Cultural Appropriation

 For the past few years this has been the rallying cry of a lot of people on the Internet, usually people on the progressive side of things. I don't want to use the SJW term because I'm conscious that it's a red flag to a great many people. Mostly, I've seen it in writing circles, where there's rather more discussion of it, with questions being asked about whether it's appropriate for writers to set stories outside their own culture. I've also seen some truly bizarre claims out there on the Internet, which often seem intent on unpicking the lessons learned by my generation about racism. For example, the complaints about Iron Fist being white, which seems to me to double down on the "Asian people are all martial artists" cliché, and which equally seems unwilling or unable to actually deal with Asian people beyond a stereotype. I also know of a Thai reviewer and writer who's treatment of anyone who dares to write about her culture has led to at least one suicide attempt, and who worked with Tricia Sullivan on a novel Shadow Boxer as Sullivan attempted to remove cultural appropriation, only to castigate the book anyway.

That's not to dismiss the attempt to be sensitive of cultures, only to note that we shouldn't use crude ideas of goodies and baddies in this situation. Personally, I see the idea as being the flip side of the groups who are fighting to preserve American and British culture, and suspect it's born from the same sort of impulse. The other thing that often strikes me about the idea's proponents is that they're quite happy to reduce, say Europe, to one homogenous lump in their efforts, and I'm not sure how I feel about that. I don't know enough about Africa to be able to comment whether their opinions do the same there, but my interactions with a lot of the, largely, Americans who fight cultural appropriation suggests that they may be. To be honest, it feels insulting to reduce a continent to one image because it's convenient to some privileged people who are involved in a generational battle with their antecedents.

I'm also concerned that, for example, they seem to reach for fantasies, such as Africans being a common sight in Medieval Europe... and while I'm happy to say that was likely to be the case in the area around the Mediterranean Sea, I do look in askance at the idea that black faces would have been common in Yorkshire, or certainly that they wouldn't have been viewed as something novel and strange, even though we've got proof of Roman officers from Africa who settled in England, and that there were African Vikings. It's not the case that you'd have black families in 14th Century England, nor that the peasantry would have been familiar with any sort of culture other than their own (and I think it's as dangerous to suggest that they would be, as it is to declare that Europe only had white people in it - the evidence doesn't point to either position being correct). On the other hand, the way that the Roma have been forgotten, when we know they were present, seems like a very odd, and quite insulting, thing to overlook. It feels like both sides of this debate are cherry picking pieces of evidence to suit their agendas.

Let me be clear, I would have no issue with the idea that Moorish (and specifically Moorish) people would have been common in Iberia, and in the Italian city states during the period, and possibly in the south of France too. It's when it's suggested that a bunch of peasants from Kenilworth or Sheffield would have seen Africans regularly that I start to struggle, and that's even with travelling peddlers doing the rounds of the country. I also look in askance at it because it infers that there were communities (and in a city like London, that may have been true, but England/Britain isn't London any more than America is New York).

Humans have a tendency to project things both across space and through time. We are naturally anachronistic, applying our standards to the past, even though (to quote L.P. Hartley), "the past is another country, they do things differently there".

However, this feeling also ties in with my own concerns about my culture, or at least British culture and stories. It often feels as if we're boiled down to "King Arthur, Robin Hood, the Tudors, the Revolutionary War (by the USA), Jack the Ripper, Sherlock Holmes, the Beatles and a bunch of castles. I'm more aware, as I grow older, that that's not the real story of Britain, and that it does us a disservice. It feels like turning around to the USA and saying only Johnny Appleseed really matters. It feels as if we're reduced to a theme park, a pretty distraction with nothing of substance to us, and I'll be honest; I quite resent that.

I note too, that there's no attempt by the people who are so concerned with cultural appropriation to fight their own American Cultural Hegemony, their concern is in the things being brought into the country, not the way America affects other countries with the rather simplistic narratives of Hollywood films, for example, or the borderline soft porn music videos that people in the Middle East object to so much.

I feel too, that there's a danger that "American" is treated as synonymous with "Western", or even "White", even though attitudes on the different side of the Atlantic, not to mention between America, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand are rather different. I'm not going to even suggest the UK is somehow above all the shit we've seen happening, but at the same time, I do wonder how much we're being cast as a sin eater for the Americans, and how much people are projecting where bad things have happened (such as assuming that the conditions in the slave trade were widely known, which I find hard to accept when most people don't know the conditions that coltan is mined in Congo or Asian sweatshops, despite the existence of broadcast media).

Look, I'm not saying that we should plunder other cultures for our own entertainment. I'm not saying that we should just stick to our own cultures either, but I do think we should be careful and respectful, and that we should appreciate the fact that it's as insulting to present parts of the globe as somehow the cultural monocultures as it is to steal things from other cultures without thinking about their significance within those cultures.

I've said before that we have the Internet, the greatest tool for information, and we don't use it. It seems ridiculous to me that we're relying on out dated, superficial ideas in this era. Not to mention that in an era of individualism we fall back to collective stereotypes so easily. I don't feel it can continue this way.