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In my treks over the internet, I have seen various people (mostly social justice people) worrying that they are somehow harming Real disabled people if they use a wheelchair if they can still walk a little or use stim toys or these nifty color communication badges if they aren’t autistic. Similarly, I have seen various people (mostly anti-social-justice people) who believe that Fake Disabled People are running around pretending to be disabled and using color communication badges and wheelchairs and so on, and this hurts disabled people somehow (they have never quite specified how).
This is completely fucking wrong.
In universal design, there’s something called the curb cut effect. Basically, things intended to benefit people with disabilities wind up benefiting everyone. Curb cuts, which are intended for wheelchair users to be able to get on sidewalks, help bicyclists, parents with strollers, delivery people, and a dozen other nondisabled groups. Similarly, closed captioning, which was originally meant to benefit Deaf people, helps people who have trouble with auditory information processing (hi!), people who like talking during films, and people trying to watch TV in noisy bars.
The curb cut effect is accessibility activists’ secret weapon. You see, people don’t generally want to accommodate disabled people any more than they have to. Accommodating disabled people is a pain in the neck, and disabled people are generally a small and relatively powerless group with limited ability to complain. However, if any TV network tries to remove closed captioning, they won’t just have to put up with complaints from Deaf people. They will have to put up with complaints from everyone who has ever tried to watch TV in a noisy bar. The latter is far more likely to strike fear in the TV executive’s heart.
Furthermore, pretty much anything that’s limited to disabled people only has to have some sort of process for figuring out who’s disabled. This presents numerous issues. Many disabled people don’t know they’re disabled. (Raise your hand if you’ve had a conversation with someone who thinks that ADD or depression isn’t real because everyone acts like that, right?) Many disabled people struggle with feeling like “fakers” and won’t ask for accommodations that they need. Many disabled people who do know they’re disabled can’t prove it: healthcare access is often limited for poor people, people of color, trans people, and so on; navigating bureaucracy requires skills like being able to talk to people, show up places at a scheduled time, and do things that you intended to do, that many mental illnesses and developmental disabilities make difficult. Every time you say “this is for disabled people only”– whether by limiting it to disabled people institutionally or by criticizing people who do it and whom you don’t think are disabled enough– a lot of disabled people don’t get access to it.
Sometimes this is a cost worth paying. For instance, we can’t let everyone bring their dogs into every public space, because service dogs have to be specially trained to not be disruptive in stressful situations. This training is expensive but service dogs are usually free, meaning that the number of service dogs available is limited, so we can’t have service dogs available to everyone who wants one. In this case, the alternatives are much worse and the cost is worth paying. But the cost is still a cost.
And notice that the people who decide who gets service dogs are the client’s medical professionals, not random strangers. It is never okay for random strangers to decide if someone is disabled enough for an accommodation. For instance, some store owners will only let service dogs in if they think the person is “really” disabled. This is wrong (and also illegal by the Americans with Disabilities Act). Other people will make fun of wheelchair users who can stand up. It is a major violation of privacy to expect random strangers to disclose their private medical history to you. You are far more likely to be harassing an actually disabled person to be criticizing a nondisabled person. And even if the person is nondisabled… who cares? Nondisabled people using wheelchairs does nothing but create a larger pro-wheelchair demographic, which benefits disabled wheelchair users. There is no call to be the Disability Police.
For a specific example, consider one of my friends, who started flapping his hands when he was happy because he thought it was adorable and later found out that flapping your hands when happy is a common symptom of autism. He freaked out, worrying that he was appropriating autism somehow. However (as I told him at the time) actually nonautistics flapping their hands works out great for autistic people. A culture in which the default reaction to happy hand-flapping is “ohmigod, adorable” rather than “you freak” is a culture in which autistic people do not have to waste energy suppressing their natural ways of moving. And because he’s nonautistic, it’s much easier for him to explain to people who dislike hand-flapping why it is wrong to do so, which helps to create a more welcoming environment for autistic people.
Similarly, I’m nonautistic, but I do flap my hands when I’m experiencing intense emotion. Unlike many autistic people, it is possible for me to stop. Think about it like not smiling when you’re happy: it’s possible for most people to do so (especially if they get mocked for being weird every time they smile) but instead of being fully present in the moment you’d have to be continually conscious of your facial expression lest your lip twitch when you’re not thinking about it. If we say “you must be This Autistic to flap”, then I still have to police what my hands are doing, which goes against the whole point. But if we say “everyone gets to express happiness in the way most natural to them, unless you express happiness by punching people in the face or something”, then everyone gets to express happiness in the way most natural to them (yay!) and we have lots of people invested in creating a culture where that stays true (yay!).
