Guest post: Appropriation or flattery?
Originally a comment by Papito on The influencer wife.
I once had a long conversation with a good friend of mine, who is a Japanese-American, about appropriation. She had been very offended that a group of white and Chinese protesters shut down an event at the museum that allowed visitors to try on, and take a picture of themselves in, a kimono. The protesters insisted that this was cultural appropriation, you know, all the usual, orientalism, the male gaze, whatever. My friend, let’s call her Keiko, insisted that it wasn’t their culture that they were talking about, and in her culture, Japanese culture, trying on kimonos and having your picture taken in them was something that people did. She was very bothered that people from another culture were preventing people from her culture from sharing their own culture with the museum visitors. The kimonos in question had literally been fabricated for the specific purpose of being tried on at a museum exhibit as a cultural event. But they were packed away, the exhibit was canceled, and the museum apologized for their cultural crimes.
In our long conversations about the matter, we decided that, like racism, appropriation can only happen where there is a power differential, or subordination. Japan does not see itself as subordinate to America, America does not see itself as subordinate to Japan, thus there can be no cultural appropriation by Japanese of American culture, nor cultural appropriation by Americans of Japanese culture. The question of whether Japanese can appropriate Black American culture is more complex, but let’s not get into that.
Can an American appropriate Spanish culture? What does that really mean? Can a Spaniard appropriate American culture? I tend to think no (either way), whereas an American can appropriate, say, Mexican culture.
My wife studies Flamenco, both singing and dancing. She adores it. She is of Cuban extraction, visibly Hispanic, but born in America. Is she appropriating Spanish culture? Are the many Japanese who study Flamenco appropriating Spanish culture? (Flamenco is hugely popular in Japan) The Spanish don’t seem to think so.
Hilarious pretended to be really Spanish instead of just loving Spain and Spanish culture. But I don’t think that can count as appropriation as much as flattery. I think the Spanish are much more upset that she stuck her foot in her mouth by saying that she’s a white girl, and there are lots of white people in Europe… as if saying that Spanish people aren’t white.
Yeah, I don’t buy into “cultural appropriation.” Certainly there are ways that one can be disrespectful in imitating something from another culture, but as a general matter, adopting something from another culture is not a sin.
Hilaria is just a phony who pretended to be something she wasn’t, presumably because she thought it made her more interesting or exotic. And it’s absolutely fair game to mock somebody for that. I do think it’s a little silly when Madonna affects an English accent immediately after moving there. Or the high school classmate of mine who was a white son of a dentist who got so into hip hop culture that he tried to talk like he was from Compton. Etc. It wasn’t racist of him, but it sure was silly.
Oh wow, I remember that same museum kimono episode! It’s my go-to example of how cultural appropriation nags can get it wrong.
A few months ago there was an an opinion piece in the local newspaper about cultural appropriation. The writer was of the opinion there was nothing wrong with someone experimenting with themes from an other culture. But the writer could also understand the frustration that was caused by that. Because a lot of times people of a minority culture were struggling with all kind of discrimination which made it more difficult for them to survive from their art. So when then someone from the major culture is succesful while doing something with their culture, it can feel that something was taken away from them.
But the solution seems to be that we should fight the discrimination instead of people experimenting with other cultures.
Screechy, I “buy into ‘cultural appropriation'” in limited circumstances. When someone from a dominant culture adopts the expressions of a subordinate culture, at a time when that subordinate culture may face stigmatism or repression for expressing their own culture, that is cultural appropriation to me. In that circumstance, the person from the dominant culture can put on the act not in spite of, but because of, his privilege as a member of the dominant culture.
Your high school classmate could mimic the dress and speech of the ghetto to his rapper’s delight, but when the cops rolled up he could put his hat on frontwards, straighten up, and talk his best dutiful white boy. And then the cops would go away. He would not end up face-down on the pavement with a knee in his back, as he would if he were actually black and up to the same antics in the same neighborhood.
The line can be vague. Most of Elvis’s early hits with white audiences were first released by Black musicians: Hound Dog, by Big Mama Thornton, Don’t be Cruel, by Otis Blackwell, Lawdy Miss Clawdy, by Lloyd Price. The TV wouldn’t show Elvis from the waist down, but if he were black, they wouldn’t have shown him from the waist up either. Some people consider Elvis to have been a cultural appropriator, but others say he wasn’t appropriating Black music so much as pointing to it, like Bruno Mars points to it today.
But let’s consider Pat Boone. Here’s his remarkable cover of Tutti Frutti, by Little Richard (who replaced Lloyd Price in his ensemble when the latter was drafted in the Korean police action).
https://youtu.be/jBzzlUIEWHA
Besides “ye gods, that’s awful, make it stop,” consider this one aspect of the video: the guy behind the counter. Doesn’t he kind of look like Little Richard? Boone is figuratively putting the creator of the music – in a white suit, like Little Richard sometimes wore – behind him as a servant.
Pat Boone’s abysmal cover reached number 12 on the Billboard pop chart, Little Richard’s only number 21. What did Little Richard have to say about this?
I submit that this is cultural appropriation.
