Appropriation: Turns Out We All Agree It’s A Thing, So What Do We Do About It?
There are tons of op-eds floating around Medium, YouTube, Facebook, Tumblr… about Cultural Appropriation, sensitivity, and basic inclusion being a stupid SJW distraction harassing “well meaning” people, who think labels divide us. A useless “toxic concept” for “identity politics” advocates to rageblog whenever a white guy eats eggrolls. It’s why liberals always lose. Except… it’s none of those. It’s a simple concept with a mass of noise around it, making a real 1st world Gordian Knot that really needs cutting.
I’ll start here: Soldiers from India were at Dunkirk in World War II. That’s it really, a simple fact. Nonetheless Christopher Nolan skipped the lascars in his recent all-twink flag waver for no reason, which makes it a lie.
Hand-wringing about Outrage Twitter and periodic pearl-clutching about call-out fatigue is just covering up for liars. Yes, nobody died when Roland Emmerich lied about the Stonewall riots by replacing brick-throwing NY Latinx Sylvia Rivera with non-existent Indiana mayonnaise “Danny”. But he erased her. This is important because a frequent component of waving-away appropriation is “we’re all equal”. Yes, even the brown people.
Making one group matter, and the other not, is the contradiction of demanding testimony for ‘harm’ from people whose testimony has already been called irrelevant. Even if the victim proves appropriation happened they still have to prove that’s a bad thing. It’s a double burden.
Plus they’re being asked to disprove the nonsensical claim a lie isn’t lying. It’s why casual racism is easy to spot, it’s a combo of circular reasoning, sweeping assumptions, and blind guessing, to erase people. Rules for data and evidence evaporate. An example is Sonny Hallett’s essay on “owning” culture [linked in intro]. In the middle she claims non-Asians are being shamed for cooking rice. Her argument gets weirder from there: since she looks Asian, she isn’t shamed for cooking rice, but she isn’t from Asia, and she doesn’t even cook, so clearly all appropriation discussions are dumb. That isn’t an exaggeration.
Her entire ramble depends on tons of assumptions: assume the ‘Ricists’ exist; they’d go by her looks not whether she speaks Chinese; they’d stop others who didn’t look Chinese; and somehow this connects to Tumblr posts about appropriation. Also, all of this depends on the Ricists being from China. She erases all other countries who eat rice to prove erasure doesn’t exist. It’s a two paragraph lie. I should also mention I’m totally plugged into the Super-Secret SJW News Network™, we’re not planning a #boycott of Uncle Ben’s. Her ramble is gibberish and several criticized parts of her bizarre arguments.
Another example might be Farah Shah [linked in intro] who calls the concept of appropriation toxic, then goes on a mini-rant about “NDNs” not letting her use the term “spirit animal”. Much like Hallett, she doesn’t cite anything, and never explains “NDN”. She discusses Blacks and never says “BLK”, she discusses Egyptians and never says “GYP” (maybe because it’s an insult). The reader can only guess from context she’s saying “Indian” and by inference referencing American Indians.
Plus, the whole spirit animal thing comes from nowhere and stays there. She quotes no one. Which is funny because there’s tons of blogs, vlogs, and tweets out there: philosophical here; sentimental here; bitchy here… She could note “totems” are worldwide so Natives have no exclusive right. She doesn’t. Notably, those same bloggers objected to using ‘spirit animal’ mainly when it was reduced to cheap meme-fodder by other, shallower bloggers. Maybe Shah’s just a bigot rationalizing herself.
Again, she can say what she likes. No one’s stopping her, but she has several blogs on how she’s silenced. She can claim “NDNs” are stopping her fun, meanwhile she’s spewing bile calling everyone “toxic”. Lionel Shriver’s “passing fad” article [linked above] agrees with Shah’s with the added justification being that fiction writers are free from caring about racism. If readers criticize writers for employing clichés they’re reading books wrong. It would be absurd, except for the fact Shriver was giving a speech in front of hundreds of people.
It’s a cynical ploy to tell readers she doesn’t respect them but they should buy her stuff anyway. She doesn’t mention when minority books get written, white school and library admins, and parents, just ban them. Shriver’s a liar. It’s fitting Shriver’s top selling book is We Need To Talk About Kevin, the story of a mother who never takes responsibility for her own part in creating a monster. In my minds eye I see Shriver shaking a cane and telling everyone to get off her lawn.
