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clyde

Social Justice

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Possibly, but again, when other feminists inform a male ally that he doesn't speak for them, because of inflammatory, misogynistic, or simply inaccurate opinions that he's expressed, we accept their statement, however disrespectful it is to his self-proclaimed status and experience as an ally. The dignity and wellbeing of oppressed peoples requires understanding, respecting, and safeguarding in ways that white, straight, and/or male members of the dominant culture will never need. Respecting someone's choice to disrespect an entire people (by selling their culture as a commodity or adopting it as a fashion) is an odd application of Popper's paradox of tolerance.

 

There are plenty of instances where this is harder to claim cultural appropriation is bad than a symbolic white oppressor selling knock-off Hopi dolls with a direct negative impact on sales by people on a reservation. Assigning rights to commoditize a culture through some official authentication seems like a conflict between the ability to leverage ties to culture for profit and the ability to leverage ties to culture for personal and social identity. I favor the needs of personal and social identity. For instance, I don't think that a white musician playing jazz is a disrespect to an entire people.

 

Here's a relevant essay that adds nuance to the conversation.

 

Or consider this one.

 

I don't like this need to prove your ability to appreciate something as part of you.

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There are plenty of instances where this is harder to claim cultural appropriation is bad than a symbolic white oppressor selling knock-off Hopi dolls with a direct negative impact on sales by people on a reservation. Assigning rights to commoditize a culture through some official authentication seems like a conflict between the ability to leverage ties to culture for profit and the ability to leverage ties to culture for personal and social identity. I favor the needs of personal and social identity. For instance, I don't think that a white musician playing jazz is a disrespect to an entire people.

 

Here's a relevant essay that adds nuance to the conversation.

 

Or consider this one.

 

I don't like this need to prove your ability to appreciate something as part of you.

 

That second link cuts both ways, the writer acknowledges the discomfort of seeing people outside his culture ignorantly adopt it for the sheer aesthetics of it, and how the response to that can run from irritation to rage to avoidance.  The writer is Hispanic, and the history and culture around el Dia de los Muertos is his history and culture.  The conflict of that piece is that his heritage has been appropriated, in a harmful way, and that actually impacts his ability to engage comfortably with his own culture publicly.  It's about how "harmless" appropriation can cause harm. Outsider's appropriation has harmed his ability to actually demonstrate his personal identity.  I really read that piece as a refutation of the argument you're making. 

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There are plenty of instances where this is harder to claim cultural appropriation is bad than a symbolic white oppressor selling knock-off Hopi dolls with a direct negative impact on sales by people on a reservation. Assigning rights to commoditize a culture through some official authentication seems like a conflict between the ability to leverage ties to culture for profit and the ability to leverage ties to culture for personal and social identity. I favor the needs of personal and social identity. For instance, I don't think that a white musician playing jazz is a disrespect to an entire people.

 

I think the jazz example is an excellent one in this conversation, because jazz as a musical genre was almost entirely an invention of black culture, but black people were prevented from practicing it and profiting from it in public spaces, often having act through white intermediaries (who often exploited or silenced them) in order to have their voices and music heard. Because of the enormous debt that jazz owes to black culture, the situation eventually righted itself and I don't think that it's a scene of cultural appropriation today, but the phenomenon of rock 'n' roll suggests to me that it could easily have broken the other way.

 

Overall, colonialism and imperialism are the long history of white people saying, "I like that, so I'll take it. Now that I have it, it's mine as much as it's yours." It's the process of treating other cultures (just like other lands, people, and resources) as a buffet on which to fulfill your own self. Social justice, especially decolonization and the dismantling of white privilege, hinge upon realizing and appreciating that just liking and wanting something, whether it be a genre of music, a style of art, or a way of speaking, does not make it your own, not in the same way as it does someone whose history and culture has a long relationship with it. It also involves accepting that some things, particularly spiritual or ceremonial objects and practices from other cultures, can never be your own at all, not if you weren't born into them or don't come into them through a sincere conversion. It is only through massive, unexamined privilege that appreciation and desire automatically beget ownership. That does not mean that you can't practice yoga or get an afro, but fundamental human decency means vocally acknowledging the debt that your personal choice as a member of the mainstream culture owes to entire societies that have spend tens if not hundreds of years living, working, and suffering to make it available to you. That's the most basic level of giving back, which is what starts to transform cultural appropriation into cultural exchange. I really don't think that that's too much for oppressed peoples to ask.

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I agree with the sentiment there Gormongous, but I think that Clyde is touching on is that it is simply not possible to do this. How do I vocally acknowledge the debt I owe for wanting to do something? And how do I do this in a way that is acceptable to whomever it needs to be? In some cases you might find a satisfactory answer like working with a native person or donating profits, but in most cases, in the cases involving people's personal choices it doesn't seem possible. You might do this to one person's satisfaction but not to another's, and the conflicts only get more complicated from there. The question isn't so much what is a sincere conversion so much as how is this communicated.

