Why do people keep using the term “cultural appropriation” for things that are not? Appropriation refers to stealing. You cannot appropriate what is freely given. And you cannot appropriate between equals. Italians freely shared their food, and Italy was not conquered. So pizza was not appropriated.
Sure, if you use it for all these completely innocuous things, it sounds silly. But those aren’t cultural appropriation. When some stupid college students argued that yoga was cultural appropriation, I pointed out how they were wrong. The people who brought it to the West were themselves freely taught, and then taught to others.
If something is appropriated, there will inherently be a majority of the minority in question who is upset with you for doing so. It will be a sacred item, but only because sacred in that context means “not supposed to be trivially used.”
You are not some superior person who gets to tell the other culture “you are wrong to regard this as sacred.” Your culture is not superior to theirs–which would be the only way you’d have the right to tell them to change their culture.
There is the one exception we make if what they are doing is harmful to others. But having a sacred item that you have to earn is not harmful. Every fucking culture has it to some extent.
The fact that you didn’t intend to offend matters only until you are told they are offensive. If you do something that offends someone, you inherently are not honoring them. To honor someone means to do something they would receive as an honor.
There is no reason this system breaks down just because it’s a group and not an individual. Groups are just a bunch of individuals.
The headdress is sacred in their culture. You don’t have the right to tell them to change it. No more than you have the right to tell black people that “nigger” isn’t offensive. It’s all the same thing. Group tells you that it’s offensive, and you don’t get to tell them to “get over it.”
Yes, you don’t care. This says absolutely nothing about whether what you are doing is right or wrong. I know several people who don’t care about shouting the word “nigger,” but they are still wrong.
Why in the world would whether you feel guilty determine whether something is right or wrong?
Whether strawman or not, it has no relevance, since it is based on your imagination and not anything real.
It also has no relevance because whether something is cultural appropriation isn’t based on what any one person says. I can easily find you a black person who says “nigger” is okay. But that doesn’t mean that you can go around saying “nigger.” What matters is the majority.
It’s cultural. It’s bigger than any one person.
And because I’m afraid people will get mad if I keep making new posts:
You are constantly saying things that no one has said. And you are “sure” that other people are a certain way. So let me set this straight.
There is no picking and choosing. There are moral principles. One of those is that you don’t unnecessarily offend people. Yes, if some belief is so morally reprehensible that I need to argue against it, that might override this principle. There are sometimes more important concerns.
I despise a lot of Muslim beliefs. Doesn’t mean I would ever intentionally offend Muslims. I’m absolutely not going to draw a picture of Mohammad. I have no reason to do so except just to piss them off. It’s not as if drawing him will make them treat women equally.
Not that any of this covers the stuff you’ve brought up. The costumes you’ve worn were not worn because you despise them. Your own admission is that you were just having fun. The only thing you seem to despise are people who get offended due to having a different culture than yours.
And, BTW, there’s some stuff I could say about French culture in this regard that I am avoiding saying because I know it would be offensive. Even though it’s about something I despise.
In short, you are completely wrong. I’m nearly certain that NAF is about the same as me in this regard.
Why in the world would whether someone feels offended determine whether something is right or wrong?
I know several people who are offended that it’s permitted to speak disrespectfully of their religious figure, but they are still wrong. Yes, they are offended. This says absolutely nothing about whether what they want me to refrain from doing is right or wrong.
I’m not sure the ideological lines are as clear as for other issues, but from what I’ve seen the melting bowl concept is now fairly conservative. They say sure, come over with some tasty food and maybe a couple loan words, but you better learn the language and assimilate. They see a unified dominant culture as a means for stability. This is how conservatives talk about hispanic immigrants or the refugee crisis in Europe.
Not all liberals disagree with that, or only to a certain extent, but they seem much more likely to embrace the salad bowl, where tolerance and self identity is key and no culture is better than another.
Modern progressives define racism as prejudice + power, so no, these and your other examples wouldn’t make an impression because they’re going the wrong direction.
Which is all well and good for simple examples, which is usually what makes the news (some corporation or white kids in college somewhere being dumb), but gets complicated when it’s between two non-majority cultures.
More amusingly, a couple years ago there were investigations into baby’s preferences for looking at the faces of their parents’ race and every click bait media ran some variation of “Science proves babies are racist!”
