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I’m white and while I have been educating myself about racism I still have a lot of things to learn. So please don’t consider this post a “this is the be-all and end-all of what cultural appropriation means”; this is just my current understanding of cultural appropriation, which I am presenting in the hopes that someone will tell me where I’ve wandered off into the wrong direction. (Also, I’m going to be using the abbreviation “POC,” which stands for “people of color.”)
The definitions of cultural appropriation I’ve found are usually something like this: “Taking intellectual property, traditional knowledge, cultural expressions, or artifacts from someone else’s culture without permission.” This is a bit difficult to understand to me, because I find it hard to grasp how you could get permission from a culture. You can only get permission from people in that culture, some of whom will be all “dude, whatever, don’t give a fuck” and some of whom will be all “the fuck? Why are you doing that? Give that back!” (Even the Seminoles, who have an actual tribal government the Florida State University Seminoles talked to to clear their mascot with, have dissenting Seminoles who are pissed as fuck about the whole matter.)
I think that part of the problem might be that when people use the term “cultural appropriation” they mean one of about four different things:
1) Dressing up as or incorporating in your art or naming your sports team after an offensive stereotype of POC. This is the definition that comes up every Halloween when people insist on dressing up as Pocahotties and Injun Braves, and when Victoria’s Secret decides to put Native American headdresses on their models. I am not sure why people think this is okay. Do not dress up as an oversexualized stereotype of the people your culture fucking committed genocide against. Similarly, this point covers Native American sports team mascots, Urban Outfitters “Navajo” bracelets, etc.
I’m… also not really sure why people call this cultural appropriation, because to me it seems like a pretty cut-and-dried case of “offensive stereotypes are bad.”
2) Do not use sacred shit from religions you don’t belong to. This is basic respect. People take their sacred shit very seriously, and it greatly upsets them when you use their sacred shit in ways other than the approved-of one. Do not upset people for no reason. (This guideline also applies to non-POC religions, of course, but very few people put on Mormon temple garments because they look cool.)
3) Do not use things associated with POC in ways that reinforce stereotypes of POC. For instance, do not do Tantra because it is spiritual and exotic and ancient and totally sexy. It is a common Orientalizing stereotype that Asian people are exotic, spiritual, and the heirs to ancient wisdom; thinking that Tantra is awesome because it is exotic ancient spiritual wisdom from the East is playing into that exact stereotype.
Similarly, white-people dreadlocks are problematic. Black people still face all kinds of racist shit– from white people trying to touch their hair to losing out on jobs– if they style their hair the way it naturally grows instead of making it look like white hair; it is incredibly fucked that black people having their hair the way it naturally grows is considered “rebellious.” Many black people are, understandably, somewhat irritated when white people decide that it is cool and countercultural to have dreadlocks. For black people, dreadlocks are a rebellion against a racist society and a statement of pride in their race; for white people they’re… um, cool because, like, black people, man.
4) Don’t steal POC’s ideas and cultural artifacts without credit. See also: the entire history of rock music. Rock music was deeply influenced by black musicians– blues, gospel, vocal groups. So of course white men like Elvis and Bill Haley ran off with their ideas and got all the credit for being musical fucking geniuses. Because, y’know, white. Similar things happen with everything from nail art to feminist theory.
It’s difficult to figure out a way to deal with this toxic dynamic. “White people, you don’t get to wear nail art or listen to rock music” is a suboptimal solution. I think ultimately the solution is to be very intentional about pointing out your influences and promoting the careers of talented POC within your field and seeking out POC’s work instead of assuming that what white people are doing is the only interesting culture that’s going on. (For instance, it would be incredibly dishonest and fucked of me to pretend that my thoughts on class and race within feminism and polyamory aren’t influenced by Audre Lorde, or that my thoughts on masculinity or love don’t come straight from bell hooks. I am not original.) But I’m not sure if that’s enough to end that dynamic.
So. That’s what I have. Your thoughts?
blacktrance said:
“Do not use sacred shit from religions you don’t belong to. This is basic respect. People take their sacred shit very seriously, and it greatly upsets them when you use their sacred shit in ways other than the approved-of one.”
The drawback to this is that it encourages being offended, and perpetuates the sacralization of whatever would otherwise be appropriated.
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Illuminati Initiate said:
Yeah, I really don’t like this one in particular. It’s basically saying no satire ever.
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Illuminati Initiate said:
Actually, now that I wrote that I’m starting to question the value of satire beyond being propaganda. It’s basically a form of strawmaning.
(propaganda value can still be important though)
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stargirlprincess said:
I actually think propoganda is pretty unhealthy intellectually. Gotta be very careful with it. Though in moderation its prolly ok.
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Ghatanathoah said:
Humor. Satire is funny. Humor and funniness are their own rewards.
I’m also not sure all satire is strawmanning. For instance, satire that points out absurd double-standards isn’t strawmanning a principle, it’s just pointing out that a principle is being applied inconsistently.
Also, while strawmanning is a no-no in terms of debate, it is very useful in getting people to question their assumptions about something they haven’t thought about before. Satire can be “thought-provoking” in the sense that it forces people to think about why they are doing something. Having to steel-man a straw-man results in your life being less unexamined than it was before.
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MugaSofer said:
What the hell kind of satire are you doing that involves taking other religion’s sacred items and dicking around with them?
That’s not satire, dude, that’s being a dick.
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wireheadwannabe said:
“2) Do not use sacred shit from religions you don’t belong to”
It occurs to me that this is exactly what conservative Christians are objecting to with regards to the “War on Christmas.” I think my only real objections to their position are:
A) Christmas is both a secular and a religious holiday, and is deeply ingrained enough in our culture that it doesn’t count as appropriation.
B) I’m not able to come up with a good account of what makes appropriation wrong and when, and apparently neither is anyone else.
Obviously A) is exactly what conservatives object to. Unfortunately I’m not sure how we would even begin to debate the question since we have no agreed upon standards for how to treat cultural intellectual property.
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AJD said:
Wait, I thought what conservative Christians were terming the “war on Christmas” was the *lack* of use of sacred shit from their religion—e.g., celebrating a “holiday season” instead of explicitly stating that the holiday being celebrated is Christmas.
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Susebron said:
Yeah, that’s what I’ve seen them complaining about. The typical example is complaining about the use of “happy holidays” instead of “merry Christmas”.
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Patrick said:
They believe that Christmas is an inherently Christian holiday. They believe that everyone who celebrates “holidays” without Jesus-ing it up is appropriating their religion. They want secular types to stop appropriating their stuff. But they don’t want secular types to do this by ceasing to celebrate holidays. They want secular types to do this by ceasing to be secular types.
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mythago said:
The “War on Christmas” is primarily Christian anti-Semitism with an anti-atheist chaser.
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Nornagest said:
I think I’m gonna need that fleshed out a little more. Anti-atheism, sure, I’d buy that. I’d be even more inclined to buy it as anti-secularism, since the kinds of people that talk about the “War on Christmas” tend to view atheism and secularism as points on the same spectrum. But anti-Semitism? I’m not saying it’s out of the question, but if this particular manufactured outrage is dog-whistle, it’s not one that I’ve ever managed to hear. And I’m pretty good at hearing dog whistles.
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kalvarnsen said:
“A) Christmas is both a secular and a religious holiday, and is deeply ingrained enough in our culture that it doesn’t count as appropriation.”
Yes, but Christmas became secularised and ingrained into non-religious culture because it was so commonly practiced by people who aren’t Christians – a process that Ozy would define as one of appropriation.
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Nita said:
Arguably, Christians appropriated the winter solstice celebration practiced by many pre-Christian (“pagan”) cultures.
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kalvarnsen said:
@Nita: Arguably. But even if we accept that Christmas is actually a pre-Christian ceremony appropraited by Christians, that doesn’t make it any better for atheists to re-appropriate it.
