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Cultural appropriation and day-to-day life


Nephil Thief

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I hope this article is not too excessively political for here...

 

http://everydayfeminism.com/2013/09/cultural-exchange-and-cultural-appropriation/

 

Because I found it pretty thought-provoking.

 

...

 

I'm reminded of my high school's a capella group singing Chanukah songs, back in ~2006. That kind of got under my skin. It felt like an intrusion into my territory - not sacrilege or insult, but an obnoxious blunder. Which is really kind of amusing, when you think about it; seeing as I'm only Jewish by ancestry, certainly not by religion, and barely by culture. My last visit to a synagogue was over a year ago (and I'm surprised I didn't burst into flames when I walked in).

 

On the other hand: my family is full of white jazz musicians. I enjoy cooking curries. I listen to all manner of music myself.

 

Is that not a bit inconsistent?

 

...

 

I have a hard time classifying my feelings on this. Where does one draw the line between appropriation and not-really-anyone's-business? Between being respectful, and being needlessly self-limiting? Between promoting cultural equality, and promoting a kind of cultural protectionism?

 

For my part, I feel that if a Christian chef wants to cook latkes, that's their own business. But Christians singing Jewish holiday songs in front of a mostly Christian crowd feels like a bit much. On the other hand, why don't I feel the same way about jazz and soul food?

 

Like I said: inconsistent. Not good.

 

...

 

More to the point, I'm a (very amateur) writer of fiction. And I feel like I'm pulled in several directions there.

 

On the one hand: "Appropriation is bad."

 

On the other: "Your default setting is politically counterprogressive."

 

Between those, if I want to be a reponsible writer, there's not much I could write about.

 

(Mind, I wouldn't mind a Christian writing about a Jewish character, culture and all; as long as they actually did the research and got things correct. But how much of a litmus test is that? Different kinds of oppression are not equivalent.)

 

...

 

tl;dr

 

If I want to at least try to make the world a slightly better place, what are sensible best practices for navigating the seas of intersecting privilege and oppression?

 

(And should I even be asking that here?)

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"Cultural appropriation" is a godawful term, because the words don't mean what they're trying to mean. The word "appropriation" just means taking something that belongs to someone else, but that's not at all what's at issue in so-called "cultural appropriation." What's at issue in the most offensive examples of the phenomenon might better be termed "stereotype profiteering."

 

For example, consider the NFL selling football gear for their Washington, D.C., franchise. The gear is covered with stereotypical (and inaccurate) depictions of Native Americans and labeled with a racist slur ("Redskin"), no less. (By comparison, imagine if there was a football team called the Alabama Niggers, and the mascot was a person in blackface.) The issue here is the flagrantly racist stereotyping, not the fact that the NFL is depicting a native culture at all. When Kevin Costner made Dances With Wolves, he was depicting a native culture (and making lots of money off it), but not in a similarly offensive way.

 

So ask yourself why you were concerned when a mostly Christian choir sang Jewish songs for a mostly Christian audience. How much were they playing on stereotypes or otherwise showing disrespect to Jews in their performance, and how much were they just singing songs for the sake of the music? If it was pretty much just the latter, then get over yourself. You don't "own" Jewish music, and neither does any other Jew, except insofar as the actual composer has (or at one time had) an intellectual property right in his or her own work. "Cultural appropriation" makes it sound as though someone is hysterically saying, "You're taking what's mine!!" when the cultural product in no sense belongs to that person at all — it's just that someone who kind of looks like that person created that cultural product.

 

Under the same reasoning, feel no shame in depicting people who are not like you in some respect, whether culturally or otherwise. In fact, you should depict people who are in some ways dissimilar from you, and you should borrow ideas from the cultures and backgrounds that produce people who are not identical to you in order to depict those people more accurately and carefully. Just don't play up stereotypes and create one-dimensional portrayals, because that's crappy artistic product and it's also offensive.

 

Take (or "appropriate") all you want. Just don't become a stereotype profiteer.

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Err... Sorry. In retrospect, I think the Chanukah music example was a terribly really bad one. I was fishing for analogies, but there aren't any - because Jewish culture has not been, well, colonized in the same way that African-American culture has.

 

As for the article I linked to, well - my feeling is that, seeing as I'm more closely attached to the colonizing culture, I don't get to ignore the author. Even if what they're saying annoys me at first glance.

 

I don't know. I'm just getting some conflicting messages, and trying to make sense of things. Hope I'm not being too pompous.

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As for the article I linked to, well - my feeling is that, seeing as I'm more closely attached to the colonizing culture, I don't get to ignore the author. Even if what they're saying annoys me at first glance.

I'm not particularly disagreeing with that article, except insofar as I think its terminology — which, to be fair, is the standard progressive terminology right now — is a massive political communication fail. So neither am I arguing that you should ignore the author.

 

What I am saying is that you shouldn't over-read the author and be terrified of everything all the time. Just be respectful and approach things in good faith — this generally means not over-emphasizing stereotypes and bad images of marginalized people — and you'll be fine.

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"Cultural appropriation" is a godawful term, because the words don't mean what they're trying to mean. The word "appropriation" just means taking something that belongs to someone else, but that's not at all what's at issue in so-called "cultural appropriation."

 

well, you know, except when it is. see: the long history of white people in the US being able to popularise and profit from musical traditions whose originators are largely left unacknowledged and unrewarded, from rock and roll to twerking. or see how common it is for people to react positively to "exotic" clothing worn by white people as a fashion statement and turn around and react with hostility or contempt to the same clothing worn by people for whom it's their traditional everyday wear. when people from marginalised racial and ethnic groups are punished for doing something that originated in their own cultural background and white people are rewarded for doing it, i think it's completely reasonable to say that something has been taken away from the former group

 

"Cultural appropriation" makes it sound as though someone is hysterically saying, "You're taking what's mine!!" when the cultural product in no sense belongs to that person at all — it's just that someone who kind of looks like that person created that cultural product.

