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clyde

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My (limited) understanding is that cultural appropriation is the problem with how rock music was basically black music until white people came along and popularised it - for whites. Not a lot of black people really benefited from white people deciding rock music was pretty cool.

 

It's almost entirely not about the culture itself, but about how non-white people are denied full influence at the cultural table and how, if they don't hold on tightly to their culture, it gets exploited.

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It's almost entirely not about the culture itself, but about how non-white people are denied full influence at the cultural table and how, if they don't hold on tightly to their culture, it gets exploited.

 

Like I approximately said earlier, the problem there seems like society's failure to recognize nonwhites, not white people using elements of other cultures. I hear a lot of people talking about appropriation condemning specifically the appropriators. Is the idea that cultural appropriation is bad for roughly the same reason as copyright infringement: the thing belongs to those who invented it and so others shouldn't profit from it?

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That's part of it, definitely. I think another part is the implicit message of "I don't care about who you are - I care about this image/proverb/decontextualized ritual that I think is neat." Appropriation, at its worst, values the superficial , material aspects of a culture over the people who belong to it.

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So the true crime (outside of extreme edge cases where culture is being desecrated upon (I guess that's cultural mis-appropriation?)) is that it's ignoring people (to their detriment) for the surface factor.  Because otherwise the would be appropriator would both inherit/absorb the foreign culture they like while also giving credit/benefit to the actual people that carried the culture on.  So hmm yeah it sounds very close to the notion of IP mixed with power disparity, which is making lot more sense.

 

Question though, how do you go on about power disparity problem if there is a mismatch between societal scale and individual scale?  Say a very powerful individual belonging to marginalized group takes in ton of surface level historical material of dominant culture?  Also the difference in culture among classes?  I suppose these are meant to be difficult cases that should require careful consideration to the specifics at hand?

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This reminds me of prince-as-pauper stories. They get the benefit of finding out what the common people reallythink about the kingdom, but their ability to go in between worlds is resentful. It would be offensive if back in the throne, they claim to know what it's like to be poor after wearing rags for a week, feeling no need to bring impoverished folks into the court for consultation.

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That's a good analogy, clyde. Actually, Common People by Pulp sums it up pretty well.

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The idea of looking at it as a sort of intellectual property brings up a bunch of weird problems for me. To take a specific example, rock and roll. Rock and roll wasn't invented by all black people collectively, it was invented by a finite number of black musicians.

 

Let's say black musician A has a hand in inventing rock and roll, but doesn't get much recognition because of system racism. Black musician B hears A, decides he likes it, and so does some rock of his own. B also gets little recognition because of systemic racism. White musician C comes along, hears A, does some rock and roll, and becomes famous for it. Cultural appropriation as IP law seems to say that what B did was fine, but what C did was wrong, and I don't understand that. Just because B is part of A's culture, he's more entitled to the rock and roll IP than C is?

 

 

I think another part is the implicit message of "I don't care about who you are - I care about this image/proverb/decontextualized ritual that I think is neat." Appropriation, at its worst, values the superficial , material aspects of a culture over the people who belong to it.

 

Why is that bad though? It's not good, but it's not directly harming anyone, and it's not IP-style taking profit that should be someone else's. It seems like a victimless crime.

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It is essentially taking away their culture. It's not about individual's achievements, it's about the idea that (for example) black people have not achieved anything with black culture. Because white people will take things from the culture, make it a commodity and remove it from the context of the original source so that it's now just assumed to be part of the 'default' white American culture.

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Intellectual property was an analogy that you brought up, not me. It's not perfect, I agree. The "victimless crime" argument has the same problem. Appropriation is not a crime. This is not a legal issue we're talking about. It does not have the thick-lined contours of a legal problem, nor does it need to. It's a hazy, confusing, complicated issue.

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Intellectual property was an analogy that you brought up, not me. It's not perfect, I agree. The "victimless crime" argument has the same problem. Appropriation is not a crime.

 

Sure, it's not a literal crime, but my point was that it seems like an action which harms no one, and is therefore not a bad action.