Are you shitting me? It’s inherently offensive because it highlights* and exaggerates* precisely those features that mark Blacks as “Other”, past any semblance of just “being cartoonish”
Racist, doubtless. Equally, no, not really. Especially since it’s that “Greek” straight nose is used for non-Greek characters too - Caesar, for one.
No - I’m using the word as a current English descriptive for that look, I’m not claiming it’s the source for it in Asterix. Don’t blame me if you’re not first-language English.
Wouldn’t know, never read it, and irrelevant to questions of drawing style.
Of course it’s laziness. Apathy is a kind of laziness, IMO.
And to really be anal about technicalities, I’ll retract my comment about “canonical,” because I meant “original”. As in, when Spider-Man (R) was created by Lee and Ditko, Peter Parker was white.
Times change, and so does canon.
I think I’ve decided, for my definition at least, “cultural appropriation” is “taking credit for another culture’s invention” more or less. There are better ways of putting it, but as an example, if Vanilla Ice claimed to have invented rap, or Elvis had claimed to invent rock ‘n’ roll. Something along those lines.
As I said before, cultural trading is in our DNA; it’s always happened, and always will. “Appropriation” is up to the person defining the term.
This whole concept of cultural appropriation is nonsensical. Ideas and practices do not have to be freely giving or between equals or whatever other arbitrary constraint. If someone wants to eat, wear, use an artifact, or speak they don’t need some random person’s from some random tribe permission.
I can imagine during war stealing the idea for a catapult and the catapult originator’s group crying foul over appropriation. Oh no! Plate armor is our sacred garb you can’t wear it.
Are you shitting me? What makes something cartoonish if not exaggerated features? And I checked again all the links you gave : the only common feature is the big red lips. Which has been used as cartoonish shortcut for blacks forever, and yes including in your dolls, and in blackfaces.
But you’ve still failed to tell me why using big lips as a stereotypical shortcut for Black is inherently racist. It tells exactly nothing, positive or negative, about Black people. It’s definitely not the feature that mark Black as “other”, because the only actual feature that mark them as other is the color of their skin (and to some extent the hair). And even if it were, it would still not be racist, because exaggerating distinguishing features is exactly what is done in cartoons. In this case, it’s not even realistic, it’s just traditional, like mostly all stereotypes.
And this exagerated feature tells absolutely nothing about Blacks. Zilch. Nada. It doesn’t say they’re inferior, superior, good, bad, violent, peaceful, intelligent, unintelligent, criminals, law-abiding…it conveys no message, racist or not.
Unless you bring your own message at the table. A depiction that says nothing about Black people can’t be inherently racist. You need to see unstated asumptions in it for it to be racist. You need to equate “big lips” with “negative discourse about Black people”. You definitely need to bring your own cultural baggage, where depiction of big lips has been typically closely associated with a racist discourse. That’s not inherent. That’s cultural.
That’s not the problem. The problem is that like with blackfaces, you bring an example which is culturally charged for you. You’re saying it looks like a gollywog and like a blackface, so of course it’s racist. While once again, gollywog puppets and blackfaces aren’t inherently racist, either. You’re not demonstrating that anything is inherently racist, you’re just pointing at similar depictions, which for cultural reasons are associated with racism. Tell me once again what inherently racist message a blacface, the doll, or Asterix caricatures convey, outside of a cultural context.
The real reason why you find Asterix characters racist is because you associate them with gollywogs/blackfaces, which in turn are associated with racist depictions or discourses, and those associations are cultural. But then you ignore that fact, and because these associations are deeply ingrained in your mind, because it feels obvious to you because of your culture that those depictions are racists, you state vehemently that they should appear as obviously and inherently racist to everybody else. You’re the one here who wants to project your cultural idiosyncrasies on everybody else and basically want every other culture and individual to adopt your arbitrary bias.
The current Ghostbuster comic books depict Winston Zeddemore with very large lips. (They also depict Egon Spengler with an extreme long face, three times as high as it is wide.)
The Tank McNamara comic strip caricatures people of all races, and some of these depictions involve racial characteristics such as lips, noses, and ears.
It would be absurd to demand that caricature of individuals always specifically avoids exaggeration of “racial” features.
Now, all of this should be done with some degree of sensitivity. The Winston Zeddemore caricature is defended by the comics’ extremely favorable treatment of him as a character: he’s a hero, through and through.
I never told them to change their culture. I never told them they were wrong to consider the symbol sacred.
I said that I get to use the symbol anyway, sacred or not. That’s called freedom.