In conclusion: if an accommodation helps you and you can get it without proving you’re disabled (i.e. as you must to get a service dog), you should use it. If using a wheelchair helps you move faster and farther than you would otherwise, use a wheelchair. If stimming makes you happy, stim. If those nifty communication cards help you express your communication preferences (and they are available at whatever event you’re at, which seriously why is that not every event, they are so cool), use them. And it is wrong to disability police people. If someone does not seem disabled enough to use an accommodation to you, then you should be quiet and mind your own business instead of harassing them about it. In the vast majority of cases, nondisabled and less disabled people using something is helpful to more severely disabled people, and when it is not, it is the job of medical professionals to decide, not you.
Thing of Things 
Closed captioning also helps foreigners who still struggle with your language!
(I’m not convinced that that argument applies to *everything* we do for disabled people tho)
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It doesn’t, but it applies to many things, more things than people think it does, and it is good to try to make it apply to as many things as possible.
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also some people just like to have them up as a backup. i can watch stuff fine without subtitles, but i still have them on whenever they’re available.
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I’m a native English speaker and do not have any hearing disabilities, but I always have closed captioning on because I often don’t understand what someone said and will feel like I’m missing something important.
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Here’s a possible weird edge-case: sign language and the deaf community.
I sign a little, and I have a disproportionate number of friends with various levels of BSL certification, including one who is a professional BSL interpreter. It’s a very useful skill in sound-compromised environments. Once, after witnessing the professional friend converse animatedly in a noisy nightclub with one of her colleagues, I asked her about commercial applications of sign language, and the possibility of fruitfully teaching it to people who work in noisy environments, such as factories or music venues.
Her response was skeptical. This was many years ago, and we lacked the vocabulary to describe it as such at the time, but her reservation was what we would now call cultural appropriation from the deaf community.
I’m quite doubtful about “appropriation” as a natural category of wrongdoing, particularly in cases such as the one above where more of a good thing seems to benefit everybody. That said, I could understand people in the deaf community feeling aggrieved at the “misappropriation” of such an integral component of their community and identity.
This is possibly a completely made-up problem, based on a conversation I had after a night out in 2006. For all I know, deaf people the world over would rejoice at the idea of more people learning sign language.
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I totally predicted that Deaf people would have apprehensions about spreading sign language. I wonder if there are other examples of their response to this sort of proposal.
My reasoning was this: their opposition to technological hearing enhancement at a very young age is based on preserving their culture, which it seems to me largely comes down to maintaining forced isolation. Why else would they be so concerned w/ being able to hear causing the destruction of their culture, if they did not accept on some level that nobody who can make the informed decision chooses to be deaf? There is nothing about Deaf culture that strictly requires it’s participants to be deaf in order to partake,* except, perhaps, for alief that the ability to hear is not something of value whose lack should be mourned.
But being deaf also forces a degree of social isolation from hearing society. Thus it is that Deafness could arise as a distinct identity, and thus do they depend on continued isolation for the identity to make sense. Having one’s children being able to hear destroys this isolation, so Deaf parents oppose it for about the same reasons that religious sects who believe (often correctly) that exposure to the liberal west would inevitably and irreversibly corrupt their children.
Everybody learning to sign would have the exact same effect. Therefore, I would predict that everybody learning to sign would largely destroy Deaf culture as it exists now, and that many Deaf people would recognize this and oppose it for the same reason they oppose cochlear implants. “Appropriation” sounds like as good a guess as any about how they would sell their objections to people who might otherwise learn Sign were it to become much much more popular.
*This is the part where people bring up marginal edge-cases, such as bass-heavy loud music of the sort occasionally enjoyed by Deaf people being potentially uncomfortable to some people who can hear, as a refutation of the entire point.
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Speaking from the angle of someone who sees some losses from geek culture becoming relatively mainstream, I think it’s not just a matter of defining a culture as being in opposition to the mainstream culture, though I think that’s part of it.
Another piece is that if a culture includes a tremendously larger number of people, that alone makes it different– you can’t know as high a proportion of the people. It’s like moving from a small town to a big city. You can have a neighborhood, but you can’t know the whole thing in the same way.
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My experience is of Deaf people getting extremely enthusiastic that I’m learning the language, but this may disappear if learning a sign language stops being a costly signal of interest in the culture.
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Aaaaaagh. No edit button to fix missing slashes.
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Probably all a bunch of rubbish — Deaf culture includes a lot of people who are not deaf. Hearing family members of Deaf people.
Using sign isn’t pretending to be Deaf.
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If it were considered appropriation, would it matter? I would say that sign language is useful, so that puts it much closer to the “importing the germ theory of disease” side of appropriation, and less the “wearing sacred dress as a Halloween costume” side.
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Appropriation is usually defined as something along the lines of “stealing” or “exploiting” another culture’s artifacts, art, etc., not simple cultural exchange. Regardless of whether you think this is a useful concept, I don’t think anyone, even the most SJish Tumblrina, would consider importing the germ theory of disease to qualify as appropriation.
