Blackface. An example of cultural appropriation from a 1900 William H. West minstrel show poster.
On oppressing people of color while appropriating our cultures.
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
Over the years I have had the opportunity to study oppression, and to participate in movements that fight against it, in many forms. I am not speaking simply of oppression along white-black lines, since my own life has led me to supporting struggles of people of color in the broader sense—Native Americans and other indigenous peoples, Asian-Americans and Latinos along with issues around gender and sexual identity.
Not all these issues are focused on the direct violence of genocide, slavery, lynching, rape and police violence. We are no longer limited to simple discussions of racism, or sexism after several decades developing critical race and gender theory. We have moved into exploring "intersectionality" as a way to bring race, class, ethnicity and gender together. Our dialogues now include thoughts on "privilege", but also on "microaggressions", and examinations of "cultural appropriation." The push-back, both academic and popular (as always) has been swift, and loud. We are labelled "PC" as an insult and to shut-down discussion, as if there is something wrong with pointing out inequity and exploitation.
This put-down of our objections has gotten a lot of play. For example, "To the new culture cops, everything is appropriation" and a slew of comments, mostly from white people supporting the author. After wading though them all, my favorite response was:
Conoy
8/21/2015 11:52 PM EST
That was an awful lot of words to say "everything belongs to everybody, and especially to White people, so get over it."
I've bookmarked this article by Maisha Z. Johnson,
What’s Wrong with Cultural Appropriation? These 9 Answers Reveal Its Harm, and recommend that folks give it a thorough read.
What Cultural Appropriation Is (And Isn’t)
In short: Cultural appropriation is when somebody adopts aspects of a culture that’s not their own. But that’s only the most basic definition. A deeper understanding of cultural appropriation also refers to a particular power dynamic in which members of a dominant culture take elements from a culture of people who have been systematically oppressed by that dominant group. That’s why cultural appropriation is not the same as cultural exchange, when people share mutually with each other – because cultural exchange lacks that systemic power dynamic.
It’s also not the same as assimilation, when marginalized people adopt elements of the dominant culture in order to survive conditions that make life more of a struggle if they don’t. Some say, for instance, that non-Western people who wear jeans and Indigenous people who speak English are taking from dominant cultures, too. But marginalized groups don’t have the power to decide if they’d prefer to stick with their customs or try on the dominant culture’s traditions just for fun.
When the last living survivors of massacred Indigenous tribes are fighting to save their language before it dies when they do, and Native students are suspended for speaking in their own Indigenous languages, mirroring the abusive US boarding schools that tried to wipe out Native American cultures up until the 1980s, it’s clear that not every person who speaks English does so by choice.
In other words, context matters.
She makes nine major points, and explains each one in detail. Can't post it all because of copyright restrictions so
go take a look.
1. It Trivializes Violent Historical Oppression
2. It Lets People Show Love for the Culture, But Remain Prejudiced Against Its People
3. It Makes Things ‘Cool’ for White People – But ‘Too Ethnic’ for People of Color
4. It Lets Privileged People Profit from Oppressed People’s Labor
5. It Lets Some People Get Rewarded for Things the Creators Never Got Credit For
6. It Spreads Mass Lies About Marginalized Cultures
7. It Perpetuates Racist Stereotypes
8. White People Can Freely Do What People of Color Were Actively Punished for Doing
9. It Prioritizes the Feelings of Privileged People Over Justice for Marginalized People
Doctor RJ wrote on Daily Kos,
At what point does an exchange of cultures cross the line into appropriation?, and the comments section indicated clearly (to me) that a lot of our friends on the left, don't get it. Just like some people who should be allies still don't "get" white privilege.
Included was this primer from a young sister, who breaks it down.
The Hunger Game's 16-year-old Amandla Stenberg delivers a crash course on black culture with a fellow classmate for their history class.
Amandla Stenberg: Don't Cash Crop On My Cornrows
She closes with this question:
What would America be like if we loved black people as much as we love black culture?
Much of the current discussion around cultural appropriations focuses on American Indians, and a good starting place to explore the issues is Native Appropriations.
Native Appropriations is a forum for discussing representations of Native peoples, including stereotypes, cultural appropriation, news, activism, and more.
The blog was founded by Cherokee scholar and activist
Professor Adrienne Keene, who was interviewed by Al Jazeera in the following clip.