So, appropriation…? Funny thing, there was no outcry for the video game Fallout: New Vegas. Stay with me, it’s oddly relevant. No SJWs noticed the DLCs Honest Hearts or Lonesome Road. It’s odd because the plot of HH is two white Mormons helping some ‘tribals’, who speak in broken English, against a foreign army. It’s a brown-face white savior story. It’s Dances with Wolves for the Xbox360. No one noticed.
Significantly, there’s a good chance most Natives, even who game, never played HH. It was released a year after the base game. It wasn’t a major film or sports team, but supposed SJW ‘allies’ played it and they didn’t complain either. Even rage-blog perpetual target Anita Sarkeesian didn’t mention it when discussing the Fallout series. It’s almost as though, despite the many and obsessive YouTube videos to the contrary, all SJWs don’t complain about all things no matter how trivial. The coming Orwellian Nightmare was averted another day (speaking of Orwell, for hating groupthink so damn much, the anti-SJWs and #skeptics do all seem to cite the same books and critics a lot and at length). There were several reasons this might be:
- Some of the tribes want to join the army, others don’t. They have different ideas. They’re diverse, not passively waiting for rescue by whites.
- They speak broken English because English is their 3rd even 4th language. The dialog says whites made contact by sending a linguist.
- They are diverse because their ancestors were Natives and whites who survived war. They’re healthy, smart, with strong social ties. Whites and Natives merged. Their culture is a shared identity, not color.
- They’re not tropes. Neither are the White Saviors. Both Mormons are flawed, with different motives and definitions of ‘salvation’.
Most of all, the New Vegas DLCs combined to follow a primary Native antagonist, Ulysses, who has lost his culture. In Lonesome Road he tells the story of people copying his traditions to be like him and how it insulted him. He’s the end of an arc with zero effect in main game. Ulysses is one of the most nuanced characters in Fallout canon, and he’s filler. He’s an anti-SJW dream: diversity no one demanded! Yet no YouTube outcry or RationalWiki page.
A compelling character, written well, and players embraced it. Repeat: The angry brown guy almost sparks a war because white people appropriated his dreadlocks, and even 4chan didn’t complain (one post quotes Ulysses’ and they all debate his merits). 4chan…! The shorthand for a fog-bank of dudebro trolls where Snowflakes go to die violently, wild breeding grounds of the Pepe meme, and several comments agree symbols have meaning. Now, it’s 4chan, some couldn’t resist dropping an n-bomb, BUT nobody challenged Ulysses’ premise. 4chan thinks appropriation is a thing! Clearly it is the end times, our tentacle-mouthed destroyer will be rising from the depths shortly…
Another example is Elder Scrolls: Skyrim. Over 20 million units and one of the most award-winning RPGs of all time. No Breitbart thinkpiece about the tribal Forsworn, or the turban-wearing Redguard, and they’re overt proxies for Aborigines and Arabs. One quest in Skyrim even requires the player join a tribal terror cell and help them. Nobody noticed… If we’re seconds from a thought-policing #triggered wasteland, someone should say something. Milo Yiannopoulos, famous for #GamerGate and militant critic of “leftist” identity politics, gave Skyrim and FO:NV not one critique. Milo was Breitbart’s tech editor.
I know at least one factor in the absence of hot takes about New Vegas, or ‘culture war’ debates over the Redguard indoctrinating kids to Radical Islam: The Redskin’s franchise clocks in at near $3bil in net worth according to Forbes. There’s a good chance Natives and Blacks care more about Vanity Fair Coachella photo-spreads, than about Assassin’s Creed III, because we can count. A dream-catcher tat on someone’s butt is silly, and we’ll laugh and point if it’s on Instagram. It’s not the open, aggressive racism of a stadium full of face-painted idiots whooping while they do the ‘tomahawk chop’.