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mstevens said:
“3) Do not use things associated with POC in ways that reinforce stereotypes of POC. For instance, do not do Tantra because it is spiritual and exotic and ancient and totally sexy. It is a common Orientalizing stereotype that Asian people are exotic, spiritual, and the heirs to ancient wisdom; thinking that Tantra is awesome because it is exotic ancient spiritual wisdom from the East is playing into that exact stereotype.”
This part seems a bit weird. Are we really not allowed to believe anything that has been associated with a stereotype? For example I’m quite interested in Buddhism. The ancient wisdom involved is a selling point. Do I have to not consider that a plus point because some people have used it in a stereotype?
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Nick T said:
There’s a difference between thinking that something is interesting because it’s Exotic(tm) Ancient(tm) Spiritual Wisdom from the East(tm) — because it’s seen as having a bunch of XML tags that you want to associate with — and thinking that something is interesting because of what you know about what it actually is (or even because you’ve noticed that, as a heuristic, Eastern spiritual traditions work for you or something like that). In addition to the former being terrible individual intellectual practice, if more people in a culture are doing it than are interested in the actual thing it contributes to the actual thing being forgotten, which seems to be one of the more important things that ‘cultural appropriation’ is pointing at.
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Sonata Green said:
There’s a grammatical ambiguity here. You seem to be parsing as “Do not do Tantra. The reason why you should not do Tantra is because it is spiritual and exotic and ancient and totally sexy.”. I think the intended meaning was “If you want to do Tantra, and if the reason why you want to do Tantra is because it is spiritual and exotic and ancient and totally sexy, then you have a bad reason for wanting to do Tantra, and you should go away and think about your life choices, and either come back when you have a good reason for wanting to do Tantra, or else find something else to do instead.”.
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ozymandias said:
Yes, what Sonata and Nick said.
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Taymon A. Beal said:
Hypothesis: “Do not use things associated with POC in ways that reinforce stereotypes of POC” ends up reducing to “do not use things associated with POC, period”, because there are so many stereotypes, many of which are mutually contradictory, that anything you do is going to reinforce one of them.
I don’t like this solution and wonder if there’s a better one. Maybe we try to resolve the empirical question of which stereotypes are actually prevalent/harmful enough that there’s a causal connection between reinforcing them through single isolated examples and actually making people’s lives worse.
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Nomophilos said:
I would be in favor of “be aware of the most prominent clichés in your genre and theme, and try to avoid using them naively if you don’t have a good reason to, especially the harmful ones”. Use your brain for five minutes and at least consider what it would mean to lampshade or invert them, see if it weakens or improves your work.
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pocketjacks said:
“Cultural appropriation” is kind of a difficult concept for me to get my head around. I do agree somewhat with conservative critics who say that on the one hand, if you don’t include certain characters, that’s erasure, but if you do, that’s cultural appropriation. As someone of Asian descent, I often feel like when people complain about cultural appropriation, they’re really complaining about something else, and this is just one of those buzzwords that people latch onto for the lack of a better term to use. Personally, I don’t see why, for instance, white people getting Chinese or Japanese letter tattoos is something to get upset about. (Or incessantly mock, which I’d categorize as “getting upset about it without admitting that you are”.)
I don’t really see what extra information the term “cultural appropriation” conveys that the basic guideline of “don’t use caricatures” doesn’t already convey.
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Nomophilos said:
When faced with lists like that, there’s always a temptation to break them because “I don’t like being told what to do” – a bit like a sibling annoying another by ordering him to do something he was planning to do anyway.
And this has two consequences:
– People having a habit of breaking norms like that for the sake of it, leaving to what TV Tropes calls “dead baby humor” where they try to be as politically incorrect as possible, with a ready-made defense (it’s a joke!) to any criticism.
– Those in favour of the original social norms may pretend they don’t see a difference between people being offensive for fun/as a reaction, and people being racist/whateverist.
… a sure recipe for flame wars and general mistrust.
To get a bit less meta, I’m not sure I agree that all cases of “cultural appropriation” are bad (to the point where it should be banned, formally or informally); and I think I would rather live in a world where creators didn’t have to worry about accusations of cultural appropriation; I mostly wish music was judged according to how pleasant to the ear it is, visual art by how pretty it is, games by how fun they are, etc. I’m willing to forego a bit of quality to avoid content that encourages bad behavior, or has too many negative stereotypes, but not too much beyond that …
If this concept was taken seriously, it would condemn a big chunk of Fantasy (in gaming, literature, movies, etc.) as fantasy worlds frequently feature counterparts to real cultures, and they do play up the stereotypes.
I would rather see more praise and appreciation of when cultural references are *well* done, rather than condemnation of when it’s badly done.
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mythago said:
So, because some people are contrary assholes who get off on punching down, we mustn’t ever criticize them?
As you note in your first paragraph, that contrarian impulse is immature and selfish.
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MugaSofer said:
Yeah, there’s an important difference between constructive criticism and dogpiling; which Social Justice has a hard time grasping as a movement. (Even more so than other movements, I think.)
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stargirlprincess said:
In practice the idea of cultural appropriation seems to be about punishing individuals for things cultures/groups did. And I am not really going to get on board with this.
I have been there when people started giving a white girl shit for having dreads. I had to jump in to defend her and take some of the heat off of her (I know not everyone wants to be defended but she did and based on our later conversations she was super happy someone jumped in with her). The girl with dreads is super liberal. She would never do anything like this:
“Black people still face all kinds of racist shit– from white people trying to touch their hair to losing out on jobs– if they style their hair the way it naturally grows instead of making it look like white hair”
But because some people, many of which share her skin color are terrible she gets attacked? Maybe some people want to have a “nice” theory of cultural appropriation but I don’t see how it can be separated from wanting to stop people from engaging in certain behaviors because of things other people with their skin color did.
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stargirlprincess said:
I am white. However I am also bi-sexual and cannot really think of a single thing that would bother me if Straight people did it but not bother me if bi-sexual people did it. The obvious example is saying things like “fag” or “dyke” but I have basically the same opinion. Unless its meant as an insult it doesn’t bother me. And if some people want to use the word in a group and others don’t want to here that word then I usually support the ones who don’t want to here slurs.
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stillnotking said:
It’s worse than that; it’s an utterly misguided and bizarre confusion of groups and individuals. The idea that “POC” have some sort of collective ownership of dreadlocks or rock music is too ludicrous to engage at all. I have difficulty even granting a basic presumption of good faith to the claimants. Shall I, as a white person, stake my claim to the very internet this is written on, because Babbage and Turing and Kahn were white? Shall I claim ownership of social justice, itself a European invention? Ridiculous. The idea would never have crossed my mind, unprompted. Cultures have neither intellectual property rights, nor feelings to hurt.
“Cultural appropriation” has to be exhibit A in the case against the modern social-justice movement (so called); it cannot be defended, and it makes me sad to see someone of Ozy’s intelligence even try.
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skye said:
I’m very late to this party, but I’d like to add that it rubs me wrong to see races divided in two: “white” and “poc”. Cambodians or Bolivians have nothing to do with dreadlocks just because they’re “poc”. That construction also erases inter-poc power dynamics – is it appropriation for Japanese people to emulate Chinese culture?
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kalvarnsen said:
Dreadlocks are what happens when hair isn’t washed regularly and allowed to grow long. If you went to Europe 8000 years ago, you’d see a lot of dreadlocks.
You could make a pretty good case that the word “dreadlock” is an appropriation, but the actual hairstyle? No.
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Nita said:
If a straight-haired person tried your method, what they would get is an irregular mess of matted hair, not a bunch of neat quasi-braids. I’m not quite sure how curly hair works in this respect.