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I agree with the sentiment there Gormongous, but I think that Clyde is touching on is that it is simply not possible to do this. How do I vocally acknowledge the debt I owe for wanting to do something? And how do I do this in a way that is acceptable to whomever it needs to be? In some cases you might find a satisfactory answer like working with a native person or donating profits, but in most cases, in the cases involving people's personal choices it doesn't seem possible. You might do this to one person's satisfaction but not to another's, and the conflicts only get more complicated from there. The question isn't so much what is a sincere conversion so much as how is this communicated.

 

My honest feeling, although I'll do some more thinking on it, is that if you don't know how to communicate your debt to and support of the culture that originated the element that you're borrowing, you should ask around members of that culture and, if they don't have any ideas or you don't have anyone to ask, maybe defer for the time being.

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There might be a good way in some situations, but I just don't see how a white lady walking down the street with (insert thing she could be accused of cultural appropriation for) could ever do this to the average passerby. How do you know she hasn't gone through a sincere conversion? To me the position that she is guilty of something, while it is entirely possible, views people as fundamentally selfish and deceitful, that they are guilty until proven innocent. You'll have to be a smarter person than me to figure that one out, and a lot of the time I just think it encourages people to assume way too much about someone based on their appearance.

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There might be a good way in some situations, but I just don't see how a white lady walking down the street with (insert thing she could be accused of cultural appropriation for) could ever do this to the average passerby. How do you know she hasn't gone through a sincere conversion? To me the position that she is guilty of something, while it is entirely possible, views people as fundamentally selfish and deceitful, that they are guilty until proven innocent. You'll have to be a smarter person than me to figure that one out, and a lot of the time I just think it encourages people to assume way too much about someone based on their appearance.

 

I meant the phrase "sincere conversion" specifically to refer to someone using religious objects from another culture (mandalas, etc). I think it's extremely difficult to make a "sincere conversion" to an entirely different culture, maybe impossible given the current history of white colonialism and imperialism.

 

Your concerns about someone being "guilty" of something that they didn't do themselves or don't completely understand speaks further to privilege and systemic oppression. Even though I try my best to be an advocate for social and racial justice, I am still racist because I have privilege as a white (straight, male, able-bodied) person and I benefit from a society built upon the devaluation and exploitation of black lives. It is an inescapable part of myself and my identity, no matter what I do. Therefore, it is pursuant on me simply to be conscious of those facts and to try my best to be an ally regardless of them. I don't see a difference when it comes to cultural appropriation. No matter how it's alleviated by support and understanding, all cultural "exchange" between more and less dominant cultures is going to be cultural appropriation on some level, because of the current and historical dynamics of power between them, and accepting that state of affairs is an important component of social justice. I don't expect most people to understand that position, because it is scary and a lot of work, but that doesn't make it any less true.

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There is a large body of work about cultural appropriation within this thread, within academia, and generally available for free on the internet. At this point, if you need clarification on what constitutes cultural appropriation, it is available to you if you look for it. Pedantry about the topic is not productive and doesn't serve to edify yourself or the person you are speaking with, so thank you in advance for confining all pedantry to the pedantry thread.

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Just so you all know, I've not checked out of the thread. I've just been out the country, and reading, trying to digest what people have said. Really appreciate the discussion.

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I read this piece recently and I think it works really well:

http://driftingthrough.com/2015/11/20/the-thing-all-women-do-that-you-dont-know-about/

"So routine that we go through the motions of ignoring it and minimizing. Not showing our suppressed anger and fear and frustration. A quick cursory smile or a clipped laugh will  allow us to continue with our day. We de-escalate. We minimize it. Both internally and externally, we minimize it. We have to. To not shrug it off would put is in confrontation mode more often than most of us feel like dealing with."

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I'm pretty bewildered by the notion that one can have ownership over a culture.

 

IMO you live out a culture, but nothing more.  As Ninety-three said over month(s?) ago, everything problematic with appropriation comes off as something other than appropriation, like say, actual racism (which it often entails).  So perhaps I can take appropriation as a 'sign' of other actual problematic things, but on its own whatever.

 

Edit: Context is, of course, I'm a child of "Miracle on the Han River", so maybe that is too much of a bias to be taken seriously for this topic but whatever.

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Reaching back to the coddling/triggering/outrage culture debate on college campuses, there's an interesting statement by the president of one of the more liberal colleges in the nation, Wesleyan University: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-roth/this-university-president_b_8621760.html

 

I read this article and it got me thinking more about my exposure to the idea that students are too sensitive, as if there is some new change in the way young people act.  It's been a few years since I was on a college campus, and I'm probably the last generation of people who will have grown up without some kind of personal computing device constantly at their fingertips, so on some level I do see a sort of generational divide between myself (being in my late 20s) and people in their early 20s. Oddly enough, what got me to finally think that this has been blown out of proportion (after reading this article) is another I came across where people are upset about the shape of some novelty Reese's cup for Christmas.  After coming across those two pieces within a short time frame of one another, I had a bit of a light bulb going off moment.  These two things might seem unrelated, but I think I finally realized that any contention, regardless of it's magnitude, seems to get about the same level of exposure in the media. This makes the major things seem just as important as the minor things, and the major things just as trivial as the minor ones.  I'm sure that there are certain elements of any controversy that are worth discussing, but looking back on it I think my frustration earlier was more borne out of my inability to recognize what was right in front of me.  I'm sure young people over react about certain things, or get pulled into some righteous fury that ends up being targeted at the wrong person, but this juxtaposition really brought the whole scene into focus.  These kids are trying their best to tackle issues like systemic oppression and equality of opportunity while living it out in their communities every day, and the adults who look down on this kind of thing are constantly losing their shit over the color of a coffee cup or the shape of a piece of chocolate.

