The deadlock issue as always puzzled me, to be honest.
Dreadlocks exist in numerous cultures: Spartan hoplites; Aztec priests; Muslim dervishes; Hindu sadhus; Jewish Nazirites, Scandinavian vikings, Tibeten Ngagpas, and so on.
At some point, dreadlocks became associated with Rastafarians who adopted (appropriated?) them from Nazirite tradition. Whether connected with Jamaica or not (I don’t actually know), they also caught on among African Americans. Somehow this results in dreadlocks (at least in the United States) having an exclusively black significance such that it becomes described in your article as “shit you created for yourself.”
When I was a kid in school, America being a “melting pot” was considered something to be proud of. Our language is peppered with words we took from other languages, our cuisine has all sorts of influences from around the world. People move here and melt in and that was supposed to good.
Now it’s appropriation and I guess next will be segregation? How far we’ve come.
Rhetoric about America as a wonderful melting pot in which harmony is achieved by assimilating people into dominant white culture was very common while America had a racial caste system. One of the things that helped move America away from its racial castes was rhetoric of cultural pride among disempowered minorities and rhetoric criticizing the notion that assimilation was a requisite for equality.
I, for one, would rather have the actual harmony than the fake rhetoric about it.
Doesn’t that presume the “challenges” are fair? Indignation is a valid response to unfair treatment.
It seems to me that all this language; appropriation, oppression, fragility, privilege, “racism = prejudice+power” etc… is designed to create a paradigm in which the accuser simply cannot be wrong, no matter how spurious the complaint. Maybe that’s why the SJW industry tends to preferentially attract the young and the self-righteous? It must be appealing to such people to have an intellectual framework (however flimsy) for their bullying and busybodying.
I don’t think so. In this case, for example, I don’t think the challenge is fair. But I didn’t respond by questioning the very idea of any negative appropriation or pointing to things white people invented or saying that I would really stick it in the eye of these Latinas by going out and buying the thing they’re criticizing. That all strikes me as a sort of emotional reaction born of defensiveness. YMMV, obviously.
That is pure unadulterated bullshit. You cannot simply translate how majority culture acts or is perceived to react in the US, to situations which exist elsewhere, with their peculiar attributes and unique circumstances.
And FYI, I am a member of both an ethnic and linguistic minority, both within the country and within the region where I live. Moreover, amongst my own ethnic group, I belong to a very small and distinct sub-group. So, a triple minority?
That’s all true, but non-responsive, since the point was that “white fragility” isn’t about literal white skin, and it is not effectively rebutted by a #NotAllPosters response.
“So-and-so has made an accusation of (rape, racism, discrimination, Islamophobia) and anyone who questions the veracity of the accusation, is a ***supporter ***of (rape, racism, discrimination, Islamophobia).”
So, it’s not that the physical object is limited. It’s that its meaning and significance is fluid, and is a result of how people use/view it (this being true of any object). Anyone can put any significance they choose to into an object. However, most (all) of us learn about the meaning of objects from our culture. Any object that has cultural meaning for a minority culture, is also going to deriving some meaning from the dominant culture. Unless you are completely ghetto-ized and shut off from popular culture, portrayals in media and culture of your object are going to be vying with your own meanings for the “hearts and minds” of your children.
I don’t think this is a controversial observation, and is in fact, as a few people have suggested, basically how cultural change works. In some sense, each of us is a “cultural minority of one,” influenced by the sea of culture around us, and maybe, if our voice is loud/strong enough, influencing that culture as well.
Now imagine instead of one person, it’s a minority group, with its own history and culture. That culture, like all cultures, is always changing, and does so under the all-encompassing influence of the dominant culture. The influences from outside can be/are much stronger than those inside, so the direction and degree of change is decided at the whims of the dominant culture. And if something from the minority culture catches the fancy of the dominant culture, then the change surrounding that cultural tidbit can happen swiftly.
Also, imagine that this dominant culture was openly hostile, aggressive and oppressive to the minority culture (say, through voting disenfranchisement, segregation, a faulty and racially biased prison/justice system, things like that). In that context, it becomes easy to see how the dominant culture’s power to influence sub-cultures can be seen as just another arm of a hostile power dynamic.
Does that make sense?