 

come on, you have to know perfectly well that culture is about more than just looking alike, it's about a shared background, experiences and heritage. of course people are going to be upset when people with no connection to that heritage claim it as their own and push the people who inherited it out in the process

 

also please don't call people who disagree with you (especially people on a feminist blog who disagree with you) "hysterical", it's a term that retains deeply misogynistic undertones to this day. i mean as insulting dogwhistles for talking about women who dare to have opinions go, it's right up there with "shrill", you know? i trust you didn't mean it that way but it's just not a great thing to say

 

I'm reminded of my high school's a capella group singing Chanukah songs, back in ~2006. That kind of got under my skin. It felt like an intrusion into my territory - not sacrilege or insult, but an obnoxious blunder. Which is really kind of amusing, when you think about it; seeing as I'm only Jewish by ancestry, certainly not by religion, and barely by culture. My last visit to a synagogue was over a year ago (and I'm surprised I didn't burst into flames when I walked in).

 

it's late here and i don't really have the energy to respond to the rest of this thread in detail, but: high five, my fellow vaguely Jewish poster

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So yeah, possibly of note: when I mentioned this article to family yesterday, the response included an indication that people trying to police cultural appropriation can "jump off a cliff."

 

In my experience, when someone provokes a suggestion of self-injury or violence like that - even a sarcastic suggestion - it's often an indication that they have a point.

 

it's late here and i don't really have the energy to respond to the rest of this thread in detail, but: high five, my fellow vaguely Jewish poster

 

*high fives*

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also fwiw it doesn't strike me as especially weird that you'd feel a degree of personal investment in Jewish culture given how you've described your background. even if you're not actively practicing Judaism as a religion, you're connected to cultural traditions that take more than a generation or two to completely fade imo, and those are going to affect the worldview of the people you grew up with and the way you were raised

 

my mother had the full second-generation-immigrant experience of being bullied at school for wearing weird clothes and eating weird foods, and of growing up with parents who had fled persecution (they were Ukrainians of Jewish background who fled the USSR to Western Europe during dekulakization in the early '30s; for some mysterious reason living as Ukrainian Jews in Western Europe in the 1930s didn't turn out so great for them either, so they eventually ended up in Australia) and moved to a country where they knew nobody, where few people could speak their native language, and where they had to learn all kinds of new rules, from laws to everyday social conventions. i can't know exactly what that was like for her or for her parents but i can still feel the echoes of it in my own upbringing

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well, you know, except when it is. see: the long history of white people in the US being able to popularise and profit from musical traditions whose originators are largely left unacknowledged and unrewarded, from rock and roll to twerking. or see how common it is for people to react positively to "exotic" clothing worn by white people as a fashion statement and turn around and react with hostility or contempt to the same clothing worn by people for whom it's their traditional everyday wear. when people from marginalised racial and ethnic groups are punished for doing something that originated in their own cultural background and white people are rewarded for doing it, i think it's completely reasonable to say that something has been taken away from the former group

 

It's not. Black Americans, the indistinct group, does not own or control rock and roll or twerking just for having invented them, any more than Greeks can claim a right to control the use of written vowels or the descendants of Thomas Edison can demand you stop making light bulbs and give them all the light bulbs you have right now back to them. These are ideas and practices and artifacts that naturally spread, and they neither are nor should they be demographically copywritten, and the question of who gets credit for what is an ouroborous, especially in the case of entire cultural groups in the abstract. Either people are allowed to adopt practices that they see and like, or they're not, and one of these options is stupid. Saying to anyone that they're not allowed to do something because of their culture of origin, ethnicity, religion, or upbringing is monstrous, and while the reality is that those restrictions apply in the vast majority of cases(and almost exclusively in cases of material importance) to minorities, trying to reflect the general practice of binding allowable behavior to identity back on the majority power-holders does not really help anyone. Cultural mixing happens whenever and wherever two cultures touch, and that one of those cultures is dominated and contained by the other is an adjacent artifact, not a component or superior one. Arguments over the former on the basis of a connection to the latter are a distraction at best.

 

So yeah, possibly of note: when I mentioned this article to family yesterday, the response included an indication that people trying to police cultural appropriation can "jump off a cliff."

 

In my experience, when someone provokes a suggestion of self-injury or violence like that - even a sarcastic suggestion - it's often an indication that they have a point.

 

In my experience, it's an indication of the speakers' complete disrespect and disregard for the subject and their reasoning, to the degree that they don't even consider it worth their time to articulate why. Your family probably feels that way because the people demanding cultural segregation are far more self-righteous about very bad lines of reasoning than they have any right to be. Who the hell are you to tell me what I am and am not "allowed" to do?! And so forth.

 

If I, in a fit of monumentally poor judgement, want to take up wearing a turban because I saw it on the television and just like the look, that doesn't hurt anybody and policing it is a bad thing to do. That I would be treated better than a middle-eastern person doing the same is a result of preexisting oppression, not of my actions - that person would be discriminated against, in the same degree, regardless, and while it's not fair that we would be treated differently, stopping me doesn't help them and hurts, well, me. "Policing" people is generally a bad thing to do, and it's only sometimes acceptable because people hurting each other is worse. Wearing clothes, eating food, listening to music, dancing, learning a language, learning a history, all of these things can involve mimicking practices from different cultures, and they do not in general materially hurt the people comprising either one.

