kate_nepveu | A non-discussion of cultural appropriation (a.k.a. worst. idea. ever.)

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race

A non-discussion of cultural appropriation (a.k.a. worst. idea. ever.)

There is much discussion going on at the moment about cultural appropriation in literature, springing off from a Wiscon panel (edit to replace with single roundup by rilina). I feel like I ought to have something to say, because (1) my biological ancestors, probably to a long way back, were from Korea or adjacent regions; (2) I like discussing literature, and (3) I'd like to think of myself as thoughtful and reasonable about culture and race. And yet, I've been watching the debates without commenting.

This is one of the more self-centered posts I have ever written: I rather doubt anyone noticed that I haven't been commenting before I said something about it, let alone has wondered about it. But I can't seem to shake wondering why I'm not, and so I'm trying to figure that out. Honestly my stomach rather knots up at the idea of entering this discussion, but my backbrain seems to want to. So, with trepidation, I jump in behind the cut.

Why have I been staying out of the cultural appropriation discussions? Some reasons, starting with the least conflicted, maybe.

I am not a confrontational person—yes, I am a lawyer, hush, it's not a contradiction—and a lot of people are very angry.
I've been busy doing law. (First papers to the Court of Appeals [New York's highest court] goes out tomorrow, yay! I'm pretty happy with it, too.)
I'm a reader, not a writer, and don't feel I have much to add to discussions about what writers should do. I can do descriptive—give me a book and ask me what I think about it, and I'm good to go—but prescriptive is not something I do.
I get vaguely weirded out by calling it appropriation. Maybe I just haven't seen the examples that really deserve a such negative label, but to my mind appropriation is a property kind of thing; I'm uncomfortable with the idea that you can appropriate, well, ideas (that aren't patents).
Relatedly, I'm not sure what it means. I don't think I've seen concrete examples (titles of books) of what people are objecting to.
The only example I can think of, that matches my admittedly-very-negative connotation of "appropriation," is the way that Tamora Pierce took Japanese culture of some not-present-time era and dropped it into the Tortall (Alanna et al.) universe in the Keladry books, complete with Japanese words like "naginata." (Tortall is generic-medevaloid-European, which is mostly because Tortall started as pretty EFP and then grew; I don't know enough about the other cultures that we meet throughout the books to know if it's the same wholesale dropping-in.) My reaction to this is that it's just sloppy, frankly.

[ETA: Apparently the panel defined "appropriation" as "use," which was not clear to me until I saw a comment later. In my opinion, "appropriation" is not a neutral word, and while I hate the re-labeling and definitional quibbles that seem inherent in these discussions, I do think this is one time where a different label would be actually useful. Not that I know what a better label would be.]
I lack a cultural identity that matches my color, and thus feel not entitled to speak on this, or not knowledgable enough to contribute, or perhaps both.
I mean, I am about the least Asian-American person it is possible to be. [*] Korean is the cuisine I've liked least when attempted in restaurants, Chad's practically dragging me to Japan next year with Worldcon as a carrot, etc. etc. The most frequent occasion of my being aware of my color? When I'm shopping for clothes and lamenting that those olive-mustard-orange pallettes make me look like a corpse. I don't run out of fingers when counting the number of times I feel someone treated me differently because of my race. (Some slurs, some from people who wouldn't like me anyway, but a couple from strangers; a couple of instances where someone spoke to me in something other than English. Oh, right, and one request to do something related to racial discrimation.) (This is very like my reaction to gender and sex.)

[*] Nutshell history: I was born in Korea, adopted as an infant, and while my parents tried to give me connections to Korean culture, it just didn't take; I wasn't interested. Still am not, really; it's very similar to how I feel about biological relatives: it's not a matter of great relevance to me.

(Someone is probably thinking, yes, but didn't you get college scholarships and go to a fancy-pants law school and all that, and wasn't that being treated differently for being a female hyphenated-American? This is where my cast-iron self-confidence comes in: I am damn smart and deserved those, thankyouverymuch. Not that I am going to pull out my test scores, grades, resume, etc., and wave them around in ALL THEIR ENORMITY, so you'll just have to trust me.)

oyceter wrote, "I think if you are a hyphenated American or an American of color, claiming American culture as your own is problematic. I wish this weren't so, and I struggled against this in college. But the fact is, if your skin color is different from that of people around you, no matter what you think you are, people will very often treat you differently."

Apparently I am problematic. But I don't know what else to call my culture but American. (And I wouldn't call that assimilation, either.)

