Peeking into the rock

Jim Hines had a thing to say about having been called out for appropriation. I haven't read the thing he was called out for, so these are general rfemarks. They're here instead of there because I went long.

I have a sticker on my old computer that says "My people are the whole world." And it better be true, because otherwise I have nobody.

For a long time I have thought that the whole notion of "appropriation" is problematic. The first time I saw it used, it was pretty clear what the issue was. It was about people who paint themselves up and stick a feather in their head and call themselves a shaman: it was about people who claim to have "gone on walkabout" and had "healing visions:" it was about, clearly, exploitation and fraud. And then I saw it used to try to examine what was problematic about some of the ways that fans fetishize elements from doujinshi traditions. Lately, though – I see it used against people who are engaged in the good old-fashioned process of cultural borrowing. You sing Fado and you're not Portuguese? Appropriation. You wear batik and you're not Indonesian? Appropriation. You're not visibly genetically Japanese and you write a character who eats okonomi yaki? Appropriation.

It's not helpful to any sensible goals to tell people they can only include elements of their own culture. You're going to tell that to musicians, maybe? You'll lose all the music ever recorded. All of it. You're going to tell that to the clothing industry? Be prepared to lose everything there too. How about food? I have no idea what I'd be allowed to eat. Is that appropriation thing additive or subtractive?

Is there a time limit on how far back it is considered appropriation? In other words, do I have to give up fresh ginger, but maybe I can keep carrots because 17th century?

I am not kidding about any of this. Culture is by nature promiscuous and appropriates everything from everywhere. If you want to think about this sensibly, you have to look at what your real problems with "appropriation" are.

I think there are just three concerns here. There's the use of cultural elements to bolster racism (consciously or unconsciously: we live in a matrix of racism and everything we do either pushes back against it or supports it or both). Conversely there's the use of cultural elements to build the strength of unprivileged cultures and the connection and cooperation between them (should that be two things?). And there's the access of people from those cultures to the marketplace (and the things that implies).

The third concern is the one that gives rise to a legitimate beef about who does what. If Joe Whiteguy writes a series of novels about the Arapaho and it means that a number of agents look at a good manuscript written by an Arapaho writer and say "Oh, Joe Whiteguy already has that market cornered," that's massively unfair. It's still not Joe Whiteguy's fault. Joe Whiteguy's responsibility is to the first and second concerns. If his work is honest and respectful and well-conceived and well-written he'll have pushed back against racism and contributed towards a better environment for Arapaho culture to thrive in. Now, if Joe Whiteguy becomes aware of this other manuscript, he can say, "Hey, this other manuscript is here, it's good, it ought to be published too." But how much pull he has in getting that manuscript taken seriously is questionable.

I'm seriously troubled, too, by the essentialist thread that runs through the appropriation conversation. How you can't possibly write something correctly unless you yourself are authentically a member of the culture in question. Sometimes people naively divide the world into "of color" and "white." I think the worst example of this particular quirk was a Sims Secret complaint that a dreads hairstyle was being portrayed on a light-skinned Sim with an unnatural hair color. "This Sim is not a POC! This is not okay!" (quote is not exact) – you can see all the things wrong with that. But in the discussion that followed, there were quite a few people who took this position seriously.

Essentialism can also lead to objections to anybody representing anybody else, like complaining when a Korean-American actor plays a Japanese character. Seriously, that Korean-American actor needs all the roles they can get. I hope that complaint doesn't lead to complaining if they get roles in Shakespeare or Tennessee Williams plays.

Let me be clear about what I'm not saying.

1. I am not saying that there is no room for critique about representation in culture.




2. I am not saying that we shouldn't be fighting for more writers, artists, actors, musicians, and so on from underrepresented cultures.

What I am saying is

1. Cultural borrowing and the inclusion of characters from cultures other than the creators' home cultures is inevitable and we shouldn't even try to discourage these things.




2. We should critique the qualities and quality of these things instead or their mere existence.




3. We should be fighting for more the members of underrepresented cultures to get more access to the marketplace of culture, rather than excoriating people from outside those cultures for including them in their work.

Why yes, I have a stake in this argument. I myself don't have a coherent "home culture" to stick to. I was raised in an ephemeral counter-cultural niche that no longer exists (and for which I am sometimes nostalgic, but I think if you have not even a scrap of nostalgia about you at my age you must have had a much worse time of it than I have had). If I wrote to the expectations implied by the color of my skin and my age and location, I would be writing about a culture as foreign to me as any other on this planet. If my work made assumptions of power and respectability and normality that those superficials seem to warrant, I would be a liar. All of my life, I have been a foreigner in my own country, and I have been pretty much equally ill at ease in all of the cultural milieus in which I have found myself.

Most of the time I write about made-up cultures in made-up geographies and histories and I am not sufficiently self-analytical to know if there's a connection with those facts about myself. However, I also write about people who are like my neighbors. I do it with respect, and I hope I do it with understanding. But whichever culture the people I write about are from, I still have to extend myself. There's nobody on earth I can write about authentically without going beyond myself.

I am aware that the moral right to write about a subject is an earned one. But it's earned by writing conscientiously, not by being born with a particular set of DNA or in a particular community.