 

What cultural mixing does do is distribute cultural artifacts or practices, and when the origin culture is engulfed by the recipient, it can dissolve the boundaries and markings between the two, and sometimes dilute the original purpose or meaning of the artifact or practice. That can weaken group identities, obscure a shared history, and ultimately reduce the capacity for that group to function independently. People, especially oppressed people, can be very attached to their group identities and want to protect them. Sometimes for good reason. But frankly, people being allowed to do what they want to is more important than people feeling a sense of distinct community.

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It's not. Black Americans, the indistinct group, does not own or control rock and roll or twerking just for having invented them, any more than Greeks can claim a right to control the use of written vowels or the descendants of Thomas Edison can demand you stop making light bulbs and give them all the light bulbs you have right now back to them.

 

this is kind of an odd choice of analogy for you to use, considering that Thomas Edison did in fact patent his lightbulb designs and could in fact control other people's ability to manufacture and sell them for the duration of

that patent

 

Either people are allowed to adopt practices that they see and like, or they're not, and one of these options is stupid.

 

well, actually, no, it's not an either/or choice. as the patent example shows, there's a middle ground. and there are in fact countries looking into ways to adapt intellectual property laws to cultural traditions and practices, especially in fields involving specialised knowledge such as medicine

 

If I, in a fit of monumentally poor judgement, want to take up wearing a turban because I saw it on the television and just like the look, that doesn't hurt anybody and policing it is a bad thing to do. That I would be treated better than a middle-eastern person doing the same is a result of preexisting oppression, not of my actions - that person would be discriminated against, in the same degree, regardless, and while it's not fair that we would be treated differently, stopping me doesn't help them and hurts, well, me. "Policing" people is generally a bad thing to do, and it's only sometimes acceptable because people hurting each other is worse. Wearing clothes, eating food, listening to music, dancing, learning a language, learning a history, all of these things can involve mimicking practices from different cultures, and they do not in general materially hurt the people comprising either one.

 

what makes you so sure that the bolded claims are always true? you, as an individual, may not have much effect on the degree and type of discrimination that marginalised groups experience, but culture is formed by the actions of its members. you only have to look at social processes like gentrification to see how individuals making choices that seem to only affect themselves can have a harmful effect in aggregate. if there's a sudden fad for wearing turbans and that causes an increase in prices or a shortage of supply, then that fad has harmed the people who have an actual cultural need to wear turbans. look at the quinoa shortage in South America for an example of this kind of thing happening in the real world right now: quinoa becomes a fashionable food item in the West and people who rely on it to survive are priced out of the market. no individual quinoa-eating foodie is in a position to prevent poor Bolivians from starving because half the supply of their staple food is suddenly being exported to the US, but they're still a part of the social forces that are making that happen

 

What cultural mixing does do is distribute cultural artifacts or practices, and when the origin culture is engulfed by the recipient, it can dissolve the boundaries and markings between the two, and sometimes dilute the original purpose or meaning of the artifact or practice. That can weaken group identities, obscure a shared history, and ultimately reduce the capacity for that group to function independently. People, especially oppressed people, can be very attached to their group identities and want to protect them. Sometimes for good reason. But frankly, people being allowed to do what they want to is more important than people feeling a sense of distinct community.

 

that last sentence contradicts itself. what if feeling a sense of distinct community is what someone wants to be allowed to do? "people should be allowed to do what they want" is so vague a principle as to be meaningless without further context on what they want to do and why

 

i mean, to use an example close to home, have you ever heard anyone say how frustrating it is when you go to a gay or lesbian bar and it turns out to be full of straight people who are there to Appreciate Our Culture? when something like that happens it defeats the purpose of those spaces existing, which is to make it easier to meet other gay people.

 

there's also the issues of honesty and respect. if we look at clothing, by wearing items of clothing that exist specifically as cultural identifiers you're misrepresenting yourself as something you're not. that's not to say you can't ever wear any clothing that originated from a community other than your own, but i do think there's a responsibility to understand its origins first and make sure that what you're wearing isn't making a false statement about yourself. for example, wearing a Native American war bonnet is disrespectful in pretty much the same way that wearing a military uniform and medals that you haven't earned would be

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In my experience' date=' it's an indication of the speakers' complete disrespect and disregard for the subject and their reasoning, to the degree that [b']they don't even consider it worth their time to articulate why.[/b] Your family probably feels that way because the people demanding cultural segregation are far more self-righteous about very bad lines of reasoning than they have any right to be. Who the hell are you to tell me what I am and am not "allowed" to do?! And so forth.

 

[bolding mine]

 

And IMO that is a problem. Knee-jerk ad hominem responses may be emotionally satisfying, but they are unhelpful and alienate people.

 

If I, in a fit of monumentally poor judgement, want to take up wearing a turban because I saw it on the television and just like the look, that doesn't hurt anybody and policing it is a bad thing to do. That I would be treated better than a middle-eastern person doing the same is a result of preexisting oppression, not of my actions - that person would be discriminated against, in the same degree, regardless, and while it's not fair that we would be treated differently, stopping me doesn't help them and hurts, well, me. "Policing" people is generally a bad thing to do, and it's only sometimes acceptable because people hurting each other is worse. Wearing clothes, eating food, listening to music, dancing, learning a language, learning a history, all of these things can involve mimicking practices from different cultures, and they do not in general materially hurt the people comprising either one.

 

I agree that nobody should be policing the legal status of your turban-wearing privilege. OTOH, I don't think there's anything wrong with people telling you in such a case: "You know, that might be considered offensive." Likewise, I don't think there's anything wrong with you thinking about it, considering whether it's actually a good idea, and (eventually) rejecting the notion.