Last year there was a social media firestorm around Coachella.
Why So Many American Indians Have an Issue With Coachella
The news: At this point, the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival has inevitably devolved into a parody of itself. Blinding sunshine, massive crowds, exorbitant ticket prices and rampant teenage drug abuse have bolstered its reputation as the yearly paean to rich kid debauchery you love to hate, and the one most people would inexplicably still commit murder to attend...Needless to say, many Natives are not fans of the trend. But that hasn't stopped the festival from capitalizing on the "white kids playing Indian" motif and offering tipi rentals for the low weekend price of ... $2,200?...
Politics as usual: The appropriation of Native cultural markers as costumes, mascots and fashion accessories has been a hot topic lately. It's arguably seen its most vocal manifestation in the debate around the Washington Redskins, Dan Snyder's NFL franchise that refuses to change its name despite being an obvious racial slur. The discussion continued with the recent "de-chiefing" protests, where Cleveland Indians fans started removing the Sambo-esque "Chief Wahoo" image from their MLB attire. And finally, even aside from the Alessandria Ambrosio picture, the fashion industry has faced heat for its insensitive use of headdresses and face paint at runway shows and photo shoots.
Our lives are not someone's fashion statement.
It isn't just Native Americans who are pushing back. Read this year's response to Coachella:
Isha Aran wrote in "Take That Dot Off Your Forehead and Quit Trying to Make Bindis Happen"
Another year, another Coachella, another trend mired in cultural appropriation. It's the true circle of life. You can almost watch the fixed gears of hipster logic grind: Now that Native American headdresses are offensive, we need to snatch some cool novelty from another culture. And so it came to be that bindis were a hit at Coachella.
Selena Gomez was wearing one. The Jenner-Kardashians sported them. Vanessa Hudgens, Duchess of Coachella herself, was wearing one.
Okay, let's just nip this one right in the bud right now.
The bindi is not your music festival fashion accessory. It's not something to be integrated into a tribal fringe mosaic of a get-up. Taking a symbol from a culture that is thousands of years old and divorcing it from its meaning — or even embracing its meaning for the express purpose of looking cool (bro, do you even chataranga?) — does not lend you any cred — street, worldly, or otherwise. And wearing a bindi to Coachella certainly is not a genuine celebration of Hindu culture, so please don't even start with that.
I think you get my point. Few people adopting outward signs of our cultures, that they can shuck in a second are willing to make the internal political commitment to fight for and alongside of Black Americans, Native Americans, Asians, Latinos or immigrants.
There-in lies my problem with cultural appropriation. It does not lead to liberation. It simply makes money for those who are not funding community efforts to make our lives matter.
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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It doesn't make sense and hasn't been shown to work politically for decades. The New Republic: Liberals Are Wrong to Separate Race from Class.
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The horizontal organization of Black Lives Matter ensures a diversity of perspectives among participants and even branches. Nevertheless, the now-commonplace claim at the heart of the recent Black Lives Matter protests against Sanders is that white liberals have long reduced racism to class inequality in order to deflect attention from racial disparities.
This is not just wrong, but the formulation—which ultimately treats race as unchanging and permanent rather than a product of specific historical and political economic relations—undermines both the cause of racial equality in general and pursuit of equitable treatment in the criminal justice system in particular.
Indeed, Sanders is more likely to draw links between economic inequality generally and racial disparities in employment, housing, wealth and incarceration than President Carter, the Clintons, or even President Obama.
However, liberals have actually tended to divorce racial disparities from economic inequality for longer than Marissa Johnson, the founders of Black Lives Matter, or even I have been alive. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, for example, traced the ultimate source of the high rates of black poverty and unemployment (which were roughly twice that of whites’) to what some today would call systemic racism.
According to Moynihan, however, “the racist virus that ... afflicts all of us” set in motion a self-perpetuating cycle of poverty and dependence that all but ensured that neither economic opportunity nor anti-discrimination policies alone would be able to close the income and employment gap between blacks and whites.
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At first a five-movement experimental opera set in various New Orleans neighborhoods called “Ecohybridity” doesn’t present as the most accessible form of theatre. But don't judge a book by its cover. ColorLines: In New Orleans, a Black Feminist Opera With a Touch of Afrofuturism.