 

 

It is essentially taking away their culture. It's not about individual's achievements, it's about the idea that (for example) black people have not achieved anything with black culture. Because white people will take things from the culture, make it a commodity and remove it from the context of the original source so that it's now just assumed to be part of the 'default' white American culture.

 

So to use the rock and roll example again, black musician A invents rock and roll and gets no credit. If black musician B hears it and popularizes rock and roll, getting the credit for himself, he has not committed cultural appropriation, but if white musician C does the same, he has? The idea that the race of the actor makes an action bad or not is crazy to me.

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Essentially yes. As much as you might wish it not to be the case, what race you are affects your responsibility as an individual because if you have privilege you should wield it carefully (since you don't really have the option to not wield it).

Also the reason the race matters is entirely because it has a different effect. It's not that a white dude doing it gets blamed when a black person doesn't. It's that a black person getting credit for another black person's cultural work still means it's seen as a contribution from black people as a group, so there is no appropriation style 'theft' going on.

I don't want to say too much on this because I don't have the best handle on cultural appropriation but thus much seems pretty clear to me at least.

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So to use the rock and roll example again, black musician A invents rock and roll and gets no credit. If black musician B hears it and popularizes rock and roll, getting the credit for himself, he has not committed cultural appropriation, but if white musician C does the same, he has? The idea that the race of the actor makes an action bad or not is crazy to me.

That's not a good argument. Black Musician A didn't invent rock music. It's convenient to point to Chuck Berry and say rock music started with him, but the innovation even he's credited was anticipated by musicians like Joe Hill Lewis. Rock and roll comes from a significantly black phenomenon -- during the Great Migration, black populations brought blues and jazz and folk and gospel and country up north. They were in such close proximity to white forms of culture that they'd previously been excluded from -- both physically and because of radio -- now that they'd gone from the rural south to more urban northern settings that they were exposed to more white styles of playing and incorporated some of that into their music. That's just the prevailing theory since there's some argument over how rock and roll came about, but pretty much everyone agrees that you can't point to someone and say, "That's the one who did it. They did the rock and roll." The phrase rock and roll was even present in rhythm and blues music before anything we'd recognize as rock and roll came about, which complicates things a bit.

Because there's no one person who made that innovation, you can't use that kind of IP argument. It's just intellectually dishonest. It was a cultural movement that was a direct consequence of the Great Migration, and all early white rock and roll musicians I can think of cribbed directly from black musicians without the black musicians getting recognition. Even when white musicians would cover black musicians' songs, they'd often have to wait decades for royalties and writer credit.

There was direct harm done to black individuals by the appropriation of rock and roll music by white musicians, and the overall harm of the devaluation of black people and ideas. The overall harm is more what's talked about when you talk about appropriation. It's not that wearing a bindi is like punching an Indian woman in the face, it's the reduction of a culturally significant idea or object to an aesthetic renders their contribution invisible.

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Sure, it's not a literal crime, but my point was that it seems like an action which harms no one, and is therefore not a bad action.

 

So to use the rock and roll example again, black musician A invents rock and roll and gets no credit. If black musician B hears it and popularizes rock and roll, getting the credit for himself, he has not committed cultural appropriation, but if white musician C does the same, he has? The idea that the race of the actor makes an action bad or not is crazy to me.

 

Mangela's points are good, but I'd like to add something else: the focus on "bad actions" and "good actions" is misguided, I think. The goal when talking about appropriation is not to unilaterally condemn it (although I think there are some blatant cases where that's appropriate), but to consider its dynamics. In a world with uneven power balances among different cultures (a concept I think is more useful here than "race" because it be both broader and more specific) and constant mixing between cultures, appropriation is inevitable and often benign. But in aggregate, appropriation reinforces the idea that certain people define what's important or relevant and others, though those notions might originate from them, do not define those things. 

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There's cultural appropriation, appropriation and then being able to use white privilege to your advantage but a lot of this all gets lumped under cultural appropriation. A lot of times appropriation is often just, as a white person, being able to neglect that specific groups, ethnicities and racial groups are discrete, different and generally have to suffer through racist garbage, often times to the detriment of their livelihood. 