But, more importantly, the current culture pretty much requires black women to regularly get expensive and harmful hair treatments if they want to be seen as “professional”. More natural and less fussy hairstyles, such as the so-called “afro”, cornrows and dreadlocks, are seen as political statements. If I wash and comb my hair, I get a neutral hairstyle. If a black woman does the same, the reaction is completely different.
So, the interests of white people who want their dreadlocks to signal “rebelliousness” are opposed to the interests of black people who want mainstream acceptance of “black hair”.
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kalvarnsen said:
@Nita: Can we assume that every white person who has dreadlocks has them because they want to signal rebelliousness, though?
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MugaSofer said:
@Nita
>More natural and less fussy hairstyles, such as the so-called “afro”, cornrows and dreadlocks, are seen as political statements.
Is this seriously true? I’m not USAian, and that sounds insane.
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Nita said:
I think many people literally don’t realize that Condoleezza Rice, Michelle Obama, Oprah etc. do not have naturally straight hair, and that extremely curly hair looks different and requires different handling.
Example: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/26/vanessa-vandyke-expelled_n_4345326.html
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ebuna said:
@nita: pretty sure if afro-hair was left to grow with washing or combing the result would be ‘an irregular mess of matted hair’. you must ‘lay foundations’ so to speak for it to come out in regular quasi braids, it doesn’t just happen because you have afro hair.
if we’re gonna talk about dreadlocks, let’s not forget about Hindu sadhus and sadhvi.
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Taymon A. Beal said:
Also sorta-relevant note: My understanding is that the original academic definition of cultural appropriation was simply one culture taking cultural elements from another. This of course happens all the time, in all directions (colonizers and colonized both appropriated from one another), and usually isn’t seen as deserving of moral condemnation. Then, as this kind of academic jargon started to be used in mainstream discourse (sometimes by people who didn’t completely understand it), it got redefined as “white people being gauche”. Which is a shame, because it would be easier not to conflate those two things if we had separate terms for them.
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Charlie said:
Right, like, what’s cultural appropriation and what’s cultural exchange? Jazz is super boss, and it wouldn’t have happened without black culture and black people, but it also wouldn’t have happened without white culture and white people. And these people stole from each other like freaking culture bandits.
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stargirlprincess said:
I don’t really know what this even means:
“For instance, do not do Tantra because it is spiritual and exotic and ancient and totally sexy.”
For one I don’t know what you mean by Tantra. The term refers to a large number of diverse practices in Buddhism and other philosophies. But even ignoring this I don’t see why those motivations are so terrible. People with these motivations plausibly will have less understanding of Buddhism than those with other motivations (Though I have no proof of this) but they will probably know much more then people with no involvement with Buddhism,
I have gone to a Zen Temple for many years now. Even though currently this involves a very long commute. I have heard of people getting involved in Zen with the express purpose of improving productivity at work. This doesn’t offend me at all. I am not sure what they are doing is wise but I wish them the best (and also I am not sure its not wise).
If someone thinks tantra (whatever they mean by that) is sexy I hope it improves their sex life. Also I think that having a reason for studying something is helpful. Maybe their goal was something to do with sex but this motivates them to study and appreciate the philosophy for other reasons.*
*Though “sexy” is a perfectly valid and worthwhile thing to pursue.
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thirqual said:
4) is hard. For example Elvis Presley said:
“A lot of people seem to think I started this business. But rock ’n’ roll was here a long time before I came along. Nobody can sing that kind of music like colored people. Let’s face it: I can’t sing like Fats Domino can. I know that.”
He gave credit times and again. Although it did not stick well, should he be blamed?
One could also argue that he contributed in spreading blues and the names of black performers.
3) is extremely vulnerable to motte-and-bailey. What reinforce stereotypes? are asian martial arts fine? dance? is spicy food (if you laugh, you have not read enough tumblr)?
(I disagree strongly with the dreadlocks example for the reasons given by stargirlprincess above).
Something else: if something was practiced by white cultures in the past, then forgotten, then reintroduced via another culture, is it cultural appropriation? that applies to tattoos, belly dancing, dreadlocks, …
2) crosses and christian imagery in Japanese popular media and fashion (not only in Japan).
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Nornagest said:
For what it’s worth: martial arts carries the image of ancient Asian wisdom, but most of what gets taught these days isn’t particularly ancient or specifically Asian. Kano sensei, the founder of Kodokan judo (whence comes Brazilian jujitsu and a number of other arts), synthesized it in the Thirties specifically as a modernization of the Japanese grappling arts, and he was extremely active in promoting it globally. Danzan ryu, the other main Western branch of jujitsu, comes out of Japanese immigrant communities in Hawaii and was also taught to people not of Japanese descent quite early in its history.
I’m talking here about Japanese martial arts because that’s what I’m most familiar with, but the pattern’s typical. If you live in the West and want to learn arts with ancient origins (as opposed to ancient influences, which everything has including pro wrestling), most of the time they’re going to take a lot of finding.
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jeqofire said:
This concept scares the crap out of me, as a writer of fiction/developer of games that I’d kinda like to include more settings and people than just middle class white American males from the late twentieth century. If I include a female character, and don’t make her exactly like the most promenant male, am I being sexist? If I include an encounter between two people who don’t speak the same language natively, and one of them makes a few grammatical errors in the language in which they are conversing, is that racist/nationalist/etc? Am I allowed to set anything anywhere that isn’t Eagleland (or if it’s in the past, Great Britain) without it being cultural appropriation? And, even then, if I only write about westernized privileged whiteboys, is it sexist/racists/nationalist/classist by exclusion?
The version presented here suggests that the answer is “no, those are OK, just avoid offensive stereotypes”.
OK, so, I was reading Naruto fanfiction, and found myself interested in doing yet another “shounen manga with a power trio” parody. The idea was vaguely Naruto-inspired in the sense that Naruto is set in a world built around Ninja mythology, so I tried to think of a similar but underappreciated mythos, and found myself drawn to Iroquois, specifically Seneca. But I’m worried that there’s no way I can do this without it being offensive, even if I consult a panel of Senecas (and said panel doesn’t immediately declare me evil for considering it. Or using the word “Senecas”; is that offensive? I remember reading it in a paraphrased account of some of Cornplanter’s doings by, iirc, one of his descendants.).
I managed to offend someone by sharing worm (because Kayden is treated as a human rather than a soulless abomination in her interlude). I’m not in a hurry to offend an entire culture, and I’m clearly bad at predicting people’s reactions to things.
(Cut: I keep wanting to veer off into defenses of how this story’s world-building is developing in my notes, but the point is more “should I continue, and if so, how?”)
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PsyConomics said:
That does seem like an odd Catch 22. If you only include characters and outlooks that you are familiar with you are doing something terrible. If you include other beliefs and fail you are doing something terrible – and oh, it is nearly impossible to not fail if you are not familiar with the outlook.
The good news, in my experience, is that a lot of the problems can be solved by writing characters as humans and not stereotypes. Don’t have the main female character fall in love with the main male character simply because main male character magical attraction field. Show the human reasons WHY someone would. Your example of the grammatical errors in a conversation between two black people, don’t have the errors happen because they are black, have the errors happen because they are human. Include flavor text about common grammatical mistakes that foreigners make, interact with a differently-raced foreign merchant who assumes that you speak the local language and have them make the same mistakes.
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Jiro said:
“The good news, in my experience, is that a lot of the problems can be solved by writing characters as humans and not stereotypes.”
I don’t like this one. Why? Because it means that any time someone thinks a work is poorly written, they can add “and, because it has a poorly written person of color/woman in it, it’s also racist/sexist”. It turns into an extra accusation that they can automatically tack on to any work they don’t like.
“Don’t have the main female character fall in love with the main male character simply because main male character magical attraction field.”