@Holms #2, yes, I think you do remember the same event. If you read anything by “Keiko” (not her real name), she’s a friend of mine from way back. Here is a link to some of her writing on the matter:
http://japaneseamericaninboston.blogspot.com/2015/07/monets-la-japonaise-kimono-wednesdays.html
That’s Pat Boone’s entire career, or the best bits of it anyway.
When this argument blew up I asked a few of my Japanese friends what they thought about it and they were unanimous in thinking it ridiculous. The Japanese love sharing their culture with foreigners and there are places in Japan where you can hire traditional outfits for matsuri (festivals) and other occasions, or just to walk around for the day. In London we have a twice yearly exhibition called Hyper Japan, where all aspects of their culture is shared and celebrated.
Being offended on behalf of the Japanese people, as happened in Boston, is actually far more racist than wearing a kimono, in my opinion.
Papito,
I think I basically agree with you — there is a “wrong” way to do these things. If you don’t give credit to the culture you’re borrowing from, or if you strip it of all the context and meaning so that you utterly miss the point, that merits criticism.
I think the area where I find the use of “cultural appropriation” silliest is in food. Stephanie Izard, a Chicago-based chef who was the first woman to win Top Chef, recently got bashed and had to apologize for posting a recipe for bibimbap because her particular take on this Korean recipe used ingredients that were more Thai or Vietnamese-influenced. Her critics insisted that if she had just called it an “Asian fusion” dish it would have been ok. Which… that’s really what all the fuss is about? Culinary traditions all borrow from other cultures, and it’s worked out wonderfully. Was it cultural appropriation when Korean cooks started using that classic American ingredient SPAM in their dishes? Did Italians appropriate the cultural heritage of Native Americans when they started growing and using tomatoes? It gets very silly very quickly. At least when New Yorkers complain about other cities’ bagels and pizza, they don’t cry racism. (They are still insufferable, however.)
As I mentioned in the other thread, my wife is from the north of Spain; many of her relatives are blind and blue-eyed. They are all definitely white. She had no interest in flamenco, in part because it was a southern thing, in part because the Franco government promoted it as part of its “Spain is different” campaign. But when we started going out I convinced her to go to a bar in La Latina neighborhood in Madrid, where they hired a guitarist who played while the local gitanos took turns improvising canto jondo and occasionally someone danced. She began to develop an interest then.
A few years later when we were living in Alexandria, Virginia, her parents came to visit. As they were unadventurous eaters, we took them to a local Spanish restaurant, where a flamenco dancer happened to be performing. We were sitting close enough to the stage that we were peppered with the occasional drop of sweat. Our then-four-year-old daughter was transfixed, and soon was entertaining us with her own version of flamenco.
Soon we found her a teacher, a classically-trained Madrileña who was a good dancer but a terrible teacher. Eventually we found a better teacher, a Peruvian with an Italian name who had learned a much more modern version in Lima, where she met her American husband (now ex-). Our daughter improved quite a lot over the years, but now she’s abandoned it. My wife’s become something of a connoisseur.
Lots of layers there. Flamenco itself was invented by gitanas, with a fairly clear connection to belly dancing and Indian dancing, but with stomping. The Madrileña didn’t like all that stomping, and complained that it was “agitanada” (gypsified); she preferred the classical style she had learned; in addition to being a bad teacher, she was a snob.
Currently one of the most popular singers in the world is Rosalía, a Catalana who combines traditional flamenco singing with reggaeton and hip hop; purists hate it (it probably doesn’t help that Andaluces were treated like shit when they migrated from the latifundia in the south to the factories in the north). She’s also resented by some Latinos who don’t think a Spaniard deserves a Latin Grammy.
And apropos of Papito’s comment, my sister and I had dinner once at a restaurant in Grenada (the city in Spain, not the island-nation in the Caribbean) that was advertising live music. We got there at an unseemly early hour (around eight), before the show had started. Eventually a Japanese man walked in, unpacked his guitar, and accompanied our dinner with soft flamenco. He was quite good.
I’m late to the discussion because I’ve been mulling things over (for about forty years). I think part of the problem is that “appropriation” is the wrong abstraction. It doesn’t give us the tools to draw a line (if there is one) between what’s OK and what’s not. I have some ideas about a better abstraction but they’re embarrassingly vague, long-winded and subject to change at the drop of a hat so I won’t inflict them on you.
But as I was reading the comments, I thought about three examples of possible appropriation, I don’t know whether they’re useful. One is definitely silly, one is borderline (is it valid to call it appropriation or not?) and the third is…. well, it seems (to me) more valid to call it appropriation than the second, but I don’t think I can explain why. It’s going to be a long one, I’m afraid.
1. My background is in computer science and I’m a geek. If you think you’re a computer geek, you’re not. Stop saying you are, just because you got your grandad’s printer to work that one time. You’re not a computer geek unless you were using computers in the 70s. You’re not a computer geek unless you were building computers in the 70s, then programming them. Then taking unseemly glee in what you wrought. Building a computer does not mean plugging a keyboard into a Raspberry Pi. It involves a soldering iron, which you saved up your pocket money to buy from the Maplin catalogue and got beaten up because of it. You’re not a computer geek unless your first solution to any mathematical or optimisation problem isn’t to just work it out on a piece of paper but to spend hours writing a program to solve it in all possible cases and then give it the worst possible user interface. And then never use that program again.
