Innocents

God, this is so complicated. I’m Jewish, with my family – all four grandparents – from the Ukraine.

I’m sorry, but after reading Jenn’s post, and especially the comments, I see an awful lot of black and white thinking on all sides. There’s no gray area here, it seems.

From a Jewish perspective: I had a discussion last night with a friend of mine about appropriation. I said that I am offended (very) by folks like Madonna fancying themselves Kabbalists (Kabbala is Jewish mysticism, and requires years of advanced study) after reading a book. But I also said that if an open-minded Christian were to display a Menorah during Christmas to educate their children that there are other religious traditions out there and maybe we should respect those, I don’t have a problem with that. It’s the context that matters – Madonna just wants to fetishize Judaism, but the Christian is contributing to reducing bigotry in the world – even if he doesn’t fully understand Jewish culture.

My friend has a Jewish father and non-Jewish mother. They did not raise her to any religious tradition. By traditional Jewish law, she’s not Jewish, since that is determined by the mother’s side. Now, however, she is researching her family history, including her Jewish grandparents on her father’s side. As part of that, she’s learning Yiddish. She mentioned on an online message board that she wants to get a tattoo of a Yiddish expression. She was told that she was “not Jewish enough”. WTF? Sometimes I want to slap my Jewish brothers and sisters for this black and white thinking. How is that any different from Lisa Vogel of MichFest fame claiming that trans women are not women? How much are we Jews going to police boundaries? My friend is very thoughtful, and fully understands misappropriation. She is not fetishising Yiddish or Jewish culture – she is part of it!

I think what concerns me about Jenn’s post and her comments is that she does not distinguish the differing contexts.

Another example:

(1) My mom has stenciled Chinese symbols all over the kitchen walls, and hangs little “feng shui” thingies all over the house. That turns my stomach. I’ve tried to explain my distaste to her, how she is taking these things completely out of context and draws her symbols with no understanding of the culture behind them. I’ve tried to explain that maybe she should use symbols from our Jewish tradition, symbols that have deep meaning to us. But she doesn’t understand the harm.

(2) I am taking acupuncture to treat chronic pain. I am doing this after spending 12 years with the medical profession unable or unwilling to do anything. The acupuncture is helping a lot. My practitioner is not Chinese, but was trained by a Chinese professional. I am not doing this to fetishize Chinese culture. I am doing this to relieve pain, and I’m sorry, but Jewish tradition doesn’t have much in the way of healing arts (except “Oy vey is mir!”). According to Jenn, I must give this up and live a life of pain. I would ask her (but I won’t, because I know I will get slammed) to consider what its like for someone who lives with can’t-even-get-to-fucking-sleep-at-night chronic pain to be told by an able-bodied person to just suck it up. Oh, but I can’t, because I’m white, so I’m not oppressed in any way.

To take this to the most extreme conclusion, we all need to stop using aspirin because it is derived from something (willow bark) that was used by Native Americans. Tell that to people who suffer from arthritis and heart disease!

I really, really think that we all need to get off our high horses, open our eyes, and listen to each other as humans, and with the understanding that each situation is unique. Please, Jenn, tell me the ways that I’m screwing up, because yes, I need my eyes opened (as does every white person), but listen to my story too. I’m not just white. I’m also Jewish, a chronic pain sufferer, and transgender. I am an oppressor. I am also oppressed. It’s not either / or. I will do everything I can to understand where you are coming from as someone with an Asian heritage who does not want to see your culture ripped off, if you will at least listen to me as a chronic pain sufferer, and not just white.

Uhm, I come from a technically Asian culture (though in America Asian seems to mean EAST Asian and “yellow” while I am a deep chocolatey brown) that is presently more reviled as such than anything else, except maybe for its food, which is often given another label.

From this perspective, I can only *wish* that it were fetishized as Japanese or Chinese culture is. Much effort from people with backgrounds similar to mine go into encouraging such fetishization.

I realize why it’s annoying to people whose cultures get fetishized like that, but do remember that there are worse thing!

IMO, the biggest with this way of thinking is that it is an inverse of the the rascist cry to protect our culture from “others” – after all why should Mexicans get to experience US culture or Blacks and Asians in East End London.

It is not enough to say that it is a question of dominance versus non-dominance, the working class whites of the East End of London are not history’s greatest winners.

The only soloution is not to let other people annoy you, let them live their lives, make bad movies, learn how to stick pins in people and drink “exotic” teas. After all none of these things should affect your appreciation of doing it properly.