The result of this is that, oh, 20% of the works with male main characters have magical attraction fields for a woman, 20% of the works with female main characters have magical attraction fields for a man, and the first group gets called sexist while the second group doesn’t.
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Ampersand said:
It’s true, bad critics can make unfair accusations, conflating badly-written but non-stereotypical characters with stereotypes.
But you could say that of any type of criticism. Criticism on any basis – on the basis of characterization, of plot making sense, of story structure, of theme, etc etc – could be done badly or done well. I think it’s a bit ridiculous to say that because critics can be bad critics, “write humans instead of stereotypes” is bad advice.
And the flip side is, intelligent critics can discern the difference and write worthwhile, specific criticism of badly written works, including criticizing stereotypes where they are actually present. That’s worthwhile and tends to improve the field (whatever the field is).
I don’t think a social norm in which no one is ever allowed to criticize racism or sexism would be a very good idea, since authors would have little motivation or opportunity to improve their works along these lines if there’s never any criticism.
But I don’t see how anything other than a “never criticize for sexism or racism” norm would satisfy you, from what you’ve written here.
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Jiro said:
Ampersand: The problem is that saying that a badly written character is racist or sexist makes an accusation of racism or sexism unfalsifiable. Because of the tremendous power of an accusation of racism or sexism, you’ve created a tool that anyone not a white male can use to destroy their enemies, and it’s in the nature of an unfair but effective tool that it will be used.
“Criticism on any basis – on the basis of characterization, of plot making sense, of story structure, of theme, etc etc – could be done badly or done well.”
Now hold on. It sounds here like you’re saying that not any poorly written character will count. It has to be poorly written in a specific way.
That is *not* how it’s typically used.
I’ve seen this most often for SJW criticism of how women are portrayed. The argument is, literally, that if a female character is not well rounded, the character is sexist. For instance, pretty much any character is sexist under http://www.overthinkingit.com/2010/10/11/female-character-flowchart/ .
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Ampersand said:
I think your premise – that “an accusation of sexism or racism” is “a tool that anyone not a white male can use to destroy their enemies” – is a ridiculous exaggeration of reality.
Look, I’ve had critics suggest that my work is sexist and/or racist. It happens. It’s not fun. But it didn’t destroy my career or my life, because I’m too obscure for stuff like that to stick to me.
But the same is true for people who are anything but obscure. A whole bunch of writers – including some quite prominent and respected writers, like Jay Caspian Kang – have argued that “Serial” is racist. Yet Serial is getting a second season, and it’s a safe bet that Sarah Koenig’s income and career prospects have improved because of “Serial.”
The New Yorker called the sitcom “2 Broke Girls” “so racist it is less offensive than baffling,” and that just got renewed for a 4th season.
I can think of lots of SF/F novelists who have, fairly or not, been criticized for sexism and/or racism: Paolo Bacigalupi, NK Jemisin, Saladin Ahmed, Vox Day, Larry Correia, Piers Anthony. In the movie/TV world, there’s Charlie Sheen, Chris Rock, Alex Balwin, Nicholas Cage, Sean Penn, Woody Allen, Aaron Sorkin…. I could go on and on with examples.
Your claim that an accusation of sexism or racism is a career-ending weapon, is contradicted by real life.
“The argument is, literally, that if a female character is not well rounded, the character is sexist. For instance, pretty much any character is sexist under …”
I tried it on my two main characters and got to “congratulations! Strong female character!” each time. So not “any” character.
But even so, I agree that the chart, if we’re supposed to take it seriously, is stupid and badly constructed – and so do dozens of people in the comments (many of whom sound like feminists themselves).
But no one’s career is going to be ended by a chart like that.
If we allow stuff like that to deter us from pursuing a creative career, then the problem is in us. Criticism is something everyone faces, including, sometimes, unfair criticism. Unfair criticism is not just a likelihood, but a certainty, if we’re ever lucky enough to ever publish something that gets a lot of traction and attention in the publishing world.
That’s the rules of the game, in a country with free speech. It’s not fair or reasonable to expect people to not criticize our work, including in ways that we’d rather not be criticized. Being willing to deal with that, and having the determination to create new work anyway, is just one of the job requirements.
(And frankly, if I’m so weak in drive that a chart like that would stop me, then even if all feminist criticism didn’t exist something else would have come along and knocked me off the path anyway.)
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Jiro said:
Okay, then “destroy their enemies” is an exaggeration. How about “hit their enemies much harder than is really justified”. It creates a system where someone who isn’t a white male can attack any work they don’t like in a way that is much more effective than and will be uncritically accepted by a much wider audience than a normal criticism that doesn’t have the added oomph of accusing something of being racist or sexist.
If you’re a nobody, your attack on a work can be ten times more effective than normal and still not be an automatic win. But that doesn’t make it right.
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Ampersand said:
Jiro: First of all, thank you for conceding that “destroy their enemies” is an exaggeration.
“Ten times more effective” – I’m afraid I have no idea what this means. How are you measuring effectiveness here? I would think that the effectiveness of most individual acts of criticism hover around “zero.”
“Hit their enemies much harder than is really justified.” How are we measuring how hard a hit is? How are we measuring if a hit is justified or not? Is it just a matter that criticism you agree with is justified, or is there an objective measure?
Earlier you said that criticism of a work for being sexist or racist is unfair because it is “unfalsifiable.” But isn’t your current argument also unfalsifiable?
I don’t think that all criticism that objects to sexism or racism in the work being criticized is harmful or wrong (but some of it is – see below). But a widespread norm of never criticizing sexism or racism would be harmful, because it would make some beneficial changes unlikely to happen.
* * *
I think there are three factors which are likely to make criticism harmful.
First, criticism that is so openly disdainful that it sends a clear message that the creator of the work, and anyone who enjoys that work, is an awful, evil person.
Unfortunately, this style of criticism is pretty popular, especially on some areas of the internet.
Second, people who seek out opportunities to be furious, either because they enjoy righteous indignation, or because they believe it’s politically expedient. So even small slights are interpreted without any charity and treated as major issues. This second factor combines very harmfully with the first factor.
And third, criticism that would be trivial or even reasonable on its own, but which is amplified by social media into a tsunami of criticism that is usually entirely disproportionate to the original offense. “Shirtstorm” is the obvious example.
Absent these factors, I don’t think that criticism of racism or sexism in a work is especially harmful. And with these factors, even criticism that doesn’t mention racism or sexism can be harmful.
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Jiro said:
“Absent these factors, I don’t think that criticism of racism or sexism in a work is especially harmful. And with these factors, even criticism that doesn’t mention racism or sexism can be harmful.”
Just because something can happen without X doesn’t mean that X can’t be a contributing factor, make it more likely, or increase the damage.
Of course, out of control criticism can be harmful even without accusations of sexism or racism. But accusations of sexism or racism make it *easier* and make the harm *greater*.
“a widespread norm of never criticizing sexism or racism would be harmful”
I;m not asking for a norm of never criticizing such things. I’m only asking that they be criticized on a basis that is more specific than just “it’s a work I don’t like, and characters don’t act realistically in works I don’t like, so works I don’t like are racist/sexist”. (Of course nobody phrases it that way, but it amounts to that.)
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taradinoc said:
“First, criticism that is so openly disdainful that it sends a clear message that the creator of the work, and anyone who enjoys that work, is an awful, evil person.”
As someone who grew up being taught that racism is among the most awful, evil things in the world, and racists are among the most awful, evil people in the world, it seems to me that almost any critic who calls a work racist will be sending that message.
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ozymandias said:
Okay, then, what would you suggest I say if I believe a work is perpetuating stereotypes in a way that is harmful to people of color?
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taradinoc said:
What’s wrong with “this work perpetuates stereotypes”? I think that gets the point across without implying that the work, its creator, and the people who enjoy it are morally tainted.
