We Didn’t Land on Hybridity. Hybridity Landed on Us.

This is a brief note about buzz words, and how they stick in my craw, and come back out through my nose. When I hear people use terms and phrases like “unpack that”, and “deconstruct”, and “genealogy,” and “discourse,” and (most especially) “hybridity” it really makes my ass twitch.

Now don’t get me wrong. All of these terms and the theories they represent are pretty cool, and very useful. I use them a great deal in my own research into the socially-constructed Whiteness of Jews, and the impact of post-colonial mimicry on Jewish ethnic identity as illustrated by the portrayal of intermarriage between Jews and Gentiles in film.

Furthermore, Foucault turned the giant microscope of ethnography back on the White West, and this was a very useful and constructive thing. We all have traces of the European, Christian (and post-Christian) Enlightenment riding our backs, and it is time to face up to it.

Even those who feel we aren’t heirs to White, male, heterosexual, middle-class, capitalist, post-Christian, and post-Enlightenment brainwashing can’t help but find it in our closets if we look hard enough.

However, when a very blond, middle-class, heterosexual, Christian, and capitalist young grad student, complete with a oh-so-trendy mountain gear ruck-sack uses these terms as a shield against any true thought, insight and feeling that might actually creep up and bite him on his pearly white ass, I feel like kicking him in that same pristine seat of knowledge.

Tonight, I just couldn’t say no to that demon who sits on my shoulder and whispers: “Do it. You know you want to. Bite him. Go ahead.” I exploded!

Using hybridity, this particular Beaver Cleaver’s favorite word, was the end for me. He used it to cover the fact that, though he had chosen to make chit-chat about the deconstruction of the “auteur” theory (while I would have been just as pleased to discuss the weather or the political state of Paris right now), he actually had no education in auteurism, and showed no real scrap of understanding the history of film from which it had sprung.

Blame it on the couple of hours of Malcolm X (1992) we saw tonight in class (those of you who know me these days will attest to the fact that that is a nasty influence on my temper and tolerance for bullshit). Blame it on the fact that I needed a smoke. Or blame it on the fact that it was 10.30pm and I had yet to eat that day. Whatever you blame it on, you can now scrape little bits of creamy-Bourgeoisie-pomposity off of Hazel Street sidewalks, all the way down to campus.

And I’d do it again. In a minute involved in a hybrid-syncratic power relationship with New York City, which is a post-colonial construction of a geographical area, which, if deconstructed, only exists in the mind of Walt Disney’s old valet’s grandniece.

Screw you, and your “discourse,” Beave. There is an appropriate place and an inappropriate place for that kind of language. It is a tool with which we can understand our world. It is not a smoke screen that hides the fact that you don’t know anything else to say.

Using it that way does no one a good turn.