 

I don't like most forms of censorship, but this isn't censorship. Telling people when they're about to do something insulting is not censorship. Self-restraint is not censorship. Etc.

 

In general, just because you have the legal freedom to casually insult someone's culture, doesn't mean you should.

 

The question in my mind isn't whether the author has a point or not. They have a point. The question is more about where (approximately) one can draw a line.

 

also fwiw it doesn't strike me as especially weird that you'd feel a degree of personal investment in Jewish culture given how you've described your background. even if you're not actively practicing Judaism as a religion, you're connected to cultural traditions that take more than a generation or two to completely fade imo, and those are going to affect the worldview of the people you grew up with and the way you were raised

 

Makes sense. A lot of my worldview does seem to be informed by Jewish philosophical concepts rather than Christian ones. At least for now...

 

my mother had the full second-generation-immigrant experience of being bullied at school for wearing weird clothes and eating weird foods, and of growing up with parents who had fled persecution (they were Ukrainians of Jewish background who fled the USSR to Western Europe during dekulakization in the early '30s; for some mysterious reason living as Ukrainian Jews in Western Europe in the 1930s didn't turn out so great for them either, so they eventually ended up in Australia) and moved to a country where they knew nobody, where few people could speak their native language, and where they had to learn all kinds of new rules, from laws to everyday social conventions. i can't know exactly what that was like for her or for her parents but i can still feel the echoes of it in my own upbringing

 

I missed this earlier... Ouch.

 

My parents' families were fortunate to get to the US earlier - my father's side from Russia, my mom's variously from Hungary and Poland, at the beginning of the 20th century IIRC. At this point we're all pretty Americanized.

 

(Though, my grandmother on my father's side would be a second generation immigrant. She just turned 90. I should ask her about it, some time, if she's willing to talk... Also, thanks.)

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I cannot think of any example of a majority group adopting a minority group's practice that resulted in the minority group being treated worse for having that practice. If anything, it destigmatizes it. Do you have one in mind?

 

i edited some extra stuff into that post while you were writing the reply, including some more specific examples. i think if "people are literally starving in South America right now because the food they rely on to survive became fashionable in the US" won't convince you there's a risk of harm from pillaging cultural traditions then probably nothing will

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It's not. Black Americans, the indistinct group, does not own or control rock and roll or twerking just for having invented them, any more than Greeks can claim a right to control the use of written vowels or the descendants of Thomas Edison can demand you stop making light bulbs and give them all the light bulbs you have right now back to them. These are ideas and practices and artifacts that naturally spread, and they neither are nor should they be demographically copywritten, and the question of who gets credit for what is an ouroborous, especially in the case of entire cultural groups in the abstract. Either people are allowed to adopt practices that they see and like, or they're not, and one of these options is stupid. Saying to anyone that they're not allowed to do something because of their culture of origin, ethnicity, religion, or upbringing is monstrous, and while the reality is that those restrictions apply in the vast majority of cases(and almost exclusively in cases of material importance) to minorities, trying to reflect the general practice of binding allowable behavior to identity back on the majority power-holders does not really help anyone. Cultural mixing happens whenever and wherever two cultures touch, and that one of those cultures is dominated and contained by the other is an adjacent artifact, not a component or superior one. Arguments over the former on the basis of a connection to the latter are a distraction at best.

 

One of the American principles is the melting pot. 98% of our population is descended from immigrants (there are just over 5M who identify as natives), and almost every single group of people who has emigrated here has faced some degree of hostility. African Americans certainly had it worst, but Italian Americans, Irish Americans, Japanese Americans, Chinese Americans, etc all experienced it as well. The current "turban wearing"/"middle eastern looking" groups have far more protections and received far less discrimination than the Irish Americans or Chinese Americans did. While I agree that it should be none, I believe that some of the commentators in this forum are blowing it out of proportion.

 

As to the whole cultural approbation think, I see it as the exact opposite of a problem. To me, it signifies an acceptance of a certain cultural background. The fact that I can go into a grocery store in an area with a population made up primarily of people with Northern European ancestry and buy pizza, chai, tortillas, sushi, collard greens, etc as a good sign. For those of you who are more into purity, express your solidarity with your ancestors by only eating culturally appropriate food while the rest of us enjoy being part of a modern pluralistic society.

 

I remember when rap was new. The complaints then where that "white labels" wouldn't sign rappers. Now, you are complaining that "white labels" are signing rappers and making money off of them. In 30 years, rap has gone mainstream. That should be seen as a victory, not a theft.

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I remember when rap was new. The complaints then where that "white labels" wouldn't sign rappers. Now, you are complaining that "white labels" are signing rappers and making money off of them. In 30 years, rap has gone mainstream. That should be seen as a victory, not a theft.

 

I'm betting the record labels make more money than the rappers, though.

 

(And I believe there are a lot of problems with this model of "victory," much more than just who gets the money. But I don't have the knowledge to offer commentary on it.)

 

what makes you so sure that the bolded claims are always true? you' date=' as an individual, may not have much effect on the degree and type of discrimination that marginalised groups experience, but culture is formed by the actions of its members. you only have to look at social processes like gentrification to see how individuals making choices that seem to only affect themselves can have a harmful effect in aggregate. if there's a sudden fad for wearing turbans and that causes an increase in prices or a shortage of supply, then that fad has harmed the people who have an actual cultural need to wear turbans. look at the quinoa shortage in South America for an example of this kind of thing happening in the real world right now: quinoa becomes a fashionable food item in the West and people who rely on it to survive are priced out of the market. no individual quinoa-eating foodie is in a position to prevent poor Bolivians from starving because half the supply of their staple food is suddenly being exported to the US, but they're still a part of the social forces that are making that happen[/quote']

 

Wow. That is nasty. I had no idea the health foods/nutraceuticals industry was that directly harmful.