I get this feeling of lack of knowledge and therefore lack of entitlement to participate a lot when it comes to discussions about race. Empathy, observation, and concern seem insufficient. Which then makes me unhappy in about six different ways, and then I want to go hide under a rock.
I'm a solution-oriented person. Tell me about a problem, and I'll start thinking of ways to fix it. (I have heard this described as a gendered trait, to which I say, pfft.) As far as I can tell, and I freely admit I may not be understanding, to the extent that solutions are being offered, they are "don't be thoughtless." In other words, this is a (oh my, I can't believe I'm going to use this phrase) consciousness-raising exercise. For the reason in the point directly above, I've got nothing which with to raise anyone's consciousness, and therefore nothing to contribute.
(Though I do have to agree that the idea of permission is, well, if I had been in the audience, I would have been searching for a polite way of saying, "Did you hear what just came out of your mouth?" But that's been said already.)

*looks at list* Yes, posting this is probably the worst idea ever. But maybe if I do, my backbrain will shut up about it.

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I figured anyone staying out of it wasn't particularly interested in the issue (fair enough) or was lurking but didn't want to jump in (more than fair). I had great trepidations posting my own thoughts, and I do have experiences that I feel are relevant to the lifting of consciousness. ^_^ I'm glad you weighed in. I don't think it's self-centered; the self is the only way we access experience.

And as for self-centeredness on my end, I hadn't even thought of what the question would look like from the reader end of the spectrum; I've a (would-be) writer so long that the two things are all tangled up.

--Korean-American Texan with her hoof in her mouth

Okay, so does that count as consciousness-raising? =>

It's funny, I have just realized that my identity as a non-writer is more important to me, at least in discussions of writing, than my identity as any visually-obvious classification. Huh.

And that doesn't count as a hoof in your mouth. Also, if you have hooves, you must have really good corrective shoes, because I never noticed.

That's so funny, I totally didn't think about my post(s) coming from the writers' end!

Though now that you say it, it is rather obvious, huh?

I do see things more as a reader, though (and was very conscious of this during WisCon), largely because... I don't write. Mostly I was trying to say stuff from a reader's POV and how maybe something written with the very, very best of intents and loads of research and whatnot can still end up reading as very problematic to me.

Uh, yes, and now I will stop spamming your LJ!

You don't write? I know I've read fiction of yours . . .

Anyway.

A reader-POV discussion, assuming I'd read or could find the works in question, would interest me. Or even a list of things that did things interestingly/well/poorly.

(And you weren't spamming. But this also wasn't the worst idea ever, so I know what you meant, kinda.)

Oh yeah! I think writing fiction is so new and so sporadic for me that I keep thinking "I don't write." Also, I'm so used to the reader/critic POV after going through lots and lots of writing posts in which I keep thinking, "Does not apply to me."

But yes, now I am really wanting to read a lot more so when I talk about this, I can actually, y'know, reference things.

This seems to me to be a useful and interesting contribution to the discussion, so I can't agree that it's the worst idea ever. (Next time, try mixing in a handgun and some tequila.)

Seriously, thanks for posting it. To me, who talks in these kinds of conversations, and why, is often as interesting as what is actually being said.

I know, I know, I was directing anxiety into hyperbole.

It's harder to figure out who's not talking in an online conversation without clear boundaries like this, but yes, one of the reasons I couldn't shake the question was that I had this image of sitting in a class or at a con panel and being *looked at*.

Glad you found it interesting.

Not the point but...you don't like Korean food? I love Korean food. And I'm Jewish/German/Russian/Welsh/Swedish/Finnish.

Which, possibly, means you might like JGRWSF food, just as soon as I figure out what that is. So far all I can think of is borscht with matzoh balls in.

Well, the grilled bits over the table are okay, but I've not tried anything else that worked for me. (Based on a handful of restaurant visits, mind.)

Heh. A good local Indian restaurant has a small section entitled "Calcutta Jewish Specials" on its menu; I had one and it was good, though not particularly identifiable to my untutored palate as, well, much different from other Indian food of the area.

Huh. Not a clue, except that the raisins are vaguely reminiscent of chulent, a fruit-and-meat stew that some Jews make for Shabbat because it can cook for a whole day. Not really my cup of tea, but then I don't tend to like sweet with red meat.

I don't know which direction the influence runs, but none of the ingredients or the taste seemed much different to me from the Indian I'd had. Good, though.

I don't know how to break this to you: olive and mustard look terrible on a lot of white people too. (Yours truly.)

I have been skippy and skimmy lately, and am going back and trying to read everything to find out what has everybody all het up, and this was a nice one to hit on first-ish. For one thing, it's calm, and soothingly it does not require me to remember my rusty Franz Fanon or Gayatri Spivak reading of 10 years ago. The I perspective is a good way to go, because, it's not like anybody can invalidate it!

