Politesse
Lux Aeterna
- Joined
- Feb 27, 2018
- Messages
- 12,115
- Location
- Chochenyo Territory, US
- Gender
- nb; all pronouns fine
- Basic Beliefs
- Jedi Wayseeker
Politically disenfranchised cultures are often exploited for material and political gain by colonizing powers, and artists and writers can become, consciously or unconsciously, agents of the process of colonization by participating in the overall extraction of value from subjugated peoples. Cultural appropriation is a situation of "borrowing" in which nothing is ever returned or shared, and it is most upsetting when it perverts or distorts the culture in a harmful way. If you're "just borrowing", the question you should be asking, is what gets returned when you're done "borrowing", and in what way. Stereotyped cultural protrayals seldom benefit the culture being portrayed, and in many ways, can lead to very direct harm, all while the coffers of the publisher are being merrily filled. If you pay attention to what issues are most likely to cause public outrage, it's not usually works that just include other cultures, but rather those that treat them with special, seemingly targeted disrespect.
So there's more than one dimension to the crime: appropriation can be financial in nature, but also sociological, legal, even spiritual. The common example of Native Americans being used as sports mascots, for instance, isn't bad because "it's bad to share between cultures" but because no sharing is actually going on. There's the monetary: When the Redsk*ns were playing, someone was making millions of dollars off the image every time they played, and not a dime of it went to anyone whose cultural symbols - the headdress, the weapons, etc - were being used to build the aesthetic of the team. There's the spiritual angle: headdresses have a meaning, they were never just decoration, but a connoted a particular social standing that is not reflected in being used as a toy. There's the issue of racial caricature: the mascot himself was obviously that. And there's the issue of incitement of violence, as mascots are frequent targets of "friendly" abuse by opposing teams, but in a within a post-genocide population still traumatized by the events of a very recent past history of violence, it can be pretty fucking traumatic to turn on the tv and see a crowd of whites lynching an effigy of a Native American, and it was never unheard of for such activities to spill over into literal violence against, say, Native-owned businesses, casinos, etc in the aftermath of a game. Finally, you have the issue of participation: because caricatures of Native people written and painted by whites abound, but Native authors and artists struggle to find publishers or venues, most Americans draw their entire understanding of Native culture from portrayals penned by whites rather than anything a Native person was involved with, and racist tropes of "tribal cultures" naturally abound in such portrayals.
In short, appropriation is real, and a real problem, but over-simplifying it as a rule like "whites can't write blacks" is not really getting at the heart of that problem. Very few people (not "no one", but very few people) are going to be upset if someone writes a story with Black characters, if their story rings true to the community and treats it with respect. But if you are a white person who hasn't spent much time with Black folks, you probably won't be successful in writing them in a way that does ring true to the community and treat it with respect, because your most ready access to Black culture has likewise been mediated and distorted by white artists, publishers, producers, labels, and so forth. The issue of unequal power underlies and amplifies this; a British person writing about an Italian character might write something dumb, but it's not worrying in the same way as a white American writing about Black culture, because Italians in Britain were never enslaved, and have little reason to fear that an incendiary work might lead to literal violence against their community. On the other hand, an anglophone New Yorker writing about an Italian neighborhood is in a different situation - there is a history of violence and discrimination in that case, and they can and should be careful not to promote painful stereotypes with their work that have more potential to come back around and hurt their neighbors. If every Italian in your novel is a gangster who speaks like someone's bad impression of Al Capone, it's fair for people to criticize your work.
I hope this was helpful; if there's interest, I'd be happy to start a new thread on the topic rather than possibly dragging this one off topic.
