities without compromising one's position of privilege within that system involves, in part, a particular distance. A distance granted, in part, by privilege.

Sure, I like to joke about Jesus and all; but I feel I have a right to joke the Presbyterian tradition in a way that I just don’t have the right to joke Pentecostals. Most relatively privileged WASP-y white people living in a semi-urban setting have probably met more than one or two Presbyterians in their lifetime. I doubt that I will ever be asked to represent the Presbyterian faith on the premise that it is the religion I grew up with. It is a privilege for me to say, "I represent myself", and to be taken as an individual, except sometimes, when I have my opinions attributed to the fact that I am a woman or a queer girl.

On the other hand, many of these same people have been exposed to a lot fewer Pentecostals. I never knew, much less formed a close friendship with, a Pentecostal until I met Dana. And, when we were first getting to know one another, I had to try really, really chock her opinions up to her religious faith, and the social categories operating within the community attached to that faith. Because although Dana was very into her religion, she was also an individual with experiences, circumstances, and other life priorities which informed and shaped her opinions.

I just don’t think that, at the time when I first met Dana, and perhaps even today, I would have had some inkling about what Pentecostalism is about unless I had been willing to immerse myself in their beliefs partially constituted and partially acted out through worship.

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If you (dear reader) are white like me, and hang with other white people in a semi-urban or urban environment, you just can’t openly joke other racial minorities. It’s against the rules of political correctness. Everybody, even my family, knows that.

But you CAN make fun of groups of white people, trailer trash, hicks, and Pentecostals, and the lot, who, by their economic status or whatever, qualify as almost less than white people. And why, after all, would some young hip suburban raised white kid want to act like trailer trash when s/he can instead act fabulous Caribbean Rastafarian, or idealize the oppressive social categories existing in Tibet before the invasion of China. Because, you know, for those noble savages, life is just a cakewalk since they don’t have to worry themselves with material possessions, since first world powers ensure they don’t have enough of what they need anyway.

After all, one of my greatest and most commonly unspoken privileges is that I can talk about things without knowing anything about them with little risk to the privileges I already have. I can misrepresent almost any marginal group to some groups of white people till the cows come home, and never threaten their white privilege.

Like, there are a lot of marginalized groups in the United States. And I think it is decidedly uncool of folks to reify and glorify some "culture" on the other side of the world (which I'm sure has plenty of it's own problems) when they obviously don’t have the time or the care to examine the ways they interact with folks living on the other side of the train tracks in their own town. And it pissed me off that these hip, college educated urban folks white drinking Heineken were trying to reify a culture none of them had ever experienced first hand, even as we share the same media driven popular culture, and much of the same history (however differently and/or conflictually we may perceive various aspects of that history).

And the habitus of rural, white Appalachian Pentecostalism they tried to invoke, which everybody who participated got wrong in the first place, was degrigated. By this degradation, the singer invited the audience to participate in (and most of the audience chose to participate in) a statement which rendered this group not us. And I think it's a really stupid idea to reify folks in your own backyard while idealizing some culture on the other side of the world.

I think lots of people who grew up WASP, including sometimes me, like to say that we are not part of "this" or "that" without ever having to take the time to put our finger on how we define ourselves. I have the privilege of slipping into un-marked-ness, should I desire. To this extent, then, marking myself by declaring myself to be inspired by Caribbean Rastafarians or Tibetans is unto itself a privilege.

And I know I probably don’t have the right to argue for the “correct” and/or “accurate” representation of Pentecostals living in ultra rural Shenadoah mountains. But I do think I have the right to try to figure out what I think was going on, and try to not contribute to such fucked up dynamics in my own life.

It's like, oh yes, I'm going to celebrate a group where there has been very little history of ethnic tension in the United States. Because, you know, those super spiritual people on that other continent must not care about poverty or other worldly things like that, because they don’t have the option of not living a lifestyle like me. Oh, the noble savage revisited.

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Because really, I’m sure almost everybody in the audience last Friday night had more in common experientially with the reified Pentecostals they were mocking than some exotified culture of some group of people of color I know some of the audience members idealize. But beyond mocking the Christian faith, I'm sure many Pentecostals would have been really offended for not having a very important aspect of their lives taken seriously.

And the Pentecostals, Tibetans, and Caribbean Rastafarians might have had more in common than the white folks invoking them for their own selfish purposes. Because in the mass mediated popular culture, none of these groups really has a say in how they are represented.

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Stuart Hall's "What is 'Black' In Black Popular Culture" discusses the fact that each of us occupy a number of social categories simultaneously. What WASP America sometimes doesn’t want to hear is that we have more in common with downtrodden, debased and/or underserviced populations than many of us (and by us I mean WASP America) care to recognize.

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One of the things I’ve learned this semester is that people who complain about political correctness often have a different life situation than those getting offended by some rude remark. When I talk or make a comment that what could be called politically incorrect, even if it’s just shooting the shit, I’m invoking the very real circumstances of peoples’ lives. Political correctness isn't about being polite so I don’t offend some poor, underserviced minority group. Political correctness is about respecting the situations and social categories experienced by everyday people, and recognizing the fact that I am able to invoke those categories with very little risk of losing any of the privileges I have as an articulate, white, upper class WASP girl who happens to be queer but can cash in on most folks' presumed perception of me as heterosexual whenever I feel like it.

If I decide to rag on political correctness, I use my white privilege, my class privilege, and my experiential (hatibus-al) privilege to usurp the discourse away from the people who political correctness is supposed to service by again putting my self and the privileged categories I occupy at the center of the dialogue. I think part of the original purpose of the political correctness movement was to cause privileged groups to realize and rethink the ways in which we use other people to define ourselves without examining the complexities of social categories operating outside of our paradigms. Obviously, this plan of action backfired.

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All in all, there was little I could do at that immediate moment last Friday night to change the very hurtful dynamics of what was going on. But I did choose not to participate (though the assumption that I would not be offended was unto itself another privilege of mine at work). But I can try to think things through. And I have had conversations with my friends who were at that event to try to process what was going on, and why I responded the way I did. And it scares me that if I had never roomed with Dana, I never would have had the feeling of feeling so out of place, in terms of class, religion, and most of all, habitus that I did on those Sunday mornings at her church the way I know she would have felt out of place had she gone with me to that concert.

In my life, I am surrounded by privilege. This is obviously clear, especially in the mass media popular culture, where I can have the supposed legitimacy and universality of those privileges reaffirmed every day. I can't pretend that just because I can't see my privilege, it doesn’t exist. And I can't pretend that other groups have not informed and influenced my life through the everyday people sort of popular culture. It is my responsibility to make room for other people to speak, to be aware of my privilege, and to try to give other folks space to represent themselves.

Copyright Jane Torpedo 2001. If you reproduce, copy, cite, or otherwise do anything with this paper, I will kill you. Direct inquiries, complaints, and confessions of undying love to: thematrixofyourlife@hotmail.com