This is our culture and you norms with your vitamin D and your ability to see in sunlight don’t get to say you are one of us. You don’t get to (mis-)use words like “realtime”. You may refer to the box a computer lives in as its “CPU”, but I reserve the right to stove in your head with the sharpened corner of one if you do.
You get the idea. Modern language is littered with terms from computer science, all used quite, quite wrongly. These words have been appropriated in the literal sense, but I can’t really complain. Well, in reality I can and do frequently complain, as mrs latsot will tell you, her eyes wide like a hostage’s, But I don’t have a right to complain. The words are not mine, they’re everyone’s and if norms insist on using them wrongly, I can only, with good conscience, bite my pillow in response. Same goes for jumped up snotlings who think they know about computers because they can open a browser. On windows. And think that entitles them to tell me how easy and cheap it ought to be to write software that just solves all the problems.
2. Food. Food has deep cultural significance and it can bind people together. When we want comfort, we seek out food we’re familiar with, which reminds us of community and hearth and home. Food that reminds us of our identity, where we came from, what we have in common with the people who care about us and know us best. Well, not me, obviously. I’m from the north east of England and our cultural food item is supposedly the Chicken Parmo (no, don’t ask. Seriously. I’ve warned you. Don’t even look up. You’re looking it up, aren’t you? Stop it.) Also, my family is awful and the last thing I want to eat is food that reminds me of them. Especially as I grew up in poverty, in the countryside, and much of my diet was nettles.
But the point is that food is definitely a strong indicator of culture and a binder (in a good way) of people who belong to that culture. That as your mother made it is not the same thing as prepared by someone else, even if the ingredients and method are identical.
But is someone from one culture making food from another an example of appropriation? What if they start a restaurant to sell that food? What if a white English person starts an Indian restaurant? What if a white English person wins an Indian cooking competition with blind judging?
Clearly we have some race issues in Britain and there is an obvious power imbalance between those who are of Indian descent and those who aren’t. This isn’t the same as case 1 because – although you still haven’t realised it yet – it’s we geeks who have all the power. Would it be right for some white person to enter an Indian cooking competition? Would it be an example of someone inserting themselves into a place where it’s better they not be?
Like I said, borderline (in my opinion). So how about:
3. There have been cases where able-bodied people have tried – often forcefully – to compete in wheelchair sports. The reasoning is that able-bodied people don’t have any particular advantage in wheelchair sports over actual wheelchair users so places on teams etc. would be decided on merit alone. As an actual wheelchair user I can tell you that this is only partially true. My disability means that I have no leverage in my legs, which (I can tell you as an ex-kayaker) does have disadvantages in certain reckless wheelchair activities (as I can tell you as someone who is also all about reckless wheelchair activities). I’m new to the chair so it’s quite possible that I could overcome this limitation through training. Or perhaps wheelchair sport governing bodies could allow for stuff like this when defining ability categories. Who knows?
But that’s not the point, of course. The point is that an able-bodied person can always just get out of the chair and walk away. What they’re taking by competing in wheelchair sport isn’t so much a place on a team or a podium, it’s something a lot less tangible that disabled people have worked, sweated, fought and bled for. Wheelchair users struggle for achievement and dignity in sports specifically designed so that they can…. only to have someone who could compete in non-wheelchair sport compete against them and then literally walk away. It’s not clear what has been taken from the wheelchair athlete, but it certainly feels as though something has. And I say that not only as someone with skin in the game (sometimes literally, see above about reckless wheelchair activities), it has seemed wrong to me since way before I was in the chair.
It’s different to men competing in women’s sports because of that point about able-bodied people generally not having a physical advantage over wheelchair users in most wheelchair sports (if we agree not to quibble). But does that make it right for them to try? Is it appropriation? The power imbalance is surely there, is that relevant here? Surely the same issue would exist for women if men didn’t have an obvious physical advantage in most sports, because women have struggled to have sports at all and they can’t walk away from being women if they wanted to (which, tragically, an increasing number of young ones seem to want to do).
It seems (to me) like “yes” to the first two questions and “maybe” to the third, but I struggle to explain why or at least to describe where the boundary cases are. What the lines look like and where they should be drawn, I cannot say.
Apologies for the length of this comment. I don’t know that I’ve said anything useful other than that the issue is kind of tricky. What I will say is that it doesn’t seem up to me to judge whether people with an Indian background should or shouldn’t complain about white people cooking Indian food. I just don’t know how seriously I should take those complaints if they’re made. I do feel it’s partly up to me to complain about able-bodied people in wheelchair sport, but I can’t, in all honesty. feel I should expect able-bodied people to take my complaint seriously. It’s a hell of a lot of words to say it’s difficult.
Oops, some things got stripped out of that post as tags, when they weren’t meant as tags. In the bit about food, there should be “cultural food item” before “as your mother made” and also before “as prepared by someone else.”