Ramblings on Librarianship, Technology, and Academia

But I think the mistrust that might seem excessive to people coming from another culture is not just because the other culture comes from the long-standing tradition of written literature, I think there also is a huge element of white privilege there.

Oh yes, that too! I don't mean that it's just an oral/literacy thing, or even an individual/communal thing, but I mentioned those aspects because I hadn't seen them widely addressed. And I do think that the latter, for example, is relevant in some in earlier child_lit rows, about for example whether books should be criticized for showing a black child from a poor family in the 1930s jumping on the sofa, or a young Native American woman speaking disrespectfully to her grandmother (my memory of both examples may be off, by the way, so don't quote me). In each case it boiled down to one set of people saying that this would not happen in the culture concerned, and another set saying (a la your bingo card) "You say that the characters are portrayed unrealistically as members of their culture, which means you want a stereotypical portrayal".

One relevant way of reading this is indeed as the operation of privilege. People to whom it doesn't occur to imagine a situation where a sofa might be such an expensive item that the children's jumping on it would be as unthinkable as, say, tossing the kids a Van Gogh to cut up for their craft project, are exercising a privilege of some kind (maybe of class or wealth as much as of race in this case). But it also has to do with self-definition and the role of one's community in supplying, conferring and legitimizing that. Hence, as I read it, Debbie's repeated insistence on her tribally enrolled status. Generally, I think one of the more persistent and less remarked ways in which people from western culture universalize what is in fact a culturally-specific perspective is in their (our) tendency to privilege individual autonomy over group identity.