(I mean, anybody with any sense.)

olive and mustard look terrible on a lot of white people too

Hell, yes. Me too.

As Wilde said, "Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months."

That reminds me, I have to go dress-shopping this weekend. *cringes*

Olive & mustard must look good on someone--who? People with skin that's non-pale but pinkish underneath, not yellow? *guesses wildly*

I managed to get out of college with very little theory of this kind. My lit electives were all genre things, like a class on cyborgs, and modern poetry (it must've been modern, I wrote a paper on H.D. for it), and so forth. So that's another reason, though enough less of one that it didn't occur to me when writing, obviously.

(And here's where I stop lurking and reading, wave hello, and answer the ALL IMPORTANT questions about olive and mustard.)

People with peach-toned skin can usually pull it off (so, warm pink rather than cool pink). Well, olive, at least. Mustard's a little trickier. I look okay in mustard, but not good enough to actually buy it.

Hello! And thank you--I'm relieved to hear that someone can manage it, otherwise fashion would be even stranger than I'd thought.

Hullo! Thank you for posting!

Also, a large part of me is sorry that I ever posted on this, but then... no one was saying anything.

Re: adopting American culture as problematic. I guess my POV on that is that maybe I wasn't outright discriminated against because I am Asian, but there were many, many times in which I felt like the token Asian among my (white) friends. I keep saying this, but it's because it had a big impact on me... there were always many comments about the Asian table and the Asian gang, and I always felt that they looked at me approvingly, like, "Oh, you're not one of those Asians that hangs out with other Asians."

Again, I wanted to say that I am not saying that my experience is yours, because... uh, I am not you ;). But I guess I wanted to say something like, yes, I do think racism is alive, albeit disguised, and as such, I think it's difficult to stay out of the argument if you are an Entity of Pigment because sometimes, people will take silence for assent.

Crud. Now I sound like I'm accusing you of not speaking up, which really is not what I meant, because I really, really, really wanted to say that I respect your uneasiness and your experience and what you feel, and that this is a difficult topic and not easy to post on.

*sigh*

I'm really sorry if this doesn't make sense and if it is offensive.

As I said in a comment further upstream, one of the reasons I did post was because if this were a con panel or a class, I would be _feeling people looking at me_. Online isn't the same, but still.

My experience is not yours, and is probably exceptional, but that very exceptionality is a big reason why I didn't feel I had anything to contribute to the discussion in its current shape.

If you promise not to tell anyone, I'll give you my thoughts on cultural appropriation.

I sometimes think somebody invented it just so liberals would have something else to feel guilty/yell about.

But that's just me and I'm about as Anglo white chick as you can get. (Well, actually I'm 1/16 Cherokee, but I'm from Oklahoma where that's legally required.)

MKK

There's that double bind that was mentioned in the original panel listing: if you don't do it, you're being all parochial and lily-white, and if you do, you're strip-mining somebody else's rich traditions. Guilts a-poppin'!

Hence the deeply fraught conversations all-around, I think. And some of the remarkably strange things said at the panel.

The label does strike me as having a load of guilt embedded in it, which as I've said upstream, seems to my eyes to be hindering communication a bit.

I'm glad that you made this post. I was born to a Pakistani father and a French-Canadian mother, both of whom moved far from whom and didn't really bring their cultures with them. I've been struggling with a lot of things in reading this discussion as well. I am, in a parallel way I guess, about as Canadian as it's possible to be. When I read that assuming the dominant culture as my own was problematic, it gave me great cognitive dissonance. First, it assumes that because my skin isn't white that I'm assuming something. But I've never had a culture other than Canadian. If I'm not Canadian, then what am I? (And why am I not allowed to be Canadian because of my skin colour?) I can also count the number of times that I've felt treated differently by someone who was not a telemarketer on two hands. (Telemarketers are constantly calling me and offering me cheap long distance plans to Pakistan. I don't know anybody there. However, it's always the same company, so perhaps I can collapse that to one really long and monotonous incident.) Anyhow, I've felt remarkably out of place in this discussion, especially in terms of my place in the connections being made between skin tone and culture. It's good to not feel alone.

Trivial things first: no do-not-call yet for your area?

(I've wondered that people don't express surprise at the contrast between my name and my face, but it's been pointed out to me that Nepveu is just so weird that people don't move past "is that *really* how you spell it?" to wonder about ethnicity. That, or they spot the French influence and think Southeast Asia (less likely, IMO).)

This entire conversation has been really good for me in terms of learning how to listen to people, and thinking about conversational techniques and tics, and comprehending the range of human experience. It's nice to know that one's not unique, and also valuable to hear the ways one's different. So, welcome, glad you found something of value here, and hope you find other things of value as the conversation continues.

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