From the post above, I’m unclear whether I’m an appropriating white girl or a cultural butterfly. In my childhood home we read Lao Tzu next to Aristotle and I never ate the same cuisine twice in a week. While my parents never took their extra-cultural flirtations deeper than eating foreign food, collecting mementos meaningless to them, and the occasional movie with subtitles, they launched a love affair for me. Starting in high school when I taught myself Vietnamese cuisine, took up reading Vietnamese history during study halls, and adopted a native martial art, I’ve gone after other cultures with a vengeance. The striking outside-in difference between my parents and myself is in our decor: all we have are books, a daisho set (we’re boffer fighters, my partner developed his style by studying the works of Musashi) and a photot of the Yangtze river. Our child, who will be homeschooled, will be reading from non-Western literature on a par with Western, ditto learning Mandarin vs. French, and Taoism along with Empiricism. My point is that appropriation may open the door to understanding.

There’s a difference between admitting that you benefit from white privilege and admitting that you’re raping and pillaging a culture every time you add cardamom to something.

There’s a difference between appropriating something because it’s fashionable–hip, trendy, mass-produced–and appropriating it because you’re truly interested in it. The former is usually sad and irritating and drains the thing of its meaning, but I can’t see any instance in which we should disapprove of the latter, which can only serve to deepen our relationships with the world and other cultures.

It’s still not black-and-white, though. What if someone drinks chai tea because she likes how it tastes, but she was introduced to it because Starbucks ran out of her favorite coffee? What if someone’s really fascinated with the Chinese language and calligraphy, but doesn’t want to study it because it’s so popular?

I lean in favor of liking what you like as long as you know why you like it–even if the “why” consists of, “Because Target sells it.” And as long as you don’t use it to show how wonderfully sensitive and “multicultural” you are.

Which brings me to workplace “diversity trainings,” which, in my experience, tend towards sad and irritating. You just can’t teach respect for a culture by dumping a couple Native American drummers in a beige conference room with no windows, regardless of how entertaining they are or how many glazed donuts are available.

Rachael, that’s a brilliant post.

I really like reading Reappropriate, because she gets me thinking about things in a new way. As Mandos hints at, I’ve come to think that Asian-philia is full of racist overtones, which are visible when you consider that India is rarely included in discussions of “cool Asian culture.” Both India and China have traditional native mysticism, and healing techniques, and cuisine, and (more recently) film, but China (and Japan) are considered “Asian chic” while India, not so much. And I think the big difference here is that Indians are brown.

But I also don’t agree with a lot of the way she demands cultural purity. Cultural purity is a ghetto. She objects to “transracial” casting in Memoirs of a Geisha. Sorry, no. Chinese is not a different “race” from Japanese. Plus, once you start saying that Chinese actors can only play Chinese characters, you ghettoize them; you take away their ability to act, their ability to be human.

On the one extreme you have “yellowface,” and yes, I get the objection, and yes, she’s right. The odd thing about Keith Carradine in the Kung Fu TV show was not that he was playing “yellowface” (and in fact, he was playing Eurasian), but that everyone he encountered on the TV show reacted to him as if he was Chinese (calling him “Chinaman” and so on). So yes, it was definitely yellowface and definitely objectionable, like Natalie Wood in bronzer playing a Puerto Rican in West Side Story, or all those bronzed-up whites playing Indians in a thousand John Wayne movies.

On the other hand, though, is Tony Curtis playing Italians and Middle Easterners, or Anthony Quinn playing a Greek, or Ken Olin playing both Jews and gentiles (I don’t know which he is). Do we really want a film industry in which an Anthony Quinn is told, “I’m sorry, you can only be cast as a Mexican-Italian” ? I don’t think so.

In other words, “protecting culture” can be as dangerous as ripping it off.

I’d love to toss a comment in about all the round-eyed characters in Anime, Spam as wedding gifts in the far east, hair mousse: when punk hairstyles goes mainstream, how popular American Jazz and blue jeans were in soviet Russia, and the like, but I’m too busy getting the ingredients together for my signature fusion cuisine chili-lime shrimp kabobs for this weekend.

Anyone want my 100% authentic Hawaiian cuisine recipe for Spam Musubi?

Agree with Brooklynite,
Cross-pollination is good for culture. China stalled – after a fantastic start – because it turned away from outside influences for centuries.
I love the energy of the quoted rant – but not the pointlessly petty examples she uses.

I think what she means are people who go, maybe watch some anime, and imagine that say, Japan is a magic fairy land for their amusement. They talk about how the Japanese culture is so different and so much more amazing than the culture here,etc,etc. They try to use random Japanese words in sentences without knowing really anything more about Japan than what is in cartoons and comic books.