A hell of a lot of people think the American Flag is sacred. But we can still buy underwear with stars and stripes on it. Their idea of sacredness doesn’t stand in the way of my using it in commerce…and neither does yours.
I’m not saying it’s not cartoonish, i’m saying it’s cartoonish and offensive.
The difference lying in what gets exaggerated and how.
Yeah, 'cos black are really all that dark… and that chinless face shape, with the pinhead, that’s also so naturalistic.
Yes, and it’s always been offensive and racist.
It’s not the only one, but then, that’s your Wurzel Gummidge, not mine.
Bullshit. It’s all the features - the skin, always made darker than the norm, the hair, the lips, always completely unlike any real African’s lips, the nose, the eyes made to show more whites…the whole racist package.
“It’s a cartoon” does not preclude something also being racist.
What is racism, if not a kind of stereotyping?
And racism is a longstanding tradition in Europe, too…
Well, yes, but it tells us plenty about the artists.
If you think the standard Black caricature isn’t trying to convey a message that Blacks have certain innate characteristics, you’re delightfully naive or just semiotically blind.
The visual clues used for the standard Black caricature are the same ones used for laziness & low intelligence in other cartoon characters. The difference is that all Blacks are drawn that way, but with the Romans, it’s only a few feckless characters.
No work of art says “nothing”.
No, I just need to note what the artist has actually done, and how it compares to the rest of his work.
Comically exaggerating an inherent feature is negative discourse. This particular bit happens to be what I highlighted here, I could easily have picked different ones in BD. The depiction of Native Americans in Asterix isn’t any better, for instance…
No, even absent cultural background I can see when someone is being depicted as less than human. I don’t need any cultural baggage to tell this isn’t a flattering portrayal…or this…
but go ahead, tell me it’s just my “cultural baggage” that sees those as inherently racist too.
Like I said, semiotically blind.
Like fuck, they’re not.
Blacks are “Other” and not, in some ways, fully deserving of consideration as human beings.
No, the depictions are racist in-and-of-themselves.
You say “arbitrary bias”, I say “semiotically aware”. But go ahead, tell me there’s no othering involved in consistent caricatured depictions of an entire race of people. I’m all ears.
I think 9/11 is a better analogy than Purple Hearts-- most of us have an intellectual respect for the military, but a visceral emotional reaction to 9/11.
I’ve travelled to various parts of the world where September 11th themes are sometimes used as decorative elements on random items.
I recall seeing cheap jute tote bags depicting a cartoon plane crashing into the twin towers, and another place where a commonly sold cheap watch featured an Osama Bin Laden face and Beverly Hills 90210/World Cup wrist bands. None of these places have any real direct connection with 9/11 or the ideologies involved, and these images weren’t used to make any coherent statement. It was just a random decoration for cheap goods.
As an American, it is uncomfortable. Both because of the emotions we feel about 9/11, and because there is an element of menace toward seeing something like that used in a context we don’t understand.
I think it’s fair that most people who adopt war bonnets aren’t doing so out of malice, but ignorance. I’m going to be generous and assume they don’t realize the significance and think it’s just a typical headdress. Kind of like snotty little goth kids who think it’s cool to wear rosary beads as a necklace.
“Fight racism with racism” – I like that. Mind if I “appropriate” it?
And yes, there are some fringe elements who will say food and just basic fashion trends can be appropriation – don’t visit Everyday Feminism unless you want your head to explode.
While this may be true, I don’t know if it’s really relevant to the debate here. I do know the significance…and I do not give a shit. No one has the power to compel me to observe their religion.
(“Hey, the Muezzin just called for prayers, and you’re not kneeling. How dare you commit such a blatant offense against my faith!”)
Some people do assume cultural appropriation every time someone wears/eats/listens to/displays art/whatever from another culture. There are always going to be people who take offensive at stupid shit. Most of them post on tumblr.
And that’s your choice, you don’t have to. But, likewise, people will get pissed about it, and you gotta accept that too. I mostly roll my eyes and go about my business. (Like I said about the rosary beads. I find it annoying, but it’s not something that really concerns me all that much)
I do very readily confess that if I were running a business, large or small, I’d work very hard not to give offense. Because, just as I may have the abstract legal right to use such symbols…other people have the very concrete legal right to boycott my business right into bankruptcy!
This is the way in which free speech is self-regulating. Very few of us want picketers marching up and down the sidewalk in front of our shops!