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ozymandias said:
Are you suggesting that if I say “this work perpetuates stereotypes that are derogatory towards people of color” no one is going to be able to figure out that I mean “this work is being racist”? How bad at reading comprehension do you suppose that people are?
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Ampersand said:
“As someone who grew up being taught that racism is among the most awful, evil things in the world, and racists are among the most awful, evil people in the world, it seems to me that almost any critic who calls a work racist will be sending that message.”
In addition to what Ozy said – I’ve been in many dozens of these discussions, and have tried to avoid going down the “how dare you bring up race/misogyny/homophobia!” rabbit hole, and trust me when I say people can see through your cunning code – I want to push back on how you define “racism” here.
When I was being raised,in the 1970s, it was widely understood that even good white people could have learned racism without being awful, evil people.This was a message told in “special episodes” of popular TV shows (see “The Best Man” episode of “Happy Days,” for instance) and in sanctimonious PSAs shown with Saturday morning cartoons.
I think this understanding is common among SJ types. Here’s the white anti-racism activist Tim Wise (who has himself been criticized for racism) discussing what the word “racism” means:
” I believe that all people (white or of color) raised in a society where racism has been (and still is) so prevalent, will have internalized elements of racist thinking: certain beliefs, stereotypes, assumptions, and judgments about others and themselves. So in countries where beliefs in European/white superiority and domination have been historically embedded, it is likely that everyone in such places will have ingested some of that conditioning. […]
“In other words, we can be racist by conditioning, antiracist by choice. That racism is part of who we are does not mean that it’s all of who we are, or that it must be the controlling or dominant part of who we are. By the same token, just because we choose to be antiracist, does not mean that we no longer carry around some of the racism with which we were raised, or to which we were and are exposed.”
Whatever you think of Wise, that’s not a controversial or even unusual viewpoint among lefties. It’s pretty typical.
Of course, sometimes (often) the word is used to refer to evil people. How do I account for that?
Think of it like the word “dishonest.” The word can be used to describe moral monsters (“Dick Cheney’s dishonesty when talking about torture is stunning”) but it can also describe people who aren’t moral monsters (“I love my Dad, but the way he describes our family dynamics is just dishonest”). This flexibility of how words can be used is utterly normal in English, and as someone who seems to be fluent, you must know that.
If I said “I was raised to believe that only worthless moral scum were ever dishonest, so you shouldn’t use “dishonest” to describe any statement unless you’re condemning the speaker as a moral monster,” would you have trouble spotting the flaw in my logic?
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Jiro said:
People aren’t complaining about flexibility, they’re complaining about motte-and-bailey.
(Also, condemning someone for being dishonest about torture is not the same as condemning him for being dishonest, period.; a lone reference to dishonesty is not taken to be the worst form of dishonesty.)
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Ampersand said:
In what way is (for example) “the depiction of Asians in “Revenge of the Nerds” is racist, because it perpetuates stereotypes that are derogatory toward Asians” a motte-and-bailey?
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ozymandias said:
It’s not motte-and-bailey if the bailey is the actual definition of racism used by the vast majority of SJ people, including everyone in this conversation, including in basic intro “what is racism?” essays, and the motte is a special definition you made up inside of your own head.
Similarly: if a Catholic says “natural law” and say “but natural means exists in nature! You say sloth violates the natural law, but slothful people exist in nature!” and they are like “that is not what the word means”, they are not engaged in motte-and-bailey, I am just being a jerk. Similarly: if I object to a Communist saying the word “materialism” because it means that only the material is real, or a free-will advocate using the word “libertarian” because it is a political platform, I am being willfully obtuse, not making a reasonable point about poor argumentative tactics.
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Jiro said:
The motte-and-bailey comes in when the definition of “racism” is one thing when used to say “this depiction is racist”, but all such racist examples are *condemned* as badly as the worst form of racism.
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taradinoc said:
@Ozy: “Are you suggesting that if I say “this work perpetuates stereotypes that are derogatory towards people of color” no one is going to be able to figure out that I mean “this work is being racist”? How bad at reading comprehension do you suppose that people are?”
Reading comprehension has nothing to do with it: it’s not that the act of perpetuating stereotypes is unforgivably evil, it’s that the word “racist” has the connotation of unforgivable evil. “Racism” is an ideology responsible for the horrors of slavery and the suppression of civil rights, and “racists” are the evil people who implemented it. Perpetuating stereotypes is merely a literary observation.
Likewise, there’s a difference between pointing out that someone is advocating German nationalism and saying he’s spouting Nazi propaganda. One is an observation about the content of his speech. The other is an observation about the content of his speech that directly links him to some of history’s greatest monsters.
@Ampersand: “When I was being raised,in the 1970s, it was widely understood that even good white people could have learned racism without being awful, evil people.”
Perhaps this is a generational difference? When I was being raised in the 1980s, there was no such nuance: racism was evil and inexcusable, period. IIRC, Scott is around the same age as me, and the second meaning of racism he brought up in Words, Words, Words — “racist people deserve to lose everything they have and be hated by everyone” — is awfully similar to the one I heard growing up.
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Ampersand said:
@taradinoc:
Okay, in the 80s I was a teenager, so I can’t speak to what was on kiddie TV. But my assigned reading in the 8th grade included To Kill A Mockingbird, and there were plenty of successful TV shows and movies which included white characters who were racist in some ways but nonetheless redeemable and sympathetic. Off the top of my head, Driving Miss Daisy, Soul Man, Hill Street Blues, Cagney and Lacey, Quantum Leap, Trading Places, and 48 Hrs all had examples of this.
I think that many people who oppose “SJ” takes on racism, and other topics, find it much easier to attack the vocabulary than to actually discuss the issues. If you discuss marriage equality a lot, for instance, it’s common to run into people who will insist that it’s never reasonable to bring up homophobia in such a discussion, because the word homophobia carries connotations.
It’s not even slightly difficult for an intelligent person to distinguish the statement “2 Broke Girls relies on many racist and offensive tropes and stereotypes for its gags” from the statement “the creators of 2 Broke Girls are evil racists who deserve to be hated by everyone.” The difference between these two statements are so large and obvious, that it’s hard to imagine any reasonable person refusing to acknowledge the difference.
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Jiro said:
Ampersnad: Even when “racist” doesn’t directly mean “you are a horrible person”, the bailey is usually “do what I tell you to do to alleviate being racist; if you don’t, you are a horrible person”.
(Needless to say, this only applies to real people, not to characters on TV shows–you can’t order them around.)
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ozymandias said:
So your objection is to… the concept of ethical claims?
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Jiro said:
No, to the motte-and-bailey between one sort of claim and another.
If your standard for racism is such that any work with a poorly written character can be called racist, then racism really isn’t all that bad. If you do that *and* insist that those racist works are horrible things and the authors should be treated like horrible people if they don’t give in to your demand to stop writing like that, you’re doing motte-and-bailey between not-very-bad racism and really bad racism. The latter is not just an ethical claim, it’s a particularly strong one.
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pocketjacks said:
@Jiro and taradinoc,
What’s wrong with “this work perpetuates stereotypes”? I think that gets the point across without implying that the work, its creator, and the people who enjoy it are morally tainted.
You know how “water closet” became “toilet” became “bathroom” became “washroom”? Euphemisms evolve. If people indulge you here, then just 5-10 years later the same people claiming that “racism is soooo terrible that it’s a charge that should never ever be used!” will be claiming that “perpetuating stereotypes is soooo terrible that it’s a charge that should never ever be used!”
Political attack terms by their very nature are “unfalsifiable”. How are “politically correct” or “socialist” falsifiable, in your opinion?
Even when “racist” doesn’t directly mean “you are a horrible person”, the bailey is usually “do what I tell you to do to alleviate being racist; if you don’t, you are a horrible person”.