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“Opera was originally a people’s form that would go from community to community. It was a way to articulate what was going on through art. But somewhere along the line, it became an elitist form, and poor people of color were locked out of the medium,” she explains over a crackling phone line from New Orleans. “But our conditioning right now, how we’re managing to exist, is opera in its largest sense. It’s comedy, it’s tragedy, it’s all of these different parts.”
“Ecohybridity" springs from Barrow's experiences with eviction in Durham. That dislocation was made more resonant in post-Katrina New Orleans, where her Gallery of the Streets provides space for highlighting artists of color.
While organizers call “Ecohybridity” an opera, the show is much more immersive and fluid. It incorporates contemporary music, paintings and the open canvas of New Orleans. It's Afrofuturist in its presentation but classic at its core.
Take a look at the cast of characters and you’ll get a sense of how the show is creating something new. One character, named Madame Sankofa (The People’s Diva), requires the performer to channel Mahalia Jackson, Nina Simone, Laurie Anderson and Lauryn Hill. Another, O.G. Falcon (The Butch of the Ashes) is rooted in Bessie Smith and the Sex Pistols, among others. These more contemporary influences ground the opera in something relatable despite the high-mindedness of the concept.
All of this is couched in Barrow’s and her colleagues’ tacit understanding of what it means to be contemporary black creatives (particularly as black women) in New Orleans, to deal with the pressures of municipal and cultural exploitation.
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An interview with the city’s public housing chief, more than two decades after the events of HBO’s Show Me a Hero. Slate: Yonkers’ Affordable-Housing Fight Isn’t Over.
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For the last two weeks, HBO’s six-episode social drama Show Me a Hero spotlighted a topic that doesn’t tend to get a lot of attention from Hollywood: affordable-housing policy. Co-written by David Simon, the showrunner of The Wire, Show Me a Hero documents the polarizing conflict over the court-ordered construction of 200 units of public housing on the predominantly white east side of Yonkers. While—hey, spoiler alert—the series ended in tragedy for Nick Wasicsko, the young mayor portrayed by Oscar Isaac, it closes in triumph for the residents lucky enough to win one of the new units. But what is the fate of Yonkers, and its public housing, more than 20 years after the court case and subsequent political battle that Show Me a Hero dramatized?
The agency that oversees the homes at the heart of Show Me a Hero is the Municipal Housing Authority for the city of Yonkers, whose head for the last eight and a half years has been Joseph Shuldiner. He began his career just to the south in New York City, rising from a tenant advocate to general manager of the New York City Housing Authority and its approximately 180,000 units of public housing. Afterward, Shuldiner worked for the Los Angeles Housing Authority and President Clinton’s Department of Housing and Urban Development, which dispatched him to lead the notoriously dysfunctional Chicago Housing Authority out of federal receivership in 1995.
Shuldiner’s stewardship of Yonkers should be simple by comparison. But in 2011, HUD reported that the nation’s housing programs faced $25.6 billion in capital repairs. Instead of helping out, Congress has been starving federally dependent housing authorities—cutting public housing’s capital and operating funds by a quarter since 2001—and forcing many, including Yonkers, to try to exit the New Deal-era program to find relief from the private sector. The Yonkers Municipal Housing Authority operates about 2,000 units of public housing and oversees more than 2,700 families who use federal Section 8 vouchers to afford housing on the market.
Slate spoke with Shuldiner about the effects that the affordable townhomes at the center of Show Me a Hero had on their neighborhoods; the vision of Oscar Newman, the controversial architect and planner who designed Yonkers’ affordable housing; and how to balance the integration of affordable housing into middle-class communities with improving units in impoverished neighborhoods. The interview has been edited for concision and clarity.
From left to right, Oscar Isaac, Angela Pietropinto, Josh Salatin, Jessica Denson, Michael Stahl-David, and Carla Quevedo in HBO’s Show Me a Hero.
Photo courtesy Paul Schiraldi/HBO
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Yes, most of the conservative media are really, really bad people. Talking Point Media; How Conservatives Used The Virginia Shooting To Flip The Script On Racism.
