Apologies Accepted

Awkwafina is living the American dream.  She jumped from YouTube to rap albums to Hollywood in a few short years and got there by showing her appreciation for hip hop culture.  Some people think she got there by cultural appropriation, and have been pretty vocal about it.  Awkwafina has heard them and issued an apology.  She's an allie, she's got your back, but she's having a hard time saying that she's sorry.

What is cultural appropriation?  Is it the same thing as cultural appreciation, cultural emulation, or is it something that is hard to define - but you know it when you see it?

The Hallmark Channel is famous for its loving take on life.  It's the feel good channel with all the feel goods.  But that changed in December of 2019 when One Million Moms took offense to some commercials that were airing on Hallmark, commercials that featuring a lesbian couple getting married. 

The one-woman force behind One Million Moms started a petition to criminalize and destroy the Hallmark Channel forever, unless they did what she demanded.  Hallmark pulled the commercials, but then after hearing from One Million Lesbian Moms decided that they had overreacted and put the commercials back on the air.  Then they decided to show that they were inclusive and signed two gay themed Hallmark Movies - mostly about some gay baker who accidentally delivers a cake to the wrong address and when the guy who opens the door says "how did you know it was my birthday and my mom always made me a honey-lavender cake every year until she died in my arms yesterday" and somehow his birthday is Christmas Eve, well the baker falls in love but then his evil...step sister?  Sure.  His evil step sister comes in to take over the bakery and almost succeeds, but happily the birthday guy is a business lawyer with two degrees from Yale and drives over her with his car but makes it look like an accident - oh wait, that's Lifetime channel but anyway everyone falls in love are you still reading this?

The warm and loving messages of the Hallmark Channel are open to all.  But are they really?  Are there some spaces that should only belong to some groups of people?  Is it right, fair, do you care - when is it ok to have a club that is "only for us" and when is it not.  Does throwing a sassy black friend into the mix somehow equal inclusion?

We don't solve any of these questions, but we have fun trying.  Bakers unite!  Everyone eats love.  (Everyone also buys cards so Hallmark, we are on to you, but also one of us is still watching you because damn you and your messages of love and hope!).

Elmo and Zoe are friends.  Rocco and Zoe are friends.  Rocco and Elmo are not friends because Elmo cannot be friends with a rock.  At least according to Elmo.  Elmo had it one day in 2004 and lost his cool on Sesame Street over Zoe saving the last cookie for Rocco to eat (because rocks don't have mouths and why are we explaining this, you get it, rocks are rocks).  Elmo refused to apologize and thus began the great debate: can you be friends with someone who fundamentally disagrees with you on the nature of reality.  Or the bigger debate: can you hurt a rock's feelings?

This Sesame Street episode was aired in 2004 but went viral in 2022.  What's up 18 years later that would make people want to share this clip millions of times over Twitter, that other online social thing that has managed to ruin reality for millions of people, Instagram, and TikTok?  Maybe - just maybe - millions of people have recently been through something and suddenly identify with Elmo's ranting about friends believe that reality is open to debate?

Join us as we meander down the dark twisted alleyways of memory lane: children's TV, puppeteers, and getting the chance to live your dream only to watch it crumble like a cookie in a rock's mouth.

In 2013 Guido Barilla, immediate member of the Barilla family and part owner of the world’s largest pasta company, casually mentioned on a radio interview that his company would never cater to gay families.  He graciously offered that there was lots of pasta in the world (and there is!) and if gay people and their families did not like his words they could just eat some of the other pasta.  There was a lot of blowback (sorry) and Mr. Barilla said wait wait wait, I was promoting women and how important they are to the family.  He had apparently never heard of lesbian moms and sort of thought that now, at last, everyone understood the true meaning of his words from his interview.  He’s not anti-gay, he is pro-women cooking pasta!  Some more anger followed.  The next day he issued a real apology, on video, and then sat back and let his CEO fix the situation he had cooked up (ha!).

That was in 2013.  Barilla has made millions of dollars of donations to anti-bullying causes, worked with the alphabet mafia (LGBTQIA+) over the last 8 years, but some people still cannot bring themselves to buy Barilla pasta.  Some gay people with podcasts drive to other grocery stores to buy anything other than Barilla pasta.

When is an apology enough?  If an apology is sincere, do you have to accept it?  Can you split situations down the middle and allow that while one person has more work to do, another person has carried the entire company through a PR disaster and allow some sort of forgiveness?

Josh Wardle invented a fun word game to play online for his girlfriend and she loved it.  So did her friends and family.  Josh opened the game up to the world and it caught on quickly - so fast that someone decided to try and make money off of it.  Zach Shakken took Wardle's Wordle and sold it as an app and got excited about how much money he was making.  But the internet got mad at Zach for stealing an idea and marketing it as his own.  Zach apologized for being a businessman in business doing business and if everyone just understood how business worked then the internet would be applauding him instead of throwing rocks.