Again, “do what I tell you to; if you don’t, then you are a horrible person” are the implied conditions behind every political attack term out there. The flipside to racist (or sexist or homophobic), political correct, is no different. That some such terms are more effective than others is largely a testament to society deciding some problems are bigger than others. You don’t have to agree with all of society’s diagnoses – I sure don’t – but you’re not going to get anywhere waging a war on how language works, and how specifically how the language of social criticism works.
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Jiro said:
“Political attack terms by their very nature are “unfalsifiable”.”
Sort of, but not quite. Making it possible to be called racist whenever you have poorly written characters is calling someone racist for doing something that is both subjective and happens very often for innocent reasons. Not all political attacks are like this. (Furthermore, it happens under circumstances which motivate spurious accusations. People love to have extra ammunition to attack anything they don’t like.)
“Again, “do what I tell you to; if you don’t, then you are a horrible person” are the implied conditions behind every political attack term out there.”
As you admit, some terms are more effective than others. That’s just another way of phrasing “some of them imply that you are a horrible person and some don’t”, with “this accusation is less effective” being another way to phrase “you’re not a very horrible person”. Nobody gets fired from their job for opposing vegetable tariffs, even if there’s a logical chain from opposing tariffs to people getting hurt and therefore to “you’re a horrible person if you get it wrong”.
Or to put it another way, only for some accusations do people alieve that you are a horrible person if you don’t obey.
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taradinoc said:
@pocketjacks
The euphemism treadmill is a good thing to keep in mind, but some terms are on an entirely different track. For instance, the term “colored” to refer to a particular race was replaced by others in turn — “black”, “African-American”, “person of color”, etc. — but even when those terms fell into disfavor, they were never as offensive as The N-Word, which is still uniquely offensive.
I believe “racist” fills the role of The N-Word in this sense: it has a unique connotation of inexcusable evil that will never be duplicated by “perpetuating stereotypes” or any other phrase, as long as those phrases aren’t used to call someone inexcusably evil, as the proponents of using the term “racism” insist they don’t mean to do.
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illuminatiinitiate said:
Actually, now that I think about it, I’m surprised I haven’t seen Avatar (the animated TV show, not the horrible Cameron movie) accused of racism/cultural appropriation. The creators are White unless I’m missing something, and the characters were even in animation yellow-face (being voiced by White people mostly). Obviously ATLA is not racist, and I think the concept of cultural appropriation is dumb and that the race of actors vs characters is irrelevant, but I’m surprised I haven’t seen that anywhere.
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Emily Horner (@emhornerbooks) said:
I have seen people raise this as an issue, so it’s not that nobody is talking about it.
But for me, the line between cultural borrowing and cultural appropriation is drawn between the stereotypical and the specific and informed. Fire Nation isn’t just a mishmash of Japanese culture cliches; it’s specifically drawn on Meiji Japan. Some Fire Nation people care very much about honor, and some care very much about tea, but they feel like well-grounded specific character traits rather than cultural stereotypes. They don’t use Chinese or Japanese words (although they borrow a lot of the phonology, which works better for me than if every character had a name that translated to something meaningful) but they use Chinese characters correctly instead of having them mirror imaged or upside down. I’m not Asian but I’ve studied Chinese and Japanese and it’s rare that I come across western narrative that incorporates Asian elements in a way that feels organic, respectful, and informed.
It would have been better if they’d hired more Asian voice actors, I think. But overall it is an example I’d point to of how you can use cultural elements that aren’t your own in a way that works.
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Jiro said:
Emily: If I can use elements of my own culture in a shallow manner, why can’t I do that to elements of another culture too? What you suggest leads to the bizarre situation where if I write a Naruto fanfic, since Naruto is just a tiny, unrepresentative, part of Japanese culture, I am being a racist appropriator who is using Japanese culture shallowly, but a Japanese person can write as many Naruto fanfics as he wants. Or worse yet, if I wear a Naruto costume, since a costume is inherently shallow.
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ninecarpals said:
To bring the discussion back to what really matters: You are a standout human being for sharing Worm. I’m halfway through my second reading now.
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ebuna said:
there’s a great blog for that: writingwithcolor. ask a question and you’ll be given pretty good advice
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Pseudonymous Platypus said:
Regarding black people and dreadlocks, here’s a dissenting opinion from at least one black person: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGgj9S8XO7k. Obviously he doesn’t speak for all black people, but I think that he makes a good point that dreadlocks are or should be (according to him) associated with Rastafarianism, not just black people in general. Thus, he finds it weird that it’s okay for him as a non-Jamaican, non-Rastafarian black person is “allowed” to have dreadlocks whereas white people are not.
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Taymon A. Beal said:
I’m not sure that’s even a dissenting opinion. The Upworthy page for that video is the first Google hit for “is it ok for a white person to wear dreadlocks”, and most of the other results on the page seem to be saying something kind of similar. Not to mention that the only context I’ve seen this particular complaint in is in the middle of lectures about Why Cultural Appropriation Is Bad.
Like, I’m sure there are plenty of people who are legitimately annoyed by it, but I seriously doubt that it’s a majority.
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Pseudonymous Platypus said:
Yes, I think you’re correct. To clarify, I meant dissenting from what Ozy wrote above: “white-people dreadlocks are problematic.” But given that Ozy is not black, that was probably not the best choice of words on my part.
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Jiro said:
“Do not dress up as an oversexualized stereotype of the people your culture fucking committed genocide against.”
Sorry, I don’t buy this one. For one thing, If I can be restricted from doing something because of the excesses of “my culture”, who gets to decide what my culture is? If I’m Polish or Irish, and my ancestors came over after the West was settled, can I then dress up as an Indian at Halloween? Or is it prohibited because the majority white culture accepts me? Would it then have been okay for me to dress up as an Indian in the past when there was a lot of prejudice against Irish and Polish? If I’m an atheist and have experienced discrimination, am I sufficiently separated from the majority white culture that it doesn’t count as “my” culture committing genocide, so I can wear a headdress?
Am I permitted to dress up as an Indian if I can find a tribe that wasn’t genocided? What if I’m black, can I then dress up as an Indian, or did I benefit enough from the genocide of the Indians that this is still prohibited?
If I’m a member of one of the Indian tribes that was violent enough that the only thing that makes them better than the white man is that they lost, would the fact that my ancestors scalped white people mean I am prohibited from dressing up as a white person from a movie?
If I’m a Japanese-American who wants to dress up as Bruce Lee on Halloween, is that prohibited because Japan killed enough Chinese to count as genocide? Or is it permitted if my Japanese ancestors were in internment camps and in no position to kill any Chinese? (Isn’t confusing people with their evil countrymen what led to the internment in the first place?)
For that matter, if I’m a white person, am I prohibited from dressing up as an anime character because white people bombed Hiroshima? Or am I only permitted to dress up as an anime character if I have a coherent political position which leads me to conclude that Hiroshima is morally permissible? OIr does it work the other way around where if I consider Hiroshima morally permissible, I’m obviously an evil oppressor of the Japanese and *that* means I’m prohibited from wearing the costume? What if I’m a Chinese-American person, is it sufficient that Hiroshima was bombed in the name of the Allies, or do I actually have to have white skin to be prohibited from using a Japanese costume?
If I support the right to abortion, am I prohibited from using pregnancy-related imagery in anything because some people think that my support of abortion is tantamount to genocide? What if I don’t support abortion, but someone tells me that I still participate in a culture that does, much like I might not have personally genocided any Indians but my culture did?
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Jiro said:
And now that I think of it, I wonder what Ozy thinks of the Ground Zero Mosque. “Do not glorify your people in a place close to where your culture committed mass murder.”
(And if your reply is “the fact that some Muslims committed mass murder doesn’t mean that their victims get to make a claim against other Muslims”, that’s the whole point, except with whites instead of Muslims.)