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I'm betting the record labels make more money than the rappers, though.

 

the record labels tend to exercise a pretty heavy degree of creative control over what they produce and market, too. so yeah, being noticed by a big label isn't necessarily a triumph in terms of either material success or artistic freedom

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the record labels tend to exercise a pretty heavy degree of creative control over what they produce and market, too. so yeah, being noticed by a big label isn't necessarily a triumph in terms of either material success or artistic freedom

 

Suddenly, the stuff I've heard on Top 20 radio stations makes a frightening amount of sense.

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this is kind of an odd choice of analogy for you to use, considering that Thomas Edison did in fact patent his lightbulb designs and could in fact control other people's ability to manufacture and sell them for the duration of that patent

 

He sure did, and it would sure be unreasonable for that patent to still be existent and controlled by his descendants today. And, if you're me, you consider much or all of patent and copyright law to be unreasonable to begin with.

 

well, actually, no, it's not an either/or choice. as the patent example shows, there's a middle ground. and there are in fact countries looking into ways to adapt intellectual property laws to cultural traditions and practices, especially in fields involving specialised knowledge such as medicine

 

A patent is, in fact, one of the options I said. It would be the one where you can't adopt practices you like. I don't know anything about the intellectual property developments you describe, but people can make all kinds of laws for things they shouldn't.

 

what makes you so sure that the bolded claims are always true? you, as an individual, may not have much effect on the degree and type of discrimination that marginalised groups experience, but culture is formed by the actions of its members. you only have to look at social processes like gentrification to see how individuals making choices that seem to only affect themselves can have a harmful effect in aggregate. if there's a sudden fad for wearing turbans and that causes an increase in prices or a shortage of supply, then that fad has harmed the people who have an actual cultural need to wear turbans. look at the quinoa shortage in South America for an example of this kind of thing happening in the real world right now: quinoa becomes a fashionable food item in the West and people who rely on it to survive are priced out of the market. no individual quinoa-eating foodie is in a position to prevent poor Bolivians from starving because half the supply of their staple food is suddenly being exported to the US, but they're still a part of the social forces that are making that happen

 

You're talking about different problems here. These are not the problems of distributed cultural practices offending people or dismantling group boundaries, they're problems of economic disparity. Poor Bolivians are not hurt by Americans learning about quinoa, they're hurt by Americans having much greater economic power than them. I think

 

Cultural mixing happens whenever and wherever two cultures touch, and that one of those cultures is dominated and contained by the other is an adjacent artifact, not a component or superior one. Arguments over the former on the basis of a connection to the latter are a distraction at best.

 

applies here as well.

 

that last sentence contradicts itself. what if feeling a sense of distinct community is what someone wants to be allowed to do? "people should be allowed to do what they want" is so vague a principle as to be meaningless without further context on what they want to do and why

 

It doesn't. The difference is that having a community requires other people to cooperate with your desires. If they want to, that's great for everyone, but if they don't want to, it's also not something you can demand.

 

i mean, to use an example close to home, have you ever heard anyone say how frustrating it is when you go to a gay or lesbian bar and it turns out to be full of straight people who are there to Appreciate Our Culture? when something like that happens it defeats the purpose of those spaces existing, which is to make it easier to meet other gay people.

 

No. I do not attend or fit in at such spaces. I have been to them before, and I am grossly out of place and unwelcome. I am not a part of LGBT culture.

 

there's also the issues of honesty and respect. if we look at clothing, by wearing items of clothing that exist specifically as cultural identifiers you're misrepresenting yourself as something you're not. that's not to say you can't ever wear any clothing that originated from a community other than your own, but i do think there's a responsibility to understand its origins first and make sure that what you're wearing isn't making a false statement about yourself. for example, wearing a Native American war bonnet is disrespectful in pretty much the same way that wearing a military uniform and medals that you haven't earned would be

 

People can be as dishonest or disrespectful as they want to be. It's fine that people sometimes want to be those things. It is not immoral to be dishonest or disrespectful when you don't hurt anyone by doing so. Hurt feelings, while often persuasive(either becasue of empathy or because people hurt your feelings for doing things they don't like), do not count for moral purposes.

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You're talking about different problems here. These are not the problems of distributed cultural practices offending people or dismantling group boundaries, they're problems of economic disparity. Poor Bolivians are not hurt by Americans learning about quinoa, they're hurt by Americans having much greater economic power than them.

 

they may be different but they're not unrelated. power disparities are what allow systemic discrimination to exist in the first place, and the people who benefit from those power disparities will be motivated to find justifications to keep them in existence

 

People can be as dishonest or disrespectful as they want to be. It's fine that people sometimes want to be those things. It is not immoral to be dishonest or disrespectful when you don't hurt anyone by doing so. Hurt feelings, while often persuasive(either becasue of empathy or because people hurt your feelings for doing things they don't like), do not count for moral purposes.

 

tbh if that's your stance then i don't have any confidence that we're going to see eye to eye on anything so i'm going to go to sleep

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Wait, did someone just argue that it's not (ever) immoral to hurt people emotionally? That's nuts.

 

I continue to think that the phrase "cultural appropriation" is a horrible phrase for an important concept, and I think Edgwyn's first post in this thread illustrates another reason why: people who use this terminology need to distinguish between "cultural appropriation" on the one hand and "cultural borrowing" (or something equivalent) in order to clarify what is okay and what is not — but that terminology is hopelessly counterintuitive. It leads to the confusion that started this thread: "I'm not even sure what's okay anymore," because the terms are so poorly chosen.

 

Just be respectful, don't play up stereotypes or exploit people, and you'll probably be fine.

