Cultural Appropriation or Cultural Apartheid? Aye, there’s the rub
The real racists in any story, are the ones who define you by your race and who restrict you by your race.
CROSS POSTED AT davidkeithlaw.wordpress.com/...
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I am the descendant of victims, thrown off their native land. On one side of the family, my people were forced out by violent military and economic forces. Their land, the life they knew, their culture, was erased or damaged. On my father’s side, repeated waves of conquerors swept through our native land, imposing brutal regimes and eradicating local culture.
Yes, I am Scottish-English.
That sounds like a snotty and dismissive analogy to more recent forms of dispossession, I know. It can be that, if you want it to be that, or it could be an attempt to empathize with more recent victims of history. If you want it to be that.
For that is the one thing that is true of all writing: the reader brings 95% of the meaning to whatever she picks up and reads. In other words, how you read something is just as important as what is written. So too with music.
At the moment I type this, I hear Ben Fold’s song “The Luckiest.” The words are an expression of good fortune, for having found true love. But listen to it as someone who found true love and couldn’t have it, or who lost it, and the song becomes a poignant lament. That’s not really an accident – the song is fragile and the lyric aches with awareness that what is found, might be lost.
Or not, if you don’t want it to be.
In recent days, the topic of “cultural appropriation” has sawed its way into popular debate in Canada. It all began with a joke, which triggered an angry response, which triggered defensiveness, which triggered a sudden seizure of institutional political correctness. Careers and reputations have fallen on the battlefield in mere days. The particularly repulsive thing about all this is that most of the “offence taken” has been “official” – posturing adopted by senior bureaucrats and others intended to signal that They Are Not Racist.
What is “cultural appropriation”? It is hard to find a good definition, because most of what I’ve seen sympathetic to the concept is incoherent bafflegab. But as I understand it from sincere adherents, “cultural appropriation” is the use of a culture’s symbols, styles, stories, motifs, methods and sensibility, by a person who is not racially or historically a member of that culture.
But if that were all, then any borrowing at all would be an offense. No, “cultural appropriation” becomes a crime when it is committed by someone in the dominant culture/ethnic group, against cultural elements intrinsic to a minority group. Especially against minority groups like my ancestors’ peoples, whose land was stolen from them.
The essential argument is “you’ve taken a lot from us, don’t take this.” The next argument is “only we, by virtue of our membership in this minority group, are truly capable of respecting, delivering, communicating, etc this art form.”
I think there is legitimacy in professing that one’s upbringing, one’s inculcation in particular group norms, might heighten sensitivity. Those characteristics can make an artist better able to use an art form. Take rap for example: when I first heard it, only really angry black guys from the U.S. inner city were doing it. They invented it. They used it like a bludgeon. It was amazing – poetic, often ugly and violent, sometimes mysoginistic – but it opened a window into a sense of oppression and rage that a white guy will probably never feel.
Today, really sweet little girls in tutus are dancing to rap, mouthing the words to Taylor Swift’s industrial white bread pop songs. Some might say that what Justin Bieber or a galaxy of pop stars (of any race) are doing, isn’t really rap. But it is a form of rap, just as rock n’roll is a form of blues, and blues was very much a form of spiritual slave music, and so on and on. It has all been appropriated.
Is that a bad thing? Well, a lot of it is bad rap music, no question. But not all the white rap is bad art (please stand up Marshall Mathers). It is possible, sometimes, for someone from outside the first community behind an art form, to bring feeling and talent to it so potent, the new version becomes just as powerful – and more accessible – than the original. Indeed, the aforementioned Mr. Mathers (aka Eminem) is a perfect example of what some hate about cultural appropriation: the white guy does it better than almost anyone else. That really must be a piss off.
Yet that is where the real power in an art form resides: not in its exclusivity and narrowness, but in its accessibility and flexibility. Yes, rap was good enough when only a small cadre of black men were doing it forty years ago, but it also had potential – a potency that could be unleashed by a wider range of people, enabling them to express different (and the same) feelings and experiences. That is what cultural appropriation does.
Now, “appropriation” of land is a real problem, because it shrinks the community’s wealth and opportunities and liberty. But appropriation of art does the opposite – it expands the scope of, and audience for, the original art form. So too for stories – the re-telling of a story by anyone simply expands the reach of that story, opening mental crevices in the minds of new listeners.
When I write my novel about an Ojibway lesbian who enters a marriage of convenience with a Ukrainian wheat farmer, it will be an almost pure piece of cultural appropriation. But what will it steal from Ojibways, lesbians or Ukrainians? Nothing. All it will do is try, poorly or well, to shed light on people who have been forgotten by time, people who left no footprints, traces or diaries. What it will really do is tell some story of mine, through them. Because that is what much of what fiction does.