Which is why it requires so much cutting to get through the noise. Shah, Shriver, Hallett, and YouTubers like Sargon of Akkad are just whining, not debating merit. Avatar was the highest grossing film of its time and it’s one giant racist trope. Nobody demanded New Vegas attempt a thoughtful render of the ‘Native Experience’. It worked because Obsidian had good writers so they decided to not be lazy racists. Nobody noticed because #rationals need their arguments handed to them on a tray. Nobody complained so they had no publicity to piggyback on. Which is the actual point of caring about appropriation, for most of us who care at all. It isn’t a desperate need to find racists under every rock to get them banned from Twitter. It’s catching the lies and working toward change. For example, not all ‘Asians’ are martial arts experts. Therefore, yet another Asian kickboxer is a racist trope. Therefore, no matter how many orgy scenes it has, Sense8 is not progressive for having an ‘Asian’ when their ‘Asian’ is a kickboxer. It’s. A. Lie.
Yes, some use ‘inclusion’ as a bat to break everybody’s knees, but every group has people working in bad faith. Hallett says she once wanted dreads in her hair. She spends three paragraphs justifying why she could, since it originated in more than one culture. Sure, but the way she’s justifying it is she enacting culture not ignoring it. She goes to kimono, to the Silk Road, to Europe, to the Moors, before concluding she’s transcended race as if the Carmen Sandiego side-quest never happened. Farah’s sprinkling “spirit animal” randomly through more than one post is an obvious edgelord bid to conceal direct bigotry and terrible reasoning, not because she’s ‘oppressed’ by it.
“But all cultures are blends”. Sure, over centuries they are. We may want cultural theft acceptable because everybody does it, but the Tradition Fallacy is a fallacy. A Kalahari Bushman won’t be reading this article any time soon. Difference exists. Cultures also beg, borrow, and steal differently. It’s not ‘blending’ if one group takes another’s stuff. Someone wearing a Native headdress at Burning Man isn’t ‘blending’ if they didn’t also learn Kiowa.
True blends do exist and we alienate or outright suppress them. There are creoles everywhere: Spanglish, Russenorsk, Ebonics… Entire education systems were created to stifle or delete them. In the US, mocking deep southern accents and the fashion of gangster rap is a national sport. Simply noticing cultures have each other’s things doesn’t prove it was on purpose. It definitely doesn’t prove either party was willing.
Did I mention Shah is on a reading list Hallett includes in her essay for ‘more information’? So is Shriver. They employ similar manipulation and lies because they’re cribbing each other’s stuff. They’re not advancing the conversation, it’s echo. Shriver blames readers for making writing hard, which was Milos’ entire shtick of provocation by self-victimhood. He loudly mocked testimonials until the moment he joked about child molesting and got called out for it, suddenly he had a personal anecdote to share.
All that said, I loathe “check your privilege”. As a Hail Mary, I get it, but as a genuine critique of behavior it’s impotent. It’s conversational slacktavism. If they say “no” or “Free Speech!”, I’m stuck. More important, privilege is given, it’s mine to check not theirs. Wearing a plains war bonnet is an entitled prick move, they’re exploiting a privilege I haven’t granted. They can accept my challenge or not, but now it’s out there.
Plus, silence is what the dog-pile trolls want. The ones who lose their mind when someone points out a movie forgot a continent aren’t trying to ‘advance the discourse’. They’re shutting it down. In a recent interview with Joe Rogan, a darling of reactionary politic Ben Shapiro, affirmed my argument. He used former Missouri State University professor Melissa Click’s “safe space” debacle to make the point. As he said, demands for equality which require exclusion is the rhetoric of the Klan. I don’t have to shut up when someone’s being a bigot. If Shah and Milo need safe spaces, it’s their problem to have.
As I said in the intro, appropriation is simple. We are our cultures. We talk, dress, and eat differently. No one is “normal”. Anything setting me apart from everyone else on earth can be appropriated. What matters is not all appropriation is bad. Some is selfish, some is curiosity. The difference is easy: if everything about a person is one way, but they have a few foreign things they over-highlight, complaining when anyone questions them, they’re a jerk. Plus, if they’re wearing overt trinkets it invites comment. If they get mad when I notice, they have themselves to blame. Bad Appropriation is self-flattery at the expense of others.