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they may be different but they're not unrelated. power disparities are what allow systemic discrimination to exist in the first place, and the people who benefit from those power disparities will be motivated to find justifications to keep them in existence

 

They are related, but not interdependent. Cultural isolationism will not solve economic disparities, but economic equality will make cultural mixing fairer.

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People can be as dishonest or disrespectful as they want to be. It's fine that people sometimes want to be those things. It is not immoral to be dishonest or disrespectful when you don't hurt anyone by doing so.

 

Vehemently disagree. IMO the principle matters - in part because you can't always be sure you're not hurting someone.

 

Hurt feelings, while often persuasive(either becasue of empathy or because people hurt your feelings for doing things they don't like), do not count for moral purposes.

 

I think it's very much a matter of degree, and also of pervasiveness. Verbal abuse hurts. Being systematically bullied hurts. I know that from (bitter) personal experience, and what I've dealt with is relatively not even that bad.

 

There's a difference between being offended or mildly embarrassed, and being made to feel humiliated or outright threatened. The latter far outweighs the former. Especially when it happens on a systematic basis.

 

Also IMO, while individual cases of appropriation may not do much harm, case after case can function to retroactively whitewash history. See for instance the "Harlem Shake" example mentioned in the article above.

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almost every single group of people who has emigrated here has faced some degree of hostility. African Americans certainly had it worst, but Italian Americans, Irish Americans, Japanese Americans, Chinese Americans, etc all experienced it as well.

Most African Americans didn't really emigrate here in the normal sense of that word. I know you know that. But I think it's worth pointing out that the framing of "this is the same nasty hazing that all the new folks have to put up with" doesn't really hold up. Not to mention that some demographic groups receive (or have received) a lot of hostility despite being completely home-grown.

 

The current "turban wearing"/"middle eastern looking" groups have far more protections and received far less discrimination than the Irish Americans or Chinese Americans did. While I agree that it should be none, I believe that some of the commentators in this forum are blowing it out of proportion.

Given the lethal hate crimes that still take place, I'm going to go ahead and say "not blown out of proportion" regardless of how the context may compare. I agree that it's worth recognizing that the landscape has changed, and in some arenas there are more protections available. That said, "at least we're not doing the awful things we were doing 100 years ago" is maybe not the highest bar to hold ourselves to as a society.

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Randomizer, we may be, but every so often, usually after reading the latest stupid stunt by a college student or college professor I remind myself that while college generates maturity by exposing students (though not necessarily professors) to new ideas and increased education, it also delays maturity by putting people in an area of reduced consequences and responsibilities for an extra four years. Someday, most of the people in college will become responsible members of society, though every so often it seems unlikely.

 

Slartibus, yes, lethal hate crimes still take place, and that is bad. Fortunately, they are a lot less likely now then they were 50 years ago, much less 100. There will always be lethal hate crimes, just like there will always be lethal crimes. From my limited perspective, we have done better at reducing lethal hate crimes in the past 50 years than we have in reducing lethal crimes.

 

Slavery was of course far worse than what the other ethnic groups faced, or what any current group faces today. My point was that we have blended far more than just "African American" and "White (which would most accurately be Northern European Protestant)" cultures in this country but have blended in many cultures that at various times we did not value.

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Close enough to vague agreement on a lot of this, but...

 

"African American" and "White (which would most accurately be Northern European Protestant)"

 

"African American" isn't comparable to "White", it's comparable to "European American". "Northern European Protestant" is similarly a lot more specific than "African American". "Black" and "white" actually are useful terms, though, when you're talking about skin color -- a key factor in the dynamics of racial equities and inequities. Not all black people in the U.S. are of African origin, just like not all white people trace their roots to Europe, and not all European Americans have a Northern Protestant background.

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I consider the basis of the US's culture to be Northern European Protestant for multiple reasons. In terms of this discussion, it helps explain the negativity that the Irish and Italians experienced despite being as "white" in terms of skin color.

 

I had actually started to put in a comment about the large breadth of African culture, but cut it due to length of post.

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it helps explain the negativity that the Irish and Italians experienced despite being as "white" in terms of skin color.

Mmm, the Irish Catholics were primarily discriminated against because of their poverty due to anti-catholic laws that made an economically prosperous life impossible after Cromwell. They were also not the healthiest when most of them migrated, thanks to the great famine. With the very long, rough, dangerous trip over the Atlantic (when you can't afford anything to make it more manageable), the ones that didn't die along the way, died shortly after arriving or were sickly at best for a time afterwards. When they came over, they were poor and looked for jobs in the things knew best, which was mostly agriculture and manual labor trades.

The Irish Catholic migrants were only really discriminated against on the grounds of religion in the US by Irish Protestant migrants that wanted to differentiate themselves from the stereotype of poor low-skill workers who came to the US to take jobs. The protestants already had laws in Ireland working to their economic advantage, so they were able to get better opportunities in the US (and wanted to keep it that way).

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You may as well say "English" rather than "Northern European." There was discrimination against Germans when they came in large numbers in the 1800's.

 

The history of the United States is a long, slow, fitful story of exclusion giving way to inclusion. At some point, just about everyone was on the outside, except — as far as I know — men of English descent.

Not all black people in the U.S. are of African origin, just like not all white people trace their roots to Europe

Now I'm confused. The latter, sure. People from India are often considered "white," and they're from South Asia, not Europe. But the former? Who did you have in mind?

 

Or do you literally mean skin color, not race?

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I mean, I know that black and white are used in a more complex way than just indicating skin color, but skin color seems an unavoidable part of it. I had a black colleague from Haiti; she didn't identify as African American, but she did identify as black. There's a reason that the census uses "Black or African American" -- she certainly wouldn't have identified as the other 4 racial categories.