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Ampersand said:
There’s a relevant distinction between “mocking and trivializing someone else’s culture” and “building a church/shul/mosque devoted to one’s own culture.” It’s not unreasonable to think that the first is wrong (especially in the context of a conquering culture mocking an oppressed culture) but the second is not.
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Anonymous said:
What about a church on the site of any place where lots of Native Americans died? Not picked for location, just coincidence.
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Ampersand said:
Well, that’s not an exact parallel, because the proposed Cordelia Center wasn’t to be built on the WTC site – it was to be built a couple of blocks away. Again, that seems like an important distinction. I don’t think anyone would have favored a Muslim center – or, for that matter, any one religion’s center – being built on the WTC site, because the feeling is that the WTC site belongs to all New Yorkers.
(Also, contrary to my previous comment, the proposal wasn’t a mosque – it was more like a community center. They’re now talking about building a museum on that site, but it would still include a Muslim meeting/prayer area on the third floor.)
So I’d say that if they wanted to build a Church that was coincidentally a couple of blocks away from the site of a massacre, then I wouldn’t be against that, especially if it were in the middle of Manhattan. In a place like Manhattan, if nothing can be built near where something bad once happened, then nothing could ever be built. NYC thrives by proving that different cultures can live together shoulder-to-shoulder and get along; I don’t think that saying “culture X owns everything in a five block radius of where X happens” is compatible with how a city like that works.
If it were a Church to be built on the site of a slaughter of American Indians… What the Church folks should do, in that case, is open up talks with representatives of the group whose ancestors died there, and see if building the Church there is acceptable to them.
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Lawrence D'Anna said:
It seems to me that none of your examples are actually bad because of appropriation, they are bad for some other reason.
1 & 3: don’t stereotype people
2: don’t needlessly offend people
4: give credit where credit is due
Where’s the problem with appropriation? I think appropriation is great. If some other culture has something to offer, be it art or wisdom or knowledge or style or anything good; why wouldn’t I want my culture to take that and adopt it? I couldn’t care less about someone who’s upset because they don’t think we have a “right” to it. There ain’t no copyright on culture. We don’t have to ask permission. If anything, our ability to appropriate from everyone is one of the great cultural virtues of America.
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ozymandias said:
Yes, but those four things seem to cover everything that appropriation is actually, in the real world, by actual SJ people, used to discuss. So based on how the term is actually used, it seems like you are against cultural appropriation (although perhaps in favor of using different words because it is confusing).
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Ampersand said:
I’m not sure that does cover everything that appropriation covers, as SJ people use the term in the real world.
For example, this – a woman claiming that its unacceptable appropriation for white women to practice belly dance – doesn’t seem to fit neatly under any of the four.
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nydwracu said:
Wait, what?
The history of every culture is packed with people ‘stealing’ things without credit. White people ‘steal’ from white people (Led Zeppelin), white people ‘steal’ from black people (Elvis), black people ‘steal’ from white people (Napoleon Strickland, any black guy who’s ever played a guitar or made electronic music), black people ‘steal’ from black people (a lot of black nationalist mythology — they don’t speak Swahili in West Africa!), white people ‘steal’ from none-of-the-aboves (sushi, karaoke, Lou Harrison, Jonny Olsen), black people ‘steal’ from none-of-the-aboves (Black Muslims), none-of-the-aboves ‘steal’ from white people and then white people ‘steal’ it back (most of the music released on Sublime Frequencies is Southeast Asian psych rock or country music or whatever), and so on.
If you want a really fun example, check this out: a rock band from San Francisco with a black vocalist and a bunch of white guys playing a song based on the kecak, a Balinese dance based on the Ramayana and partially invented by a German.
Blues itself was based on things that were ‘stolen’ from white people: the guitar, the blue note, and so on. The idea that blues represents a purely black form of music is common, but that doesn’t make it not ridiculous. And if you dig around some, you can probably find some white influence in rap. (I don’t think flyting survived long enough to be an influence, but it’s the same thing. They stole rap from the Vikings!)
The usual response is to dislike outright plagiarism, but otherwise not care. Do they hate Jonny Olsen in Laos?
The point will probably be more effective with an example, so here’s some Burmese stoner rock, and here’s Jonny Olsen playing one of the most bizarre instruments on the planet.
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Illuminati Initiate said:
Asian folk death metal is totally a thing, and it sounds awesome.
(Apparently this song is political. I know nothing about Taiwanese politics, and don’t necessarily endorse any message in that song)
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nydwracu said:
Link won’t load because terrible bus internet, but is that Sigh?
Any time someone mentions Asian folk metal, I have to plug Ego Fall, Tengger Cavalry, and The Nine Treasures. Mongolian folk metal! (There’s also Deep Mountains, which is China’s Agalloch, and Altan Urag, which isn’t exactly metal, but it’s closer to metal than, say, Ulytau. I don’t know of any folk metal bands from any other Asian countries; are there any?)
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osberend said:
@Illuminati Initiate: AFAICT, Chthonic is pro–human rights, pro–aboriginal rights, anti-China, and pro–Taiwanese independence. I’ll endorse those messages.
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osberend said:
Also massively anti-KMT, but given the above, that kinda goes without saying.
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unimportantutterance said:
Here you argue that white people, by associating their own attitudes towards stuff with that stuff, are hurting the cause of POC by making their stuff seem less legitimate, and therefore we should have a social rule against it. In your Respectability Politics post, you argue that having social rules against people making things seem less legitimate is a bad idea. Either I’m misunderstanding one of these arguments or one of them is wrong.
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unimportantutterance said:
How does
jibe with
? Is incidentally reinforcing a stereotype only bad if it’s the outgroup doing it? In that case, what would you say to someone who says nounselfers are appropriating the concept of “preferred pronouns” from the narrower group of, say, transsexuals, and thus reinforcing the stereotype that trans people’s pronoun preferences were arbitrary ploys for attention?
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ozymandias said:
There is nothing wrong with studying Tantra. There is quite a lot wrong with believing that Asian people are spiritual, exotic, and the heirs to ancient wisdom (for one thing, it is not true). One behavior that is sometimes a product of those beliefs is studying Tantra. Believing that trans people’s pronouns are arbitrary ploys for attention rarely seems to result in people choosing to use weird pronouns; instead, it usually seems to result in people not using other people’s preferred pronouns, which is bad and I disapprove of it.
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unimportantutterance said:
So we should have a social rule against acting on false stereotypes, but not against acting in a way that might strengthen those stereotypes in others? Makes sense.
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Bugmaster said:
There’s nothing special about music that makes it white, or black, or asian, or whatever. Sure, some specific works of music may be created for the explicit purpose of propagating a certain idea or ideology, such as gospel songs or L’Internationale. But by and large, music is just… music. There are different styles of it, sure, and maybe some ethnic groups prefer some styles over the others, but that’s a statement about those ethnic groups, not a statement about music itself. Same thing goes for other forms of art, too.
What you are doing is taking a universal human experience, and partitioning it by race. White people get to enjoy this kind of music, but not that kind; black people get to enjoy that kind but not this kind; let’s all make sure we’re being super-respectful to each other by staying in our separate corners.
I personally don’t even listen to music all that much, and even I can see how that’s wrong.
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Pseudonymous Platypus said:
I am really not on board with the whole concept of cultural appropriation, so I have problems with all of the proposals in this list, but most of my issues have already been addressed by other commenters. This one sorta has too, but I want to draw particular attention to it anyway:
“2) Do not use sacred shit from religions you don’t belong to.” Why should I give a flying fuck about what people find offensive because of their religious beliefs? Don’t get me wrong, I have many friends who are religious, and I *do* go out of my way to not be an asshole to individuals about their specific beliefs. But frankly, I think all religions are pathological. Religions are offensive *to me* because practically every single one of them, and certainly the most commonly practiced ones, are chock-full of absurd, immoral, misogynistic, homophobic, racist bullshit. If someone uses sacred religious symbols to criticize or satirize these pathological aspects, I don’t think that person is an asshole; I think they are making an important point which maybe religious people should consider before getting all upset.