And if, as you might expect, my novel makes a hash of it, what injury will be done to anyone (other than my publisher and my own reputation?) None. Will an Ojibway lesbian be denied her chance to write a similar story? Not if she cares about her story. Hell, I might even inspire her to do a better job of it than me.
The fear of cultural appropriation – that something is being stolen – seems almost backwards from reality – a limiting and self-destructive ideology. And not just self-destructive. In recent days very sympathetic and sensitive people have been accused of apostasy – denied their jobs, seen their names tarred – because they did not bend a knee to Cultural Appropriation Theology (more accurately, they joshed about it amongst themselves, but in a public forum). Down came the hammer of institutional punishment and sudden pariah-hood. Out came the sad apologies, the “I didn’t mean its”, the professions of fealty to the Official Ideas. Too late, boys – off to the gulag with you.
What we are witnessing – living – is a kind of Trendy Stalinism. Instant judgment and punishment for uncomfortable thoughts. But in a way, it’s tougher than Stalinism was, because this is an Inquisition with no Bible. Back in the day, you at least knew who you were offending (the priests, the Church, the Pope, God Almighty) before you were drawn and quartered. In the Soviet Union, there were enough sacred cows (communism, Lenin, Marx, the Party, the Politburo, whoever was the boss) that you could at least keep your mouth shut and maybe survive. Even North Korea makes it easy to know what (who) is sacred, with a cautionary note to govern yourself accordingly.
But in Trendy Stalinism, there is no Bible, no authority – just the surging mob of tweeters, preferably carrying enough of the right DNA to claim moral supremacy in the argument – and instead of doctrine, there is self-inflated rage. Everybody has a pitchfork nowadays and they’re coming for you!
The official reaction to this complaining is to punish “the offenders” (those who are being complained about). But is that response driven by a sincere wish to protect the downtrodden “appropriated peoples?” I very much doubt it. No, the official reaction is more likely a pure product of bureaucratic cowardice. For Christ’s sake, don’t let someone who says anything offensive, go unpunished. Not on your watch. If you do, well you know who will be next….
Of all the many things wrong with the “cultural appropriation” debate right now, it is that reaction – Trendy Stalinism – which may be the most offensive and the most frightening. Because it is MEANT to be frightening. It is meant to silence. And it is working.
This is the point, in any essay such as this, where I say the necessarily supportive things about dispossessed minorities. I have to say them, to weaken the case against me that I am a racist monster. The fact of what I believe and how I live my life will be of nothing, if the Trendy Stalinists gets their steel mesh mitts on me. So I have to oil myself up with all the nice things one’s supposed to say, and hope the Stalinists move on to less slippery morsels.
What white settlers did to the indigenous people of North America and Australia and Africa, was nightmarishly evil. Members of my ancestral ethnic group perpetrated a kind of holocaust on the people they met and robbed in North America after 1600. “We” destroyed “them” and the very rich society we hatched here, for all its many real virtues and strengths, has done little to make up for it despite all the treaties and subsidies. It was perhaps the largest theft in human history.
But in 2017, a grade six white kid making a dreamcatcher in art class is not committing theft. She is making art, something lovely born of the almost-eradicated traditions of the dispossessed. She is keeping the lost people alive, in her own humble way. That’s what she’s doing if she belts out a rap song, too: keeping the spirit and the form of an art alive, in a new body, with new soul.
Yet you have to wonder, today, is there a single white kid in Canada whose teacher would still suggest they make dreamcatchers? Forget about feather head-dresses and Pocahontas costumes. Would that girl be allowed to do a “rap” if someone thought, hmm, maybe we shouldn’t “go there”? What do you want to bet that the Trendy Stalinists have already terrorized school board bureaucrats into making sure that little cultural homage never happens? And God help the teacher who doesn’t read the memo.
Which takes us to the peculiar weirdness of Cultural Appropriation territory: you are only permitted to do, what your race or identity permits. It is suggested that we live under a kind of mental, cultural apartheid – don’t drink from the wrong water fountain little girl, please sit in the white seats. Inflammatory rhetoric? You bet, but that’s what you earn when you premise your argument upon race entitlement and race exclusion.
The real racists in any story, are the ones who define you by your race and who restrict you by your race. And in this story, that ain’t me.
Protectionism of one culture means locking out anyone else from experiencing that material – it traps them in their own field. It narrows and reduces the experience of people, on all sides of all fences. It steals from that grade six white girl, a host of guilt-free opportunities to grow, explore, search, learn and become more human – while shrouding “the other” in silence and darkness. Everyone loses.
And it is THAT form of cultural appropriation, my friends, that we should really be afraid of.