There’s a
difference between me making a stirfry and eating it like a normal human being, and me making a stirfry and talking about the magic of the East and how Asians are so much more smart and attractive because they eat stirffry and all that, but you know, never try to actually talk to or understand any actual Asians.

Black people get this too- white folks listen to rap and some pretend to be hard and ’street’, but would they talk to us like actual human beings? I think not.

I think Shannon (in 19) is onto a critical distinction, here. What Jenn is talking about is more complicated than just cultural cross-pollination: it has everything to do with the power relations between the two cultures, and having the privilege to swoop in and appropriate all these things to make yourself feel ‘multicultural’ and exciting and blah blah blah without doing any of the hard work of dealing with your own white privilege. (This is distinct from using, say, acupuncture or whatever because it works. Intention matters, here.)

Hmm. This is remarkably hard to write about coherently. All I can think about is this one guy in college who joined the anti-rape group that I ran for a while. He wasn’t the first guy to join, but man did he just bug the shit out of me, and it took me a while to figure out what it was. He would come in, all excited to join our meetings and talk about this and that, and get all the good vibes from being the ‘guy who got it,’ but he never wanted to do the actual hard work of outreach to other men. As soon as we’d try to set up some event like that, he was off to run to an A.S.I.A. meeting or something, where he could be the ‘white person who got it,’ I guess.

I think there can be a parallel thing that happens with white people, where it does make you feel *good* and non-racist and multicultural to draw Asian symbols on your wall and watch Bollywood movies and hang Native American dreamcatchers from your windows–and never once do any of the hard work of actually wrestling with your own privilege.

Huh. I think Indian stuff is pretty trendy, or at least it has been in the very recent past. I’m actually sort of fascinated with the change in the way that Europeans and Americans fetishize India: it used to be thought of as pure and spiritual and non-materialistic, but now it’s global and high-tech and po-mo. People used to ignore Indian pop culture and other aspects of Indian culture that seem modern and consumerist and fixate on Indian spirituality, but now it’s all about Bollywood. And as hip as India is, the Indian diaspora is even hipper in the U.S., because it’s both Indian (and po-mo and global and whatnot) and British, and to Americans, anything British is always cool.

I appreciated Jenn’s rant, because I think I needed the reminder to be a bit more conscious about my interactions with other cultures, especially the ones that interest me the most. I’m not going to throw away the Lagaan soundtrack or stop eating sushi, but I think it’s worth thinking about what I’m doing and why I’m doing it.

Something about the capitalization of “white” makes my teeth itch.

Also, I liked Batman Begins because it had Christian Bale looking hot and kicking ass, and I am shallow and like comic book movies.

I do take the larger point, though, and I think it’s a good one. But I’m finding it hard to get past all the generalizing and combining of instances. Is it cultural appropriation when I go to the Chinese restaurant down the street, owned by my sister’s friend’s family, and have a plate of dumplings? Where is the line between the “melting pot” of America’s diverse cultures and the callousness of appropriation? Is it possible to retain an awareness of a thing’s origins – whether a martial arts style, a tea preparation, or a cinematic tradition – without resorting either to fetishization or a cultural ghettoization of “thou shalt not touch”?

I don’t know. What do y’all think?

Thanks for the link back! Some great comments over here, certainly worth considering.

For the record, I’m not against cultural borrowing by people not born into a particular culture — this has been elucidated in the comments to the post in question. It would certainly be a difficult position to defend, even were it something I advocated.

Instead, as the original post above describes, I am against misappropriation coupled with disrespect for the source cultural practices. I’m against taking what’s convenient and denying what’s too weighty — enjoying green tea but being ignorant or supportive of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Practicing kung fu but knowing nothing about the Rape of Nanking. Fetishizing Asian culture while being ignorant of what charges of Asiaphilia mean and how you might fit into that category. I hope that clears something up.

As far as the idea that I should be “grateful” that my culture is fetishized, and whether or not Indian culture is currently a fad — I can only say that, in my opinion, being a fad is no better than being hated and reviled. In both cases, our histories and heritages are still being digested, processed and consumed by non-insiders, with the intention of distorting who we are for the sake of someone else’s benefit. It’s like arguing that Asian Americans should argue for the model minority myth because it is a “positive stereotype”: I would counter that the act of stereotyping is itself the distasteful act and that no matter what, stereotypes should be struggled against. Similarly, so long as any culture is treated with disrespect by the majority mainstream, whether a fad or reviled, we have reason to object.

Oh, I should add that those “Asian Studies major attitudes” were COLONIALIST FANTASIES, not legitimate feelings about Asia. Those attitudes were one reason I actually feel rather dismayed by my degree and work in a different field.