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Of course not, that’s why I used it as the extreme example for that side of the axis. Everybody is ok w/ THAT kind of appropriation (and maybe not even just because it involves taking something from European culture.) Nonetheless, I do remember anti-appropriation objections to global use of the Indian neem tree (even aside from the patent controversy) despite that also being something of medical value, so no, not even spreading medical technology is strictly immune to the charge of appropriation when it isn’t being taken from a sufficiently privileged people.
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I took a British Sign Language class a couple of years which was taught by a Deaf person (and had no Deaf students in it), so she at least clearly didn’t have any problem with hearing people learning sign language.
In a similar vein, I attended a talk by Paul Baker once (an expert on the British gay cant, Polari—notice that half the references on that Wikipedia page go back to Baker’s work) and somebody asked him whether it would be cultural appropriation for straight people to borrow Polari words. Responding, he appeared bemused—it’s not impossible that he hadn’t even heard of “cultural appropriation” before—and said that he’d welcome the use of Polari by anybody who wanted to use it, straight or gay. Of course a relevant difference in that case might be that Polari is no longer actually used by the gay community; the social context has changed so that gay people don’t need a secret cant any more.
Of course a similar change in the social context could occur with regards to sign language, due to the use of cochlear implants. Based on my limited knowledge I suspect that the Deaf community will be unable to stop cochlear implants armed solely with the cultural preservation line of argument, which is extremely unconvincing to most people. The more convincing argument against the use of cochlear implants is the one about how cochlear implants are imperfect, and so don’t actually provide a net benefit when the option of attaining normal fluency in a language (albeit one often misunderstood and considered not a proper language by hearing people—this is an important point to understand because it’s what makes it a real identity-politics issue) is also available. But that argument should become less valid over time, as the technology improves. (I don’t know how valid it is currently.) If sign languages do become seriously threatened, I can’t imagine there being any significant resistance to the use of sign language by hearing people on cultural appropriation grounds. In fact thinking about this makes me think I positively *should* learn a sign language. As a student of linguistics, I’d be especially sad if sign languages became extinct.
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Huh, I had no idea those were intended for wheelchairs. Neat!
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Good points, but I can think of examples where it is possible to appropriate from disabled people. For example by parking in wheelchair accessible parking spots.
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Disabled parking spaces are similar to the guide dog situation. You need a permit to use one. What you don’t need to use one is a wheelchair.
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It’s more difficult (loosely speaking, basically impossible) to appropriate from disabled people in the service dog example though.
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It is actually possible to do something that’s at least similar to appropriation by trying to pass an untrained dog off as a service dog. The limited resources being used up in that case are:
1) Public goodwill, especially the goodwill of store owners/managers. If the last time they let someone in with a dog that was supposed to be a service dog, the dog growled at other customers/peed on something/was otherwise poorly behaved, they’re likely to turn away actual service dog handlers, regardless of the fact that that’s illegal. (Actual service dogs don’t act like that, but your average store manager isn’t going to care enough to do the research and find out.)
2) Public expectations, or lack therof. People who are trying to pass themselves off as legitimate service dog handlers when they’re not will often present store owners/managers/etc with faked paperwork about their dogs when they’re challenged, e.g. to get out of trouble when their dog misbehaves as in point 1. This sets up a situation where every handler is then expected to be willing to do the same thing, which is illegal – service dog handlers have the same rights to access places without being questioned as everyone else does. (Again, your average manager is not going to care enough about the actual law to do their research.)
There’s also a similar pattern with people trying to pass off regular pets as service dogs or emotional support animals (which aren’t allowed to go out in public like service dogs are, but can’t be forbidden from being kept in apartments that usually have a no-pets policy) and setting landlords up to be more hostile to actual service animal handlers.
Also, there’s a whole industry around selling people faked certification papers and dog vests and things, which fits one of the other definitions of appropriation – taking something that’s got a specific purpose in one culture and profiting from selling a corrupted version of it outside that culture.
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Yes I think you are right to point out that goodwill is a limited resource.
The disabled parking example has the same issue. People using fake parking permits and such erode goodwill. But it also has the additional issue that a parking space can only physically fit one vehicle at a time. So a spot that is occupied by someone who is not disabled is unambiguously unavailable to someone who is disabled.
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Actually I don’t think that’s the same thing at all – disregarding for the moment the fact that I’ve never heard of fake parking permits being a thing, someone using a fake permit doesn’t harm or even inconvenience the nondisabled people around them, who shouldn’t be using those spots anyway, so goodwill shouldn’t really be a factor in the first place.
I think what you’re talking about is the situation where a nondisabled person sees someone who doesn’t look disabled (either because they’re not or, much more likely, because they’re invisibly disabled – the nondisabled person doesn’t actually have any way of knowing) using a spot and feels upset that they’re ‘cheating’. In this case, the nondisabled person is unambiguously wrong; invisibly disabled people are not cheating and it’s not a random layperson’s job to distinguish between invisibly disabled people and (rare!) fakers; that’s what doctors are for.