I guess there’s a difference between mocking religion to make a statement about its negative effects and, say, wearing a turban for Halloween because you think it looks funny. I agree that the latter just makes you an asshole. But I worry about blanket statements that sacred religious icons should be respected just because they’re important to religious people; that seems dangerously close to a carte blanche to censor critical discussion of religion just because some people find it offensive. (I am not only referring to government censorship here; in fact, I’d say that in Western societies the primary impediments to speaking out against religion are societally/culturally enforced.)
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Audrey said:
The dreads thing might make more sense if it were about ethnic groups. If black Americans have a particular perspective on dreadlocks that some of them wish to use to critique white Americans as a group, that is about ethnicity. It does not follow that a rule that applies in American culture can be applied to people who do not have American as part of their ethnicity.
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Ampersand said:
A lot of the time, when I hear people criticizing white people with dreadlocks, it really doesn’t seem to have anything to do with “cultural appropriation.” A lot of the time, it really just seems to be mocking someone for dressing in an unusual way, no different than mocking boys who wear flowy skirts or people with huge hats. (And the people I hear doing the mocking are usually white, but then again, I live in Portland.)
“For black people, dreadlocks are a rebellion against a racist society and a statement of pride in their race; for white people they’re… um, cool because, like, black people, man.”
Or… Maybe the white person is wearing dreads because they think dreads look wonderful. Maybe it’s because they don’t have daily access to a shower and so want a nice-looking hairstyle that doesn’t need to be washed often.
Fashion is an art form that requires people to constantly, constantly borrow from what they see other people wearing and doing. I’m very suspicious of norms that tell artists “you shouldn’t borrow the things you see for your own work,” because I don’t think that’s compatible with a flourishing art culture.
On the other hand, I’m okay with norms that say that art is better done if the things it borrows, it borrows with intent, intelligence, and specific knowledge.
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Ampersand said:
I’d really like to see a lot less complaining on both sides of this issue.
I don’t have much patience for claims that only people from culture X are allowed to write stories set in that culture, or make art drawing upon that culture’s traditions. Art is art, and it should be mainly judged on if it’s bad art or good art, not on who created it.
OTOH, I also don’t have much patience for the argument that goes “I’m afraid to write such and such, because I might be criticized.” I have sympathy, because I know criticism can hurt. Nonetheless, being criticized is part of making art. And no one has a right to control the types of criticism they get.
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Jiro said:
“I’m afraid to be criticized” implies that the standard suggested by the other person encourages baseless criticism. The solution to this is not to learn how to handle fear, it’s to have better standards.
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mythago said:
Not even “I’m afraid to be criticized”, but “it would be wrong and immoral for people to criticize me.”
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Shiggity said:
Seeing “asian” used as an example of a lesser people against whom the privileged can carry out appropriation seems a bit off. That category includes the Japanese and Chinese, the former of whom are formerly imperialist and are among the wealthiest per capita nations in the world, and the latter of whom are currently imperialist and are a nuclear great power. If none of that is enough to get your people into the Privileged Races Club, than this really is all just transparently anti-white.
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ozymandias said:
White people are privileged in the West. Asians are not. I am talking about Western racial dynamics because those are the racial dynamics relevant to most of my audience and that I actually know stuff about, unlike racial dynamics in Asia.
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stargirlprincess said:
Asian Americans have the highest average income. Higher than Whites by a signification amount. Asians are still under-represented politically but in terms of professionally success they are doing even better than whites.
I don’t see a principled way to come to the conclusion that Whites are privileged and Asians are not.
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Ampersand said:
Although I haven’t examined the truth of this, I know that several sociologists and economists have claimed that holding human capital (experience, education, etc) constant, Asian americans are paid less than white Americans. Asians are paid more than whites on average mainly because they are more qualified, if this is true, but nonetheless suffer a wage penalty for being Asian.
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Shiggity said:
This approach has the perverse implication that co-residency actually makes cultural cross-pollination less acceptable. Like, imagine no Chinese ever came to America and vice versa. China is still an imperialist great power, so they and the West can swap culture as equals while sharing stories about how they’re exploiting the fuck out of Africa. Then some Chinese move to America and become a minority there while some Americans move to China and become a minority there. Now all of a sudden, Chinese appropriation of American culture becomes problematic, and vice versa?
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pocketjacks said:
Seeing “asian” used as an example of a lesser people against whom the privileged can carry out appropriation seems a bit off. That category includes the Japanese and Chinese, the former of whom are formerly imperialist and are among the wealthiest per capita nations in the world, and the latter of whom are currently imperialist and are a nuclear great power. If none of that is enough to get your people into the Privileged Races Club, than this really is all just transparently anti-white.
Asian Americans have the highest average income. Higher than Whites by a signification amount. Asians are still under-represented politically but in terms of professionally success they are doing even better than whites.
I don’t see a principled way to come to the conclusion that Whites are privileged and Asians are not.
Well, speaking as someone of Asian descent… this is presuming that income or professional success is the only valid axis upon which “privilege” can hang. (This is a word I otherwise hate, but it’s the best shorthand for now so I’ll drop the scare-quotes henceforth.) I don’t think this is true. Furthermore, I don’t think anyone actually believes this is true. There are many other areas in life in which one group can have power and the other cannot.
Gay people have higher incomes than straight people. Is anyone going to make the claim that therefore gay people have it just as good in American society as straight people? If not, then you see how there can be more to social power and privilege than income.
I fail to see what China’s power has to do with the lives of Chinese-Americans, especially since the historical correlation is the opposite; when a foreign country starts becoming a military challenge for America, people of that ancestry get discriminated within the US.
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R said:
Dreadlocks are (sadly) not just a rasta thing. Polish hicks wore them until meddling public hygiene busybodies stamped out the practicein 19th century..
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Illuminati Initiate said:
Ozy said they don’t necessarily endorse any of their old statements in these reports. It occurs to me we may all be criticizing opinions they no longer hold. Do you still agree with this post Ozy?
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Illuminati Initiate said:
I meant reposts, not reports.
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Pseudonymous Platypus said:
Oh, I didn’t even realize these were still reposts. Anyone know when Ozy is done with their obligation which prevents them from writing new posts? (I can’t remember what it was… a coding camp or something?)
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ozymandias said:
March. We’re getting reposts for a long time.
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Pseudonymous Platypus said:
Oh. Well, in the meantime I’ll continue arguing with past-you 🙂
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Ano said:
Ozy admits themself that it’s fucked up that dreadlocks are considered a symbol of rebellion, then describes them two sentences later as a “rebellion against a racist society. Which one is it?
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pocketjacks said:
It’s fucked up that something as basic and personal as hair needs to be a political battlefield, on which rebellions against a racist society can sometimes be staged. I should think this is obvious, minus an intentionally uncharitable, agenda-driven reading.
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mstevens said:
Is there any chance you can add a repost tag or something so the easily confused (such as me) don’t think these might be new posts?
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ozymandias said:
No, because I’m lazy and there are three months of posts to do it to. There will be no new posts until March.
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hopefullythishelps said:
My earlier comments seemed to have been deleted. If I wrote something that was offensive/annoying I’m really sorry!
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ozymandias said:
I’m sorry, I don’t believe I deleted your comments! They must have gotten eaten by the spamfilter. Did you have a lot of links?
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hopefullythishelps said:
That’s fine! They didn’t have any links, but I didn’t really say anything that others haven’t said already. Just wanted to make sure I didn’t say anything wrong! 🙂
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Chris Karpis said:
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