 

I also don't think people from India are "often" considered white. Not even remotely. I know that's a thing on U.S. passports, for example, but isn't that just the result of completely insane Aryanism from a century ago? Even the census now lists India under "Asian" and I sure can't think of any Indian Americans I know who identify as white.

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Understand that I'm asking out of genuine ignorance and curiosity, not disagreement. I just can't come up with any example of people who are usually considered "black" in America (in a racial sense) without any African ancestry. Even your Haitian colleague presumably is black because she descends in significant part from African slaves brought to Haiti by the French, right? That makes her ethnically/culturally different from African Americans who descend from African slaves brought to the American South by the British (or whomever), and that's probably why she doesn't want to identify as African American, but she's still descended from Africans ultimately, right?

 

And sure, Indians may not be a good example of non-European white people, although sometimes they are considered so. Maybe Armenians or something? My point is just that I can come up with people who have at times in certain circumstances been considered "white" but who have basically no European ancestry, but I can't come up with people who have been considered "black" who have no African ancestry. And it would be interesting to know who I'm not remembering right now.

 

Orrrrrrrr... am I misunderstanding you, and are you just saying that some people passed through other countries along the way? Something like the Hispanic/Latino designation, which ultimately refers to people who are usually (but not always) of some mixture of European and Native American descent, but who bear the cultural heritage of Spanish colonialism in the New World in some way. Hence, the Haitian to which you were referring of course has African ancestry, but there is more to it than that, and that's what you mean.

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That racial classification system was pretty facial feature dependent and only had three races: Caucasian, Mongoloid and Negroid. That essentially resulted in most of the population from Europe, North Africa and SouthWest/South Central Asia as Caucasian ("White"). While not a lot of stock is placed in that particular model anymore, a model that lumps everyone on the Asian continent together isn't really any more accurate from a culture or genetic point of view and has nothing in particular to recommend it but the fact that we are currently using it.

 

A couple of days ago I stumbled on a ten year old article in African American admissions to Harvard. It seems that a fairly high proportion of "Black" students at Harvard fall into the recent immigrant category and did not have any grandparents who were born in the US and therefore could be considered victims of slavery or even much of America prior to passage of the Civil Rights Act. The article was of course anti-affirmative action, but irrespective of ones stance on affirmative action, it shows problems with enacting policies based on oversimplified criteria.

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And that's of interest because African immigrants and descendants of slaves have markedly different sociological trajectories. The former mostly follow the generally expected immigrant curve, with increasing assimilation and upward social mobility over generations, while the latter do not. Skin color and racism are certainly part of the story, but they're not the whole story. Africans often come from a background of dealing with the vestiges of colonialism, but they didn't live through the crushing legacy of America's centuries of slavery and intensely racist policy.

 

—Alorael, who agrees that a major part of America's history can be seen not as a lessening of discrimination, exactly, so much as an expansion of the white in-group. Yes, German and Irish and Jewish immigrants only became white after discrimination had died down a lot, but still, it says something sad that acceptance has been so tied to being subsumed into racial hegemony.

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a major part of America's history can be seen not as a lessening of discrimination, exactly, so much as an expansion of the white in-group

This, this, this.

 

This is also why I've been pretty ironically uncomfortable witnessing the onrush of support for gay rights over the last five years, and the accompanying legal milestones. It's all about gay people being welcomed into the in-group. But we shouldn't have an in-group in the first place. A larger in-group is, I guess, better than a smaller one. But we shouldn't have one in the first place. We should be ceasing to discriminate, not getting our friends into the party.

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This, this, this.

 

This is also why I've been pretty ironically uncomfortable witnessing the onrush of support for gay rights over the last five years, and the accompanying legal milestones. It's all about gay people being welcomed into the in-group. But we shouldn't have an in-group in the first place. A larger in-group is, I guess, better than a smaller one. But we shouldn't have one in the first place. We should be ceasing to discriminate, not getting our friends into the party.

That's kind of US history, where the haves pick who they will let out of the have-nots get to the punch bowl. There's always someone out there that they won't let in, yet.

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So: a week since the OP. We've recapitulated the basics of whiteness theory, but otherwise I don't see much in terms of opinions on appropriation. Maybe just as well, I don't know. I may be looking in the wrong place.

 

For my part, I'm considering not making my fiction writings publicly available, anyway. I never really was interested in publishing for money - by all accounts I've read, this is a huge pain. And it's not like the world needs yet another rich white dude SF writer.

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I think if you look carefully there was discussion of cultural appropriation. The thing is "whiteness theory" is central to most forms of cultural appropriation.

 

As for the Washington Redskins, here's a bit of appropriation: the word "redskin" is similar to the word "gay". It was chosen by the people it represents, and then was appropriated by people outside those groups to use as slurs. Also, the "racist" logo was created in close collaboration with Native Americans and appears to be a realistic face with realistic attire. Both name and logo were intended to honor Native Americans. Wikipedia says that at the time the name and logo were chosen, the coach and four players were Native Americans. The controversy is baloney.

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As for the Washington Redskins, here's a bit of appropriation: the word "redskin" is similar to the word "gay". It was chosen by the people it represents, and then was appropriated by people outside those groups to use as slurs.

 

uhhh i don't know where you're getting your history from but that's definitely not how "gay" originated. one of the earlier meanings of "gay" was "promiscuous" and it got applied in that context to same-sex-attracted people. it started out as a term with clearly derogatory associations that was only later reclaimed

 

Also, the "racist" logo was created in close collaboration with Native Americans and appears to be a realistic face with realistic attire. Both name and logo were intended to honor Native Americans. Wikipedia says that at the time the name and logo were chosen, the coach and four players were Native Americans. The controversy is baloney.