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These mass shootings are also usually perpetrated by mentally disturbed white men. But when I found out that an African American man was the killer in one incident and the accused in another, I knew conservative sites like Breitbart would seek to frame the incidents, like any black-on-white crime, as indicative of reverse racism, and a political dog whistle that they are under attack. “RACE MURDER IN VIRGINIA: BLACK REPORTER SUSPECTED OF EXECUTING WHITE COLLEAGUES – ON LIVE TELEVISION!” blared the initial Breitbart headline. On Fox, “Justice with Jeanine” used the Texas story as an opportunity to blame Obama and call Black Lives Matter “black slime that needs to be eradicated.”
American Thinker, a conservative blog, claimed that the “evil” things put in the murderer's head was the result of Obama liberalism. In the Conservative Treehouse, an article about the Texas deputy’s murder notes: don’t be surprised if the shooter turns out to be a modestly mentally impaired person (think Bubba Gump) who is easily influenced—and lives surrounded by modern anti-cop “Fu*k The Police” type ideological and violent minds.
The artwork used in the article throws everything out there they find responsible for racism in America, from Saul Alinksy to Louis Farrakhan to Obama in a Trayvon Martin hoodie with a Skittles insignia, set against a backdrop of “Hunger Games” of race rabble rousers.
This hyperbolic outcry is part of a longstanding practice of false equivalency—assuming that systemic racial violence towards African Americans and individual incidents of black people killing white people are one and the same.
In the larger arc of history, these media outlets are continuing an American tradition of the ‘black savage myth.” This myth can be placed on gangsta rappers “celebrating” their outrageous violence (mostly against other black men and especially black women). It can come in the form of a 12-year-old boy gunned down in a Cleveland park out of fear, or a father choked to death in Staten Island gasping “I can’t breathe,”or a teenager shot down in the streets of Ferguson who was described as an “animal that needed to be put down” or a 14-year-old boy lynched beyond recognition for whistling at woman in Mississippi. Whatever form this savage image is placed upon appears, the media’s narrative makes it clear that society needs protection from this so-called monster and is justified in torturing, enslaving, castrating, raping, and using every method possible to tame this monster that roars through the imagination of American racists.
The people who die in these scenarios are all black people. And yet, to some conservatives, it’s only racial violence when black kills white.
The right wing media’s logical fallacies extends past race: The local weather is cold so global climate warming isn’t real; if women have greater access to birth control they will become hard-drinking promiscuous abortioneers; the Second Amendment means the government should never take actions in prohibiting gun access to any adult; and taking care of poor people incentivizes poverty. But racial false equivalency is one of the right wing’s most consistent rhetorical tricks.
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Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
Some say that Life is a mystery. Some say if we can just cut into it, dissect it and see what makes it breathe and speak; we then will have our questions answered, the mystery will be solved. Will it though? Won't our fears and prejudices interpret or misinterpret what we see? Alexander Pope said, "T'is with our lives as our watches. None go just alike, but each believes his own."
But what if Life is not such a mystery? What if out of duty, or an almost familial responsibility to friends, we agree to look in on their lives while they are gone to a family tragedy? As in that moment when we open the note they left that reads...
If You Are Over Staying Woke
Water
the plants. Drink
plenty of water.
Don’t hear
the news. Get
bored. Complain
about the weather.
Keep a corkscrew
in your purse.
Swipe right
sometimes.
Don’t smile
unless you want
to. Sleep in.
Don’t see the news.
Remember what
the world is like
for white people.
Listen to
cricket songs.
Floss. Take pills.
Keep an
empty mind.
When you are
hungover
do not say
I’m never drinking
again. Be honest
when you’re up
to it. Otherwise
drink water
lie to yourself
turn off the news
burn the papers
skip the funerals
take pills
laugh at dumb shit
fuck people you
don’t care about
use the crockpot
use the juicer
use the smoothie maker
drink water
from the sky
don’t think
too much about the sky
don’t think about water
skip the funerals
close your eyes
whenever possible
When you toast
look everyone in the eyes
Never punctuate
the President
Write the news
Turn
into water
Water
the fire escape
Burn the paper
Crumble the letters
Instead of
hyacinths pick
hydrangeas
Water the hydrangeas
Wilt the news
White the hydrangeas
Drink the white
Waterfall the
cricket songs
Keep a song mind
Don’t smile
Don’t wilt
funeral
funeral
Morgan Parker
"If You Are Over Staying Woke"
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