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:adelene
Yes, use of service dogs is now ‘appropriatable’, as medic alert and similar services do not require professional training, and for general access the ADA does not offer or require certification or other paperwork for any service dog or handler. Owner trained service dogs is a legitimate thing, and faking is easy.
As for fake certification and vests, it’s counter-intuitive that the ADA does not
require some sort of certification, so uninformed store managers often demand one. Even with a copy of the ADA in your pocket, it’s hard to get past that situation — unless you have a ‘fake’ vest and/or certification to show.
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@Adelene
It seems obvious to me that cheaters will erode the goodwill that the system depends on and I’m somewhat flummoxed by your disagreement.
For what it’s worth I’m not claiming that fake parking permits are a thing. I am under the impression that cheating by various means is, or as least was, fairly common.
As for the second paragraph, no that’s not what I’m talking about. I suppose something I said must have pattern matched to that.
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With undocumented service dogs, as with curb cuts, there are some good consequences to the disabled of a large number of other people using the same privilege. Claimed medic alert dogs being seen in public, fake or not, spreads the meme that a dog can warn of blood sugar out of range, or of a coming seizure, etc, so that people who really have that problem learn it’s worth looking into training an alert dog for themself. Employees become used to dogs other than sight or hearing dogs, so the concept does not need to be explained to them. They also tend to let any well-behaved dog pass, rather than question whether it is technically a service dog or just a documented or even undocumented emotional support dog.
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@GMHowe: Thinking about it, I’m guessing you’re talking about people just parking in the reserved spots without any real attempt to pass themselves off as disabled? I still wouldn’t class that as using up goodwill (it doesn’t result in people saying that disabled people shouldn’t be allowed to park close to buildings) but it does erode the norm of following the laws about parking in those spots, so this is probably just a semantic disagreement.
@houseboatonstyx: True, I hadn’t thought of that. It comes down to the specific situation, I guess.
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Re fake dogs, I should have compared this to close captioning. The city doesn’t make or close curb cuts lightly, but enforcement of service dog rules is variable. If the mayor’s own family has been passing their pet dogs as service dogs, zie is not likely to crack down on it.
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Yeah, Adelene is right about people taking advantage of “No dogs allowed” “Oh but this is a service dog!”.
To defend shop keepers, there are regulations about permitting animals onto premises where food is prepared/stored/served/sold. And some people will try and get around that by pretending their dog is not a pet but a necessary service animal, so shops and restaurants then get stuck with the job of judging if someone is “really” disabled.
The parts about pets not being trained as service animals are also apply. And some people are just jerks for the sake of being jerks.
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Better example: bus seats. In cases like this, where the resource is for disabled people and is limited, the rule I use is “am I significantly likely to cause harm if I don’t use this resource?” So when I feel sick enough or can’t see well, I sit up front.
I think it would be a dick move to sit up front when I feel safe about sitting elsewhere or standing, even though I have a disability. So this isn’t a case of appropriating vs. not appropriating, it’s just one where thinking carefully about your need is kind to others. Something similar could arise with those mobility carts in some grocery stores.
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Using a wheelchair can have costs for others. For example I ride the bus daily, and the process of getting onboard with a wheelchair adds maybe 3min to a ride. The ramp has to go out, the seats have to be folded away, the wheelchair needs to be secured. And a person with a wheelchair takes up more space once they’re on the bus, which at peak times can mean multiple other people here to wait for the next bus. This doesn’t mean people who need wheelchairs shouldn’t use them or shouldn’t ride the bus: totally do both! But someone simply using a wheelchair because they enjoy it, without regard for the effect on others, is being kind of a jerk.
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I agree with this, but I also think things might change if more people used wheelchairs. I’ll bet there are a lot of improvements that could be made to buses that would make using wheelchairs less inconvenient for others – maybe bigger doorways, more spacious seating, extendable ramps, etc. If more people used wheelchairs, there would be more pressure for buses to improve their services for wheelchair users.
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Those improvements would be relatively expensive and would trade off against other things the bus company could fund, like more frequent service or giving buses priority at stoplights.
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It’s actually not that hard to have buses accomodate wheelchairs more natively. The bus has a small ramp that flips out,a low floor, and it “kneels” by letting the air out of the suspension. Theres no lift, and there’s less space taken away from other riders. Never assume that the technology can’t be better.
Also, this hypothetical mass of fully able bodied people who just prefer wheelchairs is totally not a real thing in any way.
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Followed up with a blog post: http://www.jefftk.com/p/curb-cut-effect
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Hum.
This actually seems like a much better example than the ones in “Disconnected Thoughts”. I’m actually pretty persuaded.