Is Zach right - is taking an idea and "improving" it OK, is that how business works?  From the telephone to the light bulb, from Edison to Apple, ideas have been taken and modified and used to make money.  But Josh Wardle may have the last word and apparently that word is not "money".

Blake McCoy was a TV news reporter who wayback about one year ago Tweeted (and because it's Twitter, you know there is gonna be an issue) that obese people shouldn't be prioritized for vaccines.  He felt that the priority should go to all essential workers like health care workers and newscasters.  He got some heat and apologized 3 hours later, deleting the tweet and then eventually his social media accounts.  He was suspended from his job, later to be terminated.

Was his apology sincere or self-serving?  We take a bite out of this story and chew on it ok I will stop...we don't do any of those things, but we do have some fun rating the apology and considering the big question: was it ever cool to be fat?

In the 1960s, during the time of peace love and groovy, the City of Santa Monica forced an entire community of People of Color to move so that a freeway could be built to allow more (whiter) people direct access to the beach.  Santa Monica had been home to a thriving community of black business owners, homeowners, and renters.  The first freed black man to register to vote in California (looking at you 1880!) lived in Santa Monica, and the first black professional-amateur surfer (hello 1920!) also came from Santa Monica.  Regardless of the heritage or the history, the City of Santa Monica used eminent domain as the legal justification for disrupting the lives and livelihoods of several hundred residents, all in the name of progress.  But now it's all OK because Santa Monica is offering the descendants (and some surviving former residents) first place in line for affordable housing back in Santa Monica!

Covid Update: Theo's fine.  It was negative.

Teachers are America's heroes.  They work hard and are largely undervalued for the important role they play.  An ice hockey (is all hockey played on ice?) team decided to honor some teachers by inviting them to apply for a half-time "Dash for Cash."  The idea was simple: put a bunch of teachers together around a big pile of dollar bills and let the fun begin!  Teachers got to keep the cash and use it in their classrooms because America really values public education.  A video clip of the Dash for Cash made its way onto the internet and The Sioux Falls Stampede hockey (ice hockey?) team found itself explaining to the angry mobs on the internet that no, no they weren't humiliating teachers making them crawl around after dollar bills for entertainment...they were trying to get money to teachers and do good in the community.

The Stampede ice hockey team issued some additional checks - and an apology.  Angry internet mobs get stuff done!  If you want to help get some stuff done, send some money to Adopt A Classroom (dot org).  That's www.adoptaclassroom.org and earn some good karma by way of a donation.  Careful listeners will note the karma joke from the episode gets played out in the show description!

It's our annual bonus episode!  Apologies Accepted is the guest podcast this week on MetaPod.  Catch Juliette and Theo in their first recorded interview as they talk about the show and all things apology.  MetaPod introduces listeners to new and different podcasts from across the world (which is round and contains more countries than just Los Angeles and San Francisco as Theo has recently learned!).  Listen in as they answer questions from MetaPod's golden-voiced hosts, Wendy and Kevin.

It's our Christmas episode.  Christmaschristmaschristmaschristmaschristmaschristmaschristmas.  We love it - the lights, the music, the cookies, the racist caricatures!  Ah, Christmas - the yuletide celebration that brings the world closer together.  A lovely time of year when we ask ourselves the eternal questions like: what is the meaning behind a black man dressed for a renaissance fair who has curly black hair and red red lips and puts children in a sack and beats them with a stick while taking them away to work in Spain. The meaning, in the Netherlands, is Christmas.  What a fun jolly time of year, and what a fun jolly sidekick-servant-slave-companion for St. Nicholas to have, a colorfully dressed black man who punishes naughty children by forcing them to work (for free) in Santa's toy shop in Spain.

Listen, we get it.  Black Pete is racist.  But some Dutch people don't think so, they will argue with you, they will scream at you from their windmill houses, shaking their fists while throwing tulips and wooden shoes at you...be warned, the dutch are tolerant but that doesn't mean they will tolerate you talking smack about their beloved Zwarte Piet.  He's been around for 150 years and comes from a children's story book and you Americans have Rudolph and Frosty and your Santa is fat like all Americans and shame on you for your history! Go drink some coca-cola and celebrate capitalism, you Americans!

Christmas gets ugly this year as we turn our attention to Dutch Delicious, a bakery in Edmonton (hello, Canada!) that thought it would be fun to share their Dutch cultural Christmas tradition of Black Pete with Canadians.  They weren't prepared for the backlash and quickly offered an apology and a new version of Black Pete, Chimney Pete - which leads us to ask another eternal question: will our listeners in the Netherlands ever forgive us for the windmill houses and throwing tulip jokes?