 

turns out opinions can change over the course of a century and people in the 1930s making difficult decisions on what kinds of stereotyping to put up with for the sake of being included in society at all shouldn't be taken as the final arbiters for all time of what's acceptable today. i mean there were plenty of black people who performed in minstrel shows but that doesn't make those okay today either

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Never mind that the idea of "redskin" being chosen by Native Americans in the first place is a contentious one at best. There is no clear origin. Native Americans are recorded as using it - but the records are made by Europeans, and in European languages. "Redskin" obviously isn't part of any Native American language. It is entirely unclear if it was chosen by Native Americans or if it was just the term they used when speaking to Europeans in European languages, because it's what the Europeans used, or if it's just some artifact of using translators.

 

That's all more or less irrelevant, though. People's feelings about language are usually not very concerned with history. Bottom line is, if someting you're doing is offensive to someone, if you care about that person's feelings, you stop. You don't argue about whether or not the offense is justified - it's a feeling, of course there's never going to be a coherent, defensible reason for it. People have and care about them all the same. Now, saying that you don't care about that other person's feelings is just as good of an option, but don't be surprised when that makes things worse.

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I suppose that I did not actually provide an opinion on appropriation, because I agreed with what Kelandon wrote. In terms of creating offense, it is easy to care about an individual's feelings, harder to care about the feelings of a mass of people. That said, I try to avoid creating offense, but I know that it is impossible to completely avoid creating offense because some people are determined to be offended.

 

Therefore the intent is important. Minstrel show bad due to stereotypical intent. "White" person doing rap okay 90% of the time as long as they do not use certain language.

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FWIW, etymonline at least makes it sound like use of "gay" to describe gay people began with gay people -- and was after the 'promiscuous' sense arose.

 

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=gay&allowed_in_frame=0

 

Wikipedia says the first use in print was by Gertrude Stein. If so, well -- I support using her words for pretty much anything...

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Therefore the intent is important. Minstrel show bad due to stereotypical intent. "White" person doing rap okay 90% of the time as long as they do not use certain language.

 

[bolding mine]

 

Funnily enough, I read an article today that was very critical of that perspective. The author's opinion was that making a big deal about intent is, by its nature, implicitly privileging the person who commits whatever offense. It's talking about the offender's feelings as the main thing, rather than the impact of their actions - i.e. in this case, the feelings of the person or people they hurt.

 

I mean, it's not like intent doesn't matter at all - especially the first time around, when ignorance may figure in - but when you think about it, "I didn't mean to hurt you!" doesn't make the cut in a lot of cases.

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Intent and alternatives matter. The problem with the Redskins as a name is not only that it's perceived as offensive by some. Not everyone, obviously, and I have no idea of the breakdown by numbers, but some. The problem is that it's easy for a team to have a name that isn't offensive to anybody. The offense, whether or not it is intended or justifiable or historical or whatever, exists, and it could be stopped.

 

Yes, there are some costs to changing a team name, but in a vacuum it's quite clear that choosing Redskins as a name, if it were done now, would be a terrible idea.

 

—Alorael, who thinks a similar quick litmus test works on a lot of things. Could what you are saying offend? Could you say it in a way that does not without losing the meaning you intend to convey? If the answers are yes and yes, you really ought to.

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—Alorael, who thinks a similar quick litmus test works on a lot of things. Could what you are saying offend? Could you say it in a way that does not without losing the meaning you intend to convey? If the answers are yes and yes, you really ought to.

 

Err, problem there: the intended meaning is what's offensive.

 

Edit: especially given the context. Native American peoples were the victims of a genocide. Using that name for a sports team, and claiming there is "honor" in that, is tremendously insulting when one thinks about it.

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As for the Washington Redskins, here's a bit of appropriation: the word "redskin" is similar to the word "gay". It was chosen by the people it represents, and then was appropriated by people outside those groups to use as slurs. Also, the "racist" logo was created in close collaboration with Native Americans and appears to be a realistic face with realistic attire. Both name and logo were intended to honor Native Americans. Wikipedia says that at the time the name and logo were chosen, the coach and four players were Native Americans. The controversy is baloney.

This sounded awfully convenient, so I did some checking. Your source of information is the football team's owner, and you get three Pinnochios! The true origin is just as exploitative and stereotype profiteering as you would expect of 1930's America.

 

Besides, the origin is almost irrelevant. The term "redskin" is clearly a slur today. It dropped out of widespread use half a century ago, when explicit racism started to be uncool. (Started, mind you.) So having a team in the nation's capital whose name is a slur is clearly wrong, and an eyesore to boot.

 

I might have a different view about the Cleveland Indians or the Atlanta Braves, at least if they back up their nominal "honoring" Native Americans by using some of their revenue for charity work in tribal communities (or something, anything, that makes it look not fake). But the Washington Redskins? No. Not cool.

 

(I confess, by the way, that I somewhat have a dog in this fight. One of my great-great-grandparents was Native American. I don't feel like we're honoring him at all with this team name.)

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I would change the Redskins name. It's not like plenty of other professional sports teams haven't changed their names, especially in the DC area (e.g. Bullets/Wizards, Expos/Nationals). That said, I do not see the Florida State Seminoles, Atlanta Braves, Kansas City Chief or Cleveland Indians as a problem, as long as the logos/mascots are done in a respectful manner, which hasn't always been the case.

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Well, I'm afraid I don't like them apples very much at all. Coincidentally, though, one of my great-great-grandparents was also Native American. I never met her though because of course very few people ever meet their great-great-grandparents. Otherwise she'd probably slap me silly.

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