But … it seems to me that this argument shouldn’t actually cause you to update on issues you already know about. If you already know whether a policy will provide spillover benefits, then it doesn’t matter that disability stuff is unusually likely to have spillover benefits.
In fact, this is only useful as a rule of thumb used for making snap judgements. Which … I feel like people shouldn’t be making. It’s kind of like racism; even if there’s a correlation between black people and poverty/crime, the actual correct response is to check whether this specific black person is poor person/criminal.
Also, am I being silly or is appropriation basically never a thing in real life?
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An extreme example would be non-Aborigines doing pop psychology books etc, about “The Dreamtime”. Sfaik there are few if any non-A’s who really understand it, so any such presentation will be shallow and distorted — but may be the only source where young A’s encounter it. So this is not just diluting a tradition, but destroying the real thing and replacing it with a fake.
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I still don’t understand why “appropriation” is ever a bad thing (unless the cultural attribute being “appropriated” is a harmful one, but in that case no one should be practicing it).
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A lot of continental Europeans don’t have a problem with blackface. When you think about it, why should they? Lithuania and Poland and Slovakia hardly have any black population to speak of. The Dutch never had Black and White Minstrels as a popular form of entertainment. Their historical problems with racism look very different from Anglo-American equivalents, and the idea of a white person pretending to be a black person doesn’t necessary ring any “woah, that’s racist” bells.
Blackface is extremely taboo in Anglosphere countries (quite rightly so, IMO) because it has an ugly and exploitative history. It’s clearly on the unacceptable side of a line of acceptable behaviour that’s continually being negotiated. At the moment, I’m not sure if dressing up as the Village People is on one side of that line or the other. Power Rangers Ninja Storm seems OK for now.
My suspicion is that the ideas of appropriation are an attempt to construct a principled scheme for defending and advancing that line without having to evaluate every case on its own merits. It would be nice if we could do this, but it seems like the line is an accident of history, without any principles from which to project it.
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Can appropriation of ‘white’ (which, of course is definitely a monolith) culture theoretically happen?
More strictly, is this accusation ever actually made?
I worry that ‘cultural appropriation’ is just another way of saying ‘Bad White People!’.
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It is usually defined as the exploitation of a non-dominant culture by a dominant culture. For instance, to pick an example that I’m pretty sure is not okay: white people sometimes go “I am learning the Exotic Spiritual Wisdom of the East!” and become Buddhists without really understanding Buddhism. However, basically no Asian Americans go “I am learning the Exotic Spiritual Wisdom of the West!” and become evangelicals without really understanding evangelicalism; even if they did, they would not become the dominant narrative in America of What Evangelicalism Really Is, the same way that white-people Buddhism is the dominant narrative of What Buddhism Really Is. I am informed that in Asia some people do talk about learning the Exotic Spiritual Wisdom of the West, but that makes sense, because what culture is dominant is different.
Context matters. There are, in fact, ways that it is possible for white people to hurt people of color where people of color cannot hurt white people, because our culture elevates white people.
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Blackface is actually somewhat common in England among traditional (Morris) dancers. It’s very controversial; there was recently a big blowup in the press when the PM was photographed with a group of blacked up Border Morris dancers. In the US blackface is so widely seen as racist that similar groups substitute other colors for the traditional black, but in the UK there are enough people who think it’s fine that this tradition continues. And it’s not just the relative popularity of minstrelsy historically; minstrel shows with blacked up whites mocking black culture were also extremely popular in the UK .
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Is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thames_Town cultural appropriation (in the context where it is, just outside Shanghai)? Are there any Westerners who are upset by it?
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The problem with black face seems to be something completely different than appropriation though. Historically it was used to mock black people with racial stereotypes, and has become taboo because of the association (like how swastikas are taboo by association with past evil). Now that I think about it I have noticed people referring to plain old racism as appropriation before (like with “Native American” Halloween costumes), but that just seems to be confusion. When people use appropriation to mean copying elements of other cultures (often with modifications), I don’t see what the issue is.
As to the Buddhism example, that’s definitely one of the harmful practices no one should have I was talking about, but anyways I fail to see why non-Buddhists would care beyond that. I can see why Buddhists would care (we have a term for this that long predates “cultural appropriation”: Heresy), but not why the ethnic aspect matters or why an atheist materialist like me should care about heresy in Buddhism.
Now, if someone tried to copy an ideology I support but did it very wrong, I would not like this, so if that is considered to be “cultural appropriation” I may have been wrong when I said I don’t see why its ever an issue, but I still don’t care about “appropriation” of other ideologies, and the ethnic part is irrelevant. And calling ideological/religious heresy cultural appropriation seems very strange to me, the cultural appropriation part is not the issue.