I’ll say again, whether or not this is a good or bad thing, or is problematic, is 100% debatable for any given situation. And I’m not here defending the idea that hoop earrings worn by white women is cultural appropriation. All I’m saying is that what cultural appropriation, while in many ways inevitable, deserves to be thought about and not just waved away, with a “well, all things change,” particularly by those who have cultural power.
And, “you can’t copy us, but we can copy you,” some sense of limited material goods being gobbled up (really?), “brown people need to give up using cars and bras since they were invented by white people,” and related responses in this thread take the fairly self-evident ideas that dominant cultures have heavily weighted influence on minority cultures, and there are questions of power and morality that come into play where those two cultures intersect, and in effect stick their finger up at it and say “I refuse to entertain the notion that there is anything to think about here.”
As for “white fragility,” in my universe/circles, I’m the first person to roll my eyes at the latest term used to categorize, demonize and dismiss anyone who doesn’t think the right thoughts. However, these responses unequivocally fit the shoe, so to speak. Refusing to understand or address an issue that suggests that white people could stand to do with some introspection, pointing at the people with less (no) power in the situation and saying “how come the black people get to do it and I don’t, it’s not fair!” is exactly what is meant by “white fragility.” Again, it’s not about whether or not this instance is negative appropriation, but whether you’re willing to look at the question at all. It’s pretty easy to say there’s no issue when you’ve got might on your side.
All great questions! My “resolution” is that we talk about the issue when it comes up in good faith and honesty, and not default to the assumption that Social Darwinism absolves us from thinking about the complicated moral issues involved. I’m not interested in “policing” or identifying “perpetrators”.
Many years ago I read an essay by Wendy Rose, a Hopi poet/anthropologist who talks a lot about cultural imperialism. She described attending academic conferences in which she would sit on a panel about Hopi practices, and how a professor who’d studied her culture would deny her first-hand experiences because he hadn’t heard of them; or how she’d go to a bookstore to read, and the manager would ask her to wear a buckskin dress; or how she’d encounter people who’d never set foot on a reservation offering courses in Native American shamanism.
I could go out and start my own kosher certification company and declare my own rules for what’s kosher and what’s not, based on my having read a couple of threads on this messageboard about the practice. I could sell holy water and offer benedictions while wearing a priest’s collar. I could go to a Trump rally in Iowa and start telling the people there what their life experiences must be, despite that being my first visit to Iowa in my life. In all three cases, I suspect people would be super pissed off at me.
That sort of cultural appropriation–in which you marginalize people from a culture, in which you in your smug ignorance claim to be more of an expert on the culture than people who’ve grown up in the culture, in which you profit off a combination of your “safety” to people from the dominant culture and your willingness to fetishize and exoticize another culture–that sort of cultural appropriation is nasty bullshit.
But stuff like condemning yoga classes taught by white people, or getting angry at white girls wearing hoop earrings? That falls squarely in the “teenagers make poor decisions” category.
WorldNetDaily’s printing of those things ought to be embarrassing for WND, in the same way it’d be embarrassing to print photos of college kids drinking too much.
Oh, God, that sort of thing is just (in internet terms) ancient. I remember watching MC Frontalot’s documentary Nerdcore Rising where some women were going on about how a white guy rapping about computers was inherently racist because that was black music about black issues. Mind you, he wasn’t parodying anyone, he just raps about nerd shit.
Or this Jezebel article from 2012 in which we’re informed that indie covers of rap or hip-hop songs are racist (I only remember it because my wife and I got into an argument about it).
Perhaps. But I’m not cowering in a safe space because someone with the wrong ancestry used the wrong word, wore the wrong clothing, or isn’t living in a mud hut because that’s their “culture.”
I think you may be misinterpreting people’s reaction to this idea, and aren’t taking your own advice.
When encountering any new idea, I’m likely to poke at and prod it, to look at it from different angles, to pick it up and shake it. What might appear hostile to some people is simply me engaging with the idea to learn more about it. If I ask what seems to the initiated to be a foolish question, that is part of the learning process.
In post #26, you say:
It’s bad form to chastise someone for asking what you may see as naive questions when they’re trying to engage with a new idea.
Also, using terms like “white fragility” comes across as needlessly adversarial, at least to people unfamiliar with the term. When you say:
…you don’t really explain why it’s called that, or justify its use. You just reassert, without adequate explanation, that the term is appropriate. It also seems like you’re not willing to give people the benefit of the doubt. If they’re prodding at the idea and making a rookie mistake, dismissing them as unwilling to engage with the idea isn’t good faith.