Look at the picture. Dudes wearing t-shirts, jorts, and some knock-off Raybans... They’re color-coordination needs work and they’re dusty, but they don’t stand out. Add feathered headdress and now they stand out for no reason except the feathers. They’re wearing someone else’s culture to call attention to themselves, not celebrate Natives. On the other hand a guy posting to Facebook asking for bok choy recipes isn’t trying to look cool, he’s experiencing not aping. If he added a tie-dye Laughing Buddha to the post, and the tag “I’m so ethnic today!” then it’s a problem. Which is the point.
It’s where so many of these think-pieces go totally off the rails, saying we’re all from somewhere else so shut up about it. Sure, but for some it’s further back than others and I choose which grandma’s meals I cook, languages I speak, and who I hang with. I’m no fool, part of my heritage is based on trade & raid tribes who were basically pirates, but we didn’t lie about it. We sure as hell didn’t whine when someone noticed it. Cracker wants to wear some feathers, fine. Catch the bird and make one, but don’t tell me it came from a gas station with a “Made In China” sticker but I’ve gotta stay quiet about it because they’re ‘like totally into spiritual-mystics and Indian stuff dude.’
A family with more than one cultural tradition is fantastic. They have several influences to draw on. It’s not in the same galaxy as a family just coming from more than one place. If my father is French and Italian and fourth generation US, while my mother is first generation Haitian, there’s serious potential. If I never spoke to mom in her native language, tried some of the food once and didn’t like it, and called her “Black”, I’m not multi-cultural. I’m multi-racial, culture is a whole life. Culture is how we perceive the world, it is not a hat.
Plus, the vocab of the other side is moronic. I laugh when I hear “red pill”. In The Matrix the red pill was created by the Oracle as a trick. It’s a lie. I’m just as baffled by the mock of “virtue signaling”. If I’m the Virtue it makes the person hating me the Villain. “Virtue-signal blue-pill cuck” translates to ‘One who recognizes false choices, with a husband and a boyfriend’. Insults should be… Insulting.
While we’re here, I’m fine with calling the entitled students at Evergreen State College, who detained professors for being white, brats. Hypocrites attacking other minority students for not being minority ‘enough’, are hypocrites. If they didn’t like the press they got they probably shouldn’t have filmed themselves being terrible. Hopefully they’ll mature. But the fact it was news means it wasn’t normal. They don’t represent anything common except the fostering of unrestrained immaturity and all sides do that.
Wearing a headdress to a frat party is taking credit for someone else’s work. I’m not reading receipts by asking if they’re a genuine part of my community. Which gives a universal standard so many demand. It applies to all cases. It makes those students hypocrites as they’re attacking people just for being themselves. They’re not affirming identity, they’re erasing. It critiques wearing a kimono to a party because it’s a nod to a people without any inclusion of those people. It also denies #freespeech as a pass to say despicable things (which turns into a wankfest anyway) by demanding a justification for the punching down.
Either we’re sharing, or someone’s taking. If they’re taking they open themselves for being called on it. It also has the handy detail of already being how our laws are written in the US: we can’t lie about other people (slander), about ourselves (perjury), threaten people for no reason (assault)… Our own laws say words are acts which have consequences. It’s no different when using the race and culture of others for attention (hard side-eye to Rachel Dolezal).
I’m good with cultural appropriation as a concept we investigate for merit. Seeing other people as valuable, capable of knowing things I don’t. It’s good to support the excluded. 22 year-olds feigning world-weary frustration any time someone asks why the Japanese guy in a movie can’t handle English are demanding we regress. Bravestarr, Captain Planet, M*A*S*H, Murphy Brown, Designing Women... Of the six leads in Saved By The Bell, three were women, one was Latinx, one Black, and they acknowledged it. Infrequently, and ham-fistedly, but they acknowledged it, and it was thirty years ago. Mouth-breathing ‘alphas’ are so insecure in their whiteness they’re saying the decade of Reagan and AIDS denial was too “radical”, too full of soy-boys.
All said though, this is just me writing to whoever’s reading. I can cite bad logic, but I can’t put anyone in ‘appropriation jail’. If someone agrees, wonderful. If not, it doesn’t cost them anything to not care. Bros don’t have to worry what I think. I would prefer they ask first but nobody’s worried much because the movie Dunkirk ignored all of India, it was barely a blip when the director admitted they used prison labor to build the sets. Wear the feathered headdress knowing it’s insulting, or take it off. But the #rationals don’t get to whine when they’re held accountable for their own actions.