Ozy, If those people are in Asia, wouldn’t eastern culture be the dominant one in that context? How is that different? Also, relevant: http://www.jefftk.com/p/why-i-cant-stand-japanese-square-dancers
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That’s what I mean. In Asia. various Asian cultures are dominant, so they do go on about the Exotic Wisdom of the West. (Or so I’m told.)
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Eh, I’ve always just rejected the concept of appropriation outright. I oppose indefinite copyright for authors because it shouldn’t be possible to own a piece of culture forever. Why would I be in favor of indefinite copyright of an entire culture? Just think of appropriated culture as “fanculture,” if it helps. Bad fanculture, maybe, but when has anyone here held that as grounds for suppressing fan artists?
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Haha I just realized that the guy who wrote that is commenting in this thread.
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I see the world Buddhist community as strong enough to take care of itself, so to speak. They have educated people with both their own local languages and English, French, etc, and successrul publishing houses, and temples and monasteries and scriptures. The religions/cultures that lack those, like Native Americans’, can be distorted or destroyed by rich outsiders’ versions.
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Something vaguely relevant to Ozy’s example:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NunsAreMikos
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AnimeCatholicism
This does seem like a pretty solid case that (Ozy’s description of) appropriation can indeed include “appropriating from white people”, and thus passes the test.
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Yes, but “appropriation” is almost alway used in the context of saying that it is a bad thing that you shouldn’t do, whereas Anime Catholicism is fucking awesome and many of the people it’s being “appropriated” from totally agree. (ie Hellsing being popular in Italy apparently.)
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I essentially agree that “cultural appropriation” is an unhealthy concept. People shouldn’t dress like a Catholic priest or a Zen monk unless they really are a monk/priest. And some Halloween costumes are offensive. But I do not see why the race/culture of the person wearing the outfit is important at all. If you are dressed in an offensive outfit or one that is “reserved” for actual monks/etc your race doesn’t matter.
I don’t think Ozy’s religion examples make much sense either. Westerner’s converting to Buddhism without much knowledge does not seem like it hurts Buddhism very much. People with a shallow understanding of Buddhism consume way more “authentic” Buddhist writings/speeches than do non-Buddhists. It is also rather speculative to assume there is such a thing as “Authentic” Buddhism. The various schools of Buddhism can be radically different. Compare Soto Zen to pure land for a striking example. Finally I doubt most Eastern Buddhists have a particularly “deep” understanding of Buddhism. Just as most Western Christians lack information about the very basics of Chuirch history and the arguments for their denominations spiritual positions. Can most Catholics really give accurate details on why the church believes in the literal interpretation of the Eucharist?
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Also worth pointing out in this case specifically, that the major rise of Western Buddhism started among Americans decades after significant exposure from Japanese Buddhists traveling the country lecturing on Buddhism.
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There is such a thing as cultural appropriation, though I hadn’t heard there’d been an apology. I didn’t hear the introduction before– it’s remarkably awful. Unfortunately, I don’t want to listen to it again to go into detail about what wrong about Judaism in there.
Occasionally, cultural appropriation can get deadly.
This being said, learning from other cultures is normal human behavior and shouldn’t be stigmatized.
Have something.cheerful on the subject. There’s another Paley video on the subject I wanted but couldn’t find– it’s the one about companies pouring memes into us, but trying to limit how we can pour our responses out.
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My interpretation is that your examples make my point. You posted links to an antoi-semite and a bunch of white nationalists. The problem here isn’t that they were “culturally appropriating” its that are a bunch of racists. If they said their racist screeds without using any Jewish/Christian symbols they would be just as bad.
As far as I cna tell whenever a “culturally appropriative” act is actually bad its bad for some reason that is orthogonal to the race/culture of the participants. It wouldn’t be ok for anyone to say that racist bile. The exact way someone is racist is not what causes racism to be bad.
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The thing is, the first one is far from the central example of an anti-semite. They think Judaism is really wonderful, but they can do better with it than actual Jews do.
They are extraordinarily rude, but not physically dangerous.
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If they were doing the “We can do Judaism better the Jews” is a non-racist way I would be fine with it. The christian faith is literally based on the premise that “we have a better version of Judaism then the Jews and they should all convert.” Jesus in fact also literally called himself a King while referencing Jewish Symbolism. Islam says “we have the real version of both Judaism and Christianity.” It explicitly knocks Jesus down to a prophet, etc.
So I don’t really see how one can take a principled stance against people saying “we have the right version of X religion.” Unless you are also going to condemn Christianity and Islam. My true rejection of those people is that sound awfully racist to me, which is not contradictory. I also the overtly racist parts of Christianity and Islam in general.
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“Westerner’s converting to Buddhism without much knowledge does not seem like it hurts Buddhism very much.”
Well, here’s a possible analogy.
Fundamentalist Christians in the US pretty unambiguously hurt Christianity; they popularize the misconception that most Christians are like that, and their theology often funges against other forms of theology (people who would otherwise have joined mainstream denominations going to fundamentalist ones instead.)
Similarly, pop Buddhism hurts regular Buddhism in the West; it makes people dismiss Buddhism as mystic-sounding gibberish without learning more about it, and people who would otherwise have sought out information on Buddhism in order to convert are likely to instead encounter pop Buddhism.
However, I think it’s worth noting is that this harm consists almost entirely of Westerners not converting to Buddhism. So Westerners adopting a policy of never “appropriating” Buddhism would, if anything, be more harmful. The solution seems to be “teach people in the West about real Buddhism”, which doesn’t quite fit with the narrative of “appropriation” … or does it?
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– It’s often very insulting, if you care about something a lot, or even if it’s a big deal in your life, or you consider it ancient and traditional, and then it becomes some kind of fleeting trend in a foreign, cosmopolitan nation. This is an entirely emotional thing, but if you are, say, Asian then it happens all the time. It’s also possible to kind of give the impression that you are exotic and provincial, but not worthy of having your culture learned by normal exchange.
Personal not-really-culture example: Gluten-free food. I started eating gluten-free when it was very difficult to do so. Now there is an abundance of gluten-free food and the idea is on the map culturally, but it seems to have become some kind of scientifically unsupported trendy diet, which I find alienating. There’s the sense that none of the people doing this care about me, especially when things which would never have gluten, even as a natural contaminant, brag about being gluten free.
– It’s even worse if all of your cultural innovations only become noted once rich outsiders take them up — for example many American musical trends since 1950 or before have been based on stuff invented by black people, but the black music they are based on hasn’t gained much exposure except the fairly recent example of rap.
– IN PARTICULAR, multicultural societies and social media mean that you will always hear about it when this happens, as opposed to the old days when groups didn’t care about each other as much and there was less communication. Today, if you dress up as $ethnic_costume at Halloween, then either you chose a really obscure group or somebody of that group will hear about it, and because multiculturalism, there is the sense that society should care about them and it was just rubbed in their face that it doesn’t.
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So complaining about appropriation is basically hipsterism.That seems quite useful in determining how seriously to take the issue.
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I’m really not sure what you mean by that?
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I get frightened at ignorance and re-writing history. Like, there was a historical show at Disneyland with Big Bird singing “You’re nothing but a hound dog.” ;-/
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Lifts hand up to sky
Bless this post
Now can able-bodied SJWs finally pretend to care that physically disabled people are still being portrayed by able-bodied people in the year of our lord 2014
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I think that would take precious time away from the most important anti-ableism cause: eliminating the use of horrible slurs like “turn a blind eye” and “dumb” and the metaphorical use of “crippled.”
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You know, at one point, I was reading the comments on a chapter of a certain on-going web serial, and found myself surprised when someone asked for people to stop using the word “blind” metaphorically in the discussion, because they were literally blind and found it offensive.
I wouldn’t even have noticed the usage if this person hadn’t pointed it out. (I almost commented to say that it doesn’t bother me, but I can never bring myself to comment on this story because I am silly.)
I have a lot of blind-people things I can complain about, but I don’t give half a crap about figurative use of vision-related terms. I use “see” figuratively because that’s just how I learned the bloody language.
Of course, there are blind SJWs, just like there are blind hackers and blind bullies and blind hypercompetent demigods who make me hyperjealous.
(What does bother me, though, is that a lot of innovations that would make my life easier are not profitable enough in general for anyone to make them reality. They could be, in principal, but in practice they totally aren’t.)
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See, when people say that phrases like “turn a blind eye” are “horrible slurs”, that’s where I stop listening. “You retard!” is a horrible slur and is hurtful and should not be used; commemorating Admiral Nelson is less so:
I am more inclined to be persuaded by someone saying “Please consider your use of language” in such cases, but someone saying “This horrible slur!” makes me regard them in the light of being in need of a fainting couch and some sal volatile to restore their delicate blossom sensibilities. and also that they should probably never step outside their door because of the limitless sources of offence awaiting them.
(Oh, and before anyone leaps to attack me on grounds of “That’s okay for you as an able-bodied person!”, you have no idea of what my physical or mental states of health are, so back off, I don’t feel like “proving” I have the right to this opinion because I’m “non-typical” enough to be allowed Disability Points).
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Maybe some autistic people would take exception at your friend’s stimming because it cultivates unrealistic expectations for them. For example, if your friend stims and person A asks them to stop, your friend can do it. If A saw an autistic person stimming and asked them to stop, A would now have the expectation that this is reasonable because that other person could do it, so why not this one?
Though most people don’t even know stimming exists, so I’m not sure that non-autistic people stimming would really make expectations more unreasonable for autistic people.
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You should not ask anyone to stop stimming. It is not ok AT ALL to tell people to stop expressing their emotions in a harmless way.
