Episode summary
Eating chips with chopsticks earned Tayvin an online accusation of cultural appropriation. A thoughtful, careful look at appropriation, assimilation, and the word he thinks fits better.
T.E.A. Time is hosted by English teacher Tayvin Bayless. Read the full transcript.
Hello, hello, and welcome to T.E.A. Time with Tayvin Bayless. If you’re here for the first time, thank you for joining me. To my returning listeners, glad to have you back. You learn anything new this week?
Before I get into today’s story, I want to introduce a phrase: cultural appropriation.
You may have heard this one before. It comes up a lot in modern American conversation, especially online. But just in case, here’s what it means. Cultural appropriation is taking elements from one culture and using them for members of a different culture, especially when the culture doing the taking has historically had more social or political power than the culture being taken from. In other words, it’s when someone takes something from a culture that is not their own, and the people of that culture feel their traditions, symbols, or practices are being used without understanding or respect.
Here’s a quick example. If someone wears traditional clothing from another culture as a costume at a Halloween party, without any knowledge of its meaning or significance, many people would call that cultural appropriation.
In America, this phrase tends to appear in conversations about things like fashion, food, music, and art. It can be an important conversation. It can also be a complicated one. And it’s a conversation that I think deserves more nuance, or careful thinking, than it usually gets. But, today I’m not wanting to explore social power dynamics. I’m actually interested in another question.
What happens when another culture becomes part of who you are?
Keep that question in mind as we move forward.
For the last couple of months, my wife and I have been buying two bags of chips on Saturdays: one for me and one for her. It’s the same exact bag from the same generic brand every week. In this case, generic is a term used to contrast with what we call name brand. For example, Lays is a very popular and well-known chip company. If you go to the grocery store and buy a bag of Lays sour cream and onion flavored potato chips, you’re probably looking at about four dollars in today’s economy. However, if you shop at Walmart, you have another option. Walmart’s generic brand is called Great Value, and you could get a bag of sour cream and onion flavored chips for about half the price of the name-brand item.
So every week, when we go to the grocery store, we buy the generic hot Cheetos. These things are priced at about a dollar fifty a bag, which is a steal. They also taste great. I’m a huge fan of spicy snacks, so this is perfect for me. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen hot Cheetos before. They may not be as popular in your country as they are in America. I could talk about how much I love them all day. But they do have one almost fatal flaw. They are covered in a bright red flavor powder that delivers that delicious spicy flavor, and that powder will stain your fingers red with even the briefest contact. So my wife and I put our heads together and pooled our collective 57 years of experience on this earth to think of an easy solution to this Cheeto challenge. I think we came up with a rather elegant answer.
So, if you ever saw me at my desk, snacking on chips between classes, what would you see? You’d see me with my chips poured out into a bowl, eating them with a pair of chopsticks.
Well, there I was one afternoon, enjoying my snack break one Cheeto at a time and scrolling on my phone, when, out of nowhere, I was accused of being racist by a content creator on YouTube. The video argued that non-Asians using chopsticks was cultural appropriation and, therefore, racist. A shocking accusation, to be sure. But did it have any merit?
I remember many times while living in Japan when my use of chopsticks led to positive experiences with the people around me. It seemed to me that, almost universally, people were genuinely happy to see a foreigner using chopsticks, especially if they could use them well. I think that may be because chopsticks are not an easy thing to learn for those not raised with them. It takes focus and persistence, and the learning process can be filled with a fair amount of frustration. There is something in that effort that people seem to recognize and appreciate.
So what’s the verdict? I don’t know if I’m the one to definitively settle this question. But I tend to think that what I’m doing isn’t appropriation. It takes real effort and genuine interest to use chopsticks properly. And to me, that kind of effort looks a lot more like appreciation than appropriation. Appropriation, as we defined it at the start of the episode, involves taking something without understanding or respect. My experience in Japan was the opposite of that.
But the question stuck with me. Because it pointed toward something bigger. If using chopsticks isn’t appropriation, then what is the right word for what I was doing? And what is the right word for everything else I brought home from Japan?
There’s a word that looms in the background of this conversation. It’s another word with a complicated history, but it’s relevant to what we’ve talked about. That word is assimilation.
In biology, assimilation means the process by which an organism absorbs and incorporates something from outside itself. The outside thing doesn’t just sit there unchanged; it is transformed into something new.
In the context of culture and immigration, assimilation describes the process of a person or group adopting the customs, language, and values of a surrounding culture. It’s often presented as the goal. Blend in. Fit in. Become indistinguishable from the culture around you.
But in modern America, assimilation carries some extra weight. For many communities assimilation was not a choice; it was something imposed. Languages were suppressed. Traditions were forbidden. People were told, directly or indirectly, that their own cultures were inferior, or not as important, and needed to be replaced. In that context, assimilation is not a neutral word.
Both cultural appropriation and assimilation, as they are usually discussed, describe a one-way relationship. Culture flows in one direction. One group takes. One group gives. One group absorbs. One group is absorbed.
But that’s not what I experienced in Japan. And it’s not what I hope happens in this podcast.
When I lived in Japan, I wasn’t trying to take something. I wasn’t trying to become something I’m not. I was trying to understand. And through that understanding, something changed in me. Not because I was forced to change. Because I wanted to. The culture around me became genuinely part of how I see the world. It’s reflected in the art in my apartment, the books on my shelf, the way I do my job, my relationship with my wife, and how we hope to raise our children.
That’s not appropriation. It’s not assimilation, either. I’ve been thinking about what word fits better, and after all the things we’ve talked about today, I’ve landed on a word that I think captures what I actually believe about cultural exchange. That word is integration: not just taking, and not replacing, but building something new together.
So that’s my answer to the questions we started with. I am very much American. But in a very real way, Japan is a part of me. And I hope that, as I interact with the cultures of my students from around the world, I am able to integrate a bit of them into my life as well.
So here’s something to think on before the next episode: Has learning English changed the way you see the world? Maybe changed the way you think, or the things you notice? Has it changed you for the better? I hope it has, and I hope that our time together can enrich your life in a way that lasts.
And with that, my cup is empty. Thanks for joining me for T.E.A. Time. Until the next pot.
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