Fledgling

by Octavia E. Butler

“Ordinary sun exposure burns your skin even though you’re black?” “I’m …” I stopped. I had been about to protest

“I think I’m an experiment. I think I can withstand the sun better than … others of my kind. I burn, but I don’t burn as fast as they do. It’s like an allergy we all have to the sun. I don’t know who the experimenters are, though, the ones who made me black.”

It says we were placed here by a great mother goddess who created us and gave us Earth to live on until we became wise enough to come home to live in paradise with her. Actually, I think we evolved right here on Earth alongside humanity as a cousin species like the chimpanzee. Perhaps we’re the more gifted cousin.

“You’re an experiment, too,” I said to him when we’d talked for a while. “Of course I am,” he said. “I should have been you, so to speak. We have the same black human mother.”

I think the Silks and perhaps the Dahlmans expected you not only to look unusual with your dark skin, but to be out of your mind with pain, grief, and anger, to be a pitiable, dangerous, crazed thing.

They all looked at me, and I realized that the doctor wasn’t the only one who wanted to heal the way I did.

In relation to cultural appropriation, there's people who only want the cool or good parts of a culture. They disregard the suffering and complexities of daily living in a society where you are 'other'.