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This is broadly true, with one caveat: Some forms of stimming can cause great distress for people with the wrong set of sensory issues, and/or can be highly distracting to people who need to concentrate on something else. Depending on various factors including who does or does not have to be there, it seems to me that asking someone to avoid producing stimulus X (or go elsewhere to do it) can sometimes be reasonable. But there’s a big difference between “I need you not to do that around me in order for me to be able to function” and “stop being weird around me,” and the vast majority of requests for someone to stop stimming are definitely the latter.
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The reason many Deaf people object to sign language being “appropriated” by hearing people is that often hearing people will decide that there is a “better” way to sign something, be it a word or a concept, without regard for the cultural reasons for the signs. I work with Deaf people and have yet to meet a single one who objects to hearies learning ASL properly and respecting the culture as well as the language…many hearies do NOT respect the language, which has its own syntax and grammar, insisting that it’s not a “real” language or that, because it doesn’t follow English word order/ grammar, etc., its “lazy” or “wrong”. When hearing people respect the language and the Deaf people who use it, Deaf people don’t object to their language being learned and used.
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Apologies for the necrocomment, but in Britain, there’s BSL (British Sign Language), which has its own word-order and grammar and there’s SSE (Sign Supported English) which uses BSL signs, but follows English word-order and grammar.
SSE is often used by someone who is speaking and signing at the same time and is sometimes used by sign-language interpreters because it reduces interpretation delay.
Having a name for “hearing people’s bad version of sign language” that tells them they’re not doing it right seems to have had a useful effect in getting hearing people to understand that they are doing it wrong.
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I love this article! Love it! I don’t know why so many folks are concentrating on the “edge cases” and playing the devil’s advocate, essentially. The basic premise is sound and people need to know about that.
I love it when a technology that benefits me as a disabled person is available to everyone and used widely and without stigma! More examples are:
-Grocery delivery
-Food delivery
-Indoor temperature regulation
-Microwaves & mini-fridges
-Heating pads
-Ready to eat food
-Home automation systems
Wait a sec, I bet some of these don’t even sound like accomodations. That’s the goal! Disability is a social condition. CHange the structure of society and its physical formats and methods, and you can alter or remove disability. Today, people can be non-disabled when in the past, because of attitudes or lack of technology, they would have been disabled. Think about something like glasses. No one says that wearing glasses for moderate vision impairment is a disability. We wouldn’t think twice about a CEO or a president with glasses… there is no oppression of glasses-wearers. But glasses are a technology that was invented. If they did not exist, large segments of the population would be disabled.
I also love that I don’t need to prove anything to get my wheelchair, or to get a cane. I DO have to prove things when the resource is more limited (disabled parking, or disability accomodation at college). However, wheelchairs can be manufactured according to demand, so I can have one if I think I need one. No one has to approve me. This gives us POWER!
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Reblogged this on Rambling Justice.
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A bit of a lesser example of this, but I work as a transcriptionist/notetaker for students who are deaf or who have reduced hearing. I basically live transcribe lectures as close to the spoken word as I can.
While the benefits to the student are obvious, the notes benefit the instructor or professor as well. I’m not allowed to share my notes with other students, of course (that would defeat the equitable purpose of my job), but for the first three weeks of class, I’m required by my employer to email the completed notes to the professor or instructor teaching the class for quality assurance purposes. I’ve been told on numerous occasions by instructors and professors that these notes are helpful in assessing their lecturing skills and making improvements for future classes so as to serve the entire classroom better.
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There’s a lot wrong with your broad generalisation here. Let me give you just 2 examples.
1. Accessible toilets.
There’s usually just 1, if any at all. Aid everyone else is using, what is the person who can only use that 1 meant to do? Another issue under this topic is that accessible toilets are the ones being turned into ‘gender neutral toilets. So while there is still the “family toilet for anyone ,.and many womens and mens stalls, the 1 toilet a wheelchair user can use is now being used by everybody. Disabled people are literally pissing themselves waiting in line
2. Disabled access at concerts & other events
Most venues have anywhere from 3 to 30 spaces, of any . The majority of medium size venues have less that 10 spots. So of people with fibromyalgia, dyslexia, depression, or nothing use them, them the people who have however else to sit miss out. And I’ve seen girls running up to a venue then hobbling with a crutch when they get close. Someone who has no limitations whatsoever , as well as someone with depression, should not be allowed to take one of the very few seats. Most places aren’t accessible anyway, so in the few that are, disabled people are missing out.
There are SO many more instances of similar things. And disability is very much being appropriated by the able-bodied. I can’t tell you how many people who have fibromyalgia & ME claim to be disabled, and actually attack truly disabled people, both online and in person. These people don’t need any accommodation to go places and do things. They are taking over disabled spaces and people who need those spaces are suffering.
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Reblogged this on Autism Candles.
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