 

No, a white person wearing locs is not harmful to anyone, really, but it means a white person gets to neglect what happens to black people who wear locs - they are often denied jobs, they are often touched without their permission, they are seen as dirty and unkempt, despite the fact that white people's hair is generally never the correct texture to actually loc, meaning you HAVE to make it matted and dirty to "loc" it. It shows a white person's lack of understanding of what locs actually are (which is coarse textured hair that naturally can be wound together) or the political meaning behind them (dreadlocs) or what black people suffer through to wear their hair in natural styles. 

 

Same goes for a white lady taking a "geisha" picture wearing some approximation of shoddy makeup and the wrong clothing - it is ignoring that a geisha has VERY specific outfits, face makeup and years of training and is an actual profession that women undertake in Japan. It ignores that Asian women, Japanese women in particular, are often highly fetishized and that geishas are often painted as merely "sex workers" despite the fact that geishas are not. It ignores the really rich cultural history of what they are and what it means in Japan, etc. 

 

Basically a lot of this just ties back to the fact that colonialism, imperialism and the slave trade basically made it so white people felt comfortable destroying, appropriating, mocking or otherwise stereotyping cultures that were not designated as "white." There's entire cultures and languages that are straight up gone from the earth because white people didn't feel like leaving them alone and killed or otherwise educated people out of it. 

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Essentially yes. As much as you might wish it not to be the case, what race you are affects your responsibility as an individual because if you have privilege you should wield it carefully (since you don't really have the option to not wield it).

 

Maybe this is super obvious but just to be clear, this is to be considered along with other forms of privileges and how strongly they are presented in a given situation?

 

On more broader topical note, Japan seems like such a fascinating example because of its non-white-yet-imperial history... like lot of this stuff that I'm reading, now I recall hearing similar sentiment in Korea in 1990s, except replace white with Japanese.  I was way too young to realize what I was listening to of course.

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Maybe this is super obvious but just to be clear, this is to be considered along with other forms of privileges and how strongly they are presented in a given situation?

 

Absolutely.

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Cultural appropriation, to my mind, becomes a problem when it's combined with power structures and commodification. Random YouTubers singing rap songs isn't a huge deal - the Chicago Blackhawks, Atlanta Braves and Cleveland Indians selling brands based around images and actions associated with Aboriginal peoples is something different. Essentially, the questions to ask around appropriation are "what did this thing mean in its original context?", "what does it mean in its new context?" and "who is this new context helping or hurting?"

 

The other thing about appropriation is that it tends toward essentializing cultures. It's usually about snatching bits and pieces of other cultures that are aesthetically pleasing or saleable and ignoring anything complicated or difficult about them. It's easy to wear smoke pot and wear dreadlocks and listen to Bob Marley; it's harder to understand the Rastafari movement and its tenets and its relationship with colonialism. It's easy to wear a Che Guevara shirt; it's hard to engage with Che Guevara's ideas and actions.

 

Of course, the other side of discussions about appropriation can tend toward essentializing as well. The tendency to shout "appropriation" at any moment of mixing can end up freezing cultures in place, which ends up hurting those more disadvantaged groups, since our collective vision of "Western" culture defaults to "dynamic and ever-changing," while Other groups are made up of a handful of more specific stereotypes. If all cultural dynamism is deemed appropriation, then the only people who are allowed to be dynamic are Westerners. That's why power is an important component - considering power lets us distinguish between people trying to break out of their boxes and people who are trying to steal and sell somebody else's box.

 

YEAH

 

YEAH

 

yeah

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In British news, something has come of David Cameron's ridiculous quotes about how "for too long we've left our citizens alone too easily. Saying 'as long as you don't break the law, we'll leave you alone.' "

 

There's a proposal which will say that non EU immigrants can be deported if they're not earning enough money. The threshold is also a ludicrous one. It's that you have to make at least £35,000. This is also supposed to apply to people who've been in the country for 5 years, as if the amount wasn't bad enough you would think that living in a country for half a decade entitles you to citizenship.

 

(apologies but I can't copy paste on the forums with my current set up, can someone Google "New UK immigration rules: will you be affected?" to give others the link)

 

 

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Warning: do not google with a colon in the middle of your search term, it thinks you're trying to do something clever.

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By that metric, other than being European, I'm not contributing enough to the country. Great!

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