“No one I know studies German, dresses in “folkloric” German costumes, learns traditional German fighting techniques, and plans to go to Germany to seek a German bride because German women “naturally” make more desirable mates–while I know personally a number of guys who are like this about various parts of Asia.”

Months ago I decided to learn more about Pagan Germanic/Nordic culture. Not only am I learning things I never knew, I am also discoving that our Pagan ancestors had a worldview much closer to the Dharmic faiths than “Western” (read Christianized Greek/Latin) worldview. In fact, I have learned that Almost of the traditionally “eastern” philosphies were produced by a fusion of the non-IE “native” beliefs with the beliefs of the Indo-European immigrants/conquerers who settled amongst them. They are not “ours” nor are they “theirs” – they are ALL of ours and this kind of racial compartmentalizing is not only based on sloppy thinking it is simply factually wrong.

Primarily, I am a history nut with no intention of confining himself to only the history of people who share my skintone. The funnny thing is that the Chinese and Indian (not Americans of chinese/indian decent – like this author – but people born and raised in the PRC and India) students in my lab ask ME questions about the ancient history of “their” cultures – stuff that they, like most Americans, ignored in school. They dont bust my ass for being a “asianophile” trying to “steal” they’re culture – some of them actually seem to look almost “proud” that a foreigner, especially an “self-centered American” would take the time
to actually read the Rig Veda, the Chuangzi, etc and appreciate them as classic works of art and philosophy.

True, there are idiots who actually would choose a mate like this – and there are dumb asians commited to marrying a white women. Its not about”they do it to” – because there is no ‘they’ and stupidity transcends cultures.

Jane –

“Cultures that seem “premodern” or “subordinate” attract this fetishism from modern day Americans.”

This is one of the many cases where a widespread basic framework of biological knowledge would come in handy. Any lifeform that exists today is by definition modern, even if it’s a bacteria. If you can see a bacteria as modern, other members of your own species shouldn’t be a stretch.

It’s also a case where our ideological frame of ‘progress’ bites us in the buttocks. Modernity is generally used to mean the present time, but piggybacked along with that is the expectation of a certain level of technology, a nation-state level will to dominate, particular social structures and buy-in to the market economy. Modernity is a freighted concept that ignores both the cyclical nature of societal power and the truly impressive history of the accomplishments of pre-colonial peoples. We’ve been conditioned as a society to reject the modernity of both those people impoverished by our cultures and those who simply refuse to adopt our values.

“(Nobody “just likes something because they like it” if the thing they like is the least bit complex or freighted with cultural meaning. Sure, when I buy a green tea at the coffeeshop, it’s pretty inconsequential, but when I buy green tea at the white-person-Asian-fetishist tea shop or at the yuppie co-op (and I’m thinking of specific places in my town) it’s marketed as this “Asian” “exotic” “pure” thing. It’s marketed.)”

This is true. I like the exotic teas at the co-op because they have interesting nutritional/medicinal properties and aren’t drenched in pesticide. I make no apologies for my organic ginger tea. If not wanting to be poisoned or wanting antioxidants makes me an elitist, sign me up.

However, I’m studying tropical agricultural systems and food varieties this quarter in school and I have to tell you that there’s barely anything we eat in the west that hasn’t been appropriated at some point or another. And in that light, shopping at the yuppie co-op (alternately, as it is in my area, the hippie co-op) where they might actually celebrate in some sense the origin of the food and may carry the products of companies that paid the farmer a decent wage, may not be such a bad thing.

From Asia (Do you really want me to break it out into east, west & Asia-Pacific? ‘Cause I ain’t gonna.): Citrus, rice, soy, stonefruits (peaches, plums, almonds, etc.), melons, pistachios, bananas, yams, coconuts, sugar, numerous spices, etc.

From the original Americans: Corn, potatoes, chocolate, sweet potatoes, other yams, peppers, tomatoes, beans, squash, tapioca (the starch of the cassava/manioc root), etc.

From Africa: Coffee (2nd most traded world commodity after crude oil), yet other yams, oil palm, sorghum, other melons, etc.

I could go on and on, but a picture should be emerging. US citizens eat more corn than any other group of people on the planet, we’re Tostitos(TM) on the hoof, but it’s an intentional cultivar whose wild ancestors had cobs (if you can call them that) that ran about an inch long. Latter-day corn is the product of thousands of years of cultural labor and it’s in almost everything we eat in this country in one form or another. Is this appropriation? If not, why not?

Probably most people around the world don’t consider coffee or chocolate to have the slightest cultural significance, mainly because they were assimilated so long ago. Medieval Arabs were the first to bring coffee back from Africa