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Oh yeah, I saw someone recently follow their twitter mocking as it became a story about how people were 'outraged' on Twitter.

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The protests at Mizzou and Yale have spread to some other campuses, including KU.  KU students are now calling for the firing of a professor after she showed that she's an ignorant asshat in a discussion about how TAs can handle discussions of racism in the communications classes. 

As a followup on this, she's been suspended: http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2015/nov/20/ku-communications-prof-who-used-n-word-class-discu/

But of course instead of focusing on the nuance of the situation and why students are mad, the newspaper goes for the easy headline and focuses on her language.

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Oh, the lady and I read that together last night and loved it.  It sounded just like how a friend of ours would have reacted to that situation. 

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I think he's saying social justice has gone too far.

 

(I have no idea either, I assumed I'd need to know what collard greens and ham hocks are first)

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To really understand that piece, it probably helps a ton to have some familiarity with Southern cooking, and black southern cooking particularly.  One of the lady's best friends is very much an old school black familial matriarch type, and when the lady and I got together she put me through a forced education in proper appreciation of southern food.  There was a bunch of stuff I said I didn't care for, like pecan pie or collard greens, and she made it a point to prove the only reason I didn't like them was cause I hadn't had them made right before.  And she was right! 

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Additionally, there's been a gentrification of historically black food (like collards for example) or many cuts of very cheap meat that have now become popular to serve in upscale restaurants like pig/beef cheek. Young white people "discover" food that's been eaten by Black families for generations, often because it's the only food available to poorer people (which Black families have been and still are poorer on average than white families.) Those foods then become trendy, and price out those who traditionally relied on those cheaper foods and then White people prepare those foods on average, way worse than a traditional southern cooking approach would prepare them.

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There's a long tradition of things like that. Corned beef isn't Irish, Tikka Masala isn't Indian, General's Chicken isn't Chinese. We (Western white folks) are "discovering" all kinds of Asian and Southeastern street food that's cheap, sustaining, and available, and going crazy for it. I love pho and ramen!

 

You can make anything overly fancy (a tortilla with cranberry sauce, mashed potato, and stuffing sold as a "thanksgiving taco" isn't mexican food), and ruin anything if you're bad enough at cooking it. You can also make something extremely traditional and amazing if you take the time to learn and do it properly. Conversely, not all black ladies cook good collard greens.

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Conversely, not all black ladies cook good collard greens.

 

That's....super duper not the point. 

 

I'll be honest, having eaten traditionally prepared Mexican, Central American, Caribbean, Indian, Southern, and Filipino foods (those are the foods I can think of where I've either had it there, or prepared by a first generation immigrant), I've yet to find a white American cook or chef who can capture the essence of what those foods are compared to when they are prepared by someone native to the culture.  Not to say it can't be done, but it ain't common in my experience.  And there's a reason for that, taste palate development is learned.  Someone who grew up with the tastes and smells of their culture will have a different knowledge base they are working from to duplicate that eating experience.  Barring significant work, most non-native cooks won't be able to replicate that exactly.  That's what the lady in that piece is describing.  It's not significantly different than say learning a language.  Many people are multi-lingual, but barring a decade or more of experience within a culture, that doesn't mean they have the same mastery or nuance that a native speaker would. 

 

A friend of Mexican and Puerto Rican descent linked to that article, and there was a discussion below it about the nuance of tacos that white restaurants just do not fucking understand. 

 

Edited to add: We see this in other things as well when it comes to taste.  There's a difference between cane soda and corn syrup soda.  One isn't objectively better than the other, but what you grew up drinking likely defines which you prefer.  Real maple syrup isn't like maple flavored corn syrup, and I know a bunch of people who prefer the corn syrup because it's what the few up having.  What you grew up eating often defines both your palate and your the flavor profile of what you will cook, even if you're not wholly aware of it. 

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I had to read that article a couple times, at first it almost seems like a satire of the position it holds.  This article takes on the racial and cultural dynamic with respect to white and non white people, but to be honest I hear this kind of stuff all the time from my italian grandparents and relatives.  Every family gathering has at least 2 hours of conversation about how only "real" Italian people know how to make a good sauce, pizza needs to have tomato chunks or it isn't good, and so on.  I can understand the frustration here, but I still can't get past the idea that any particular group of people "owns" something, and in that article ownership seems to be a stand in for the complaint that the food they ate just wasn't very good.  I mean would this article not have been written were the food as good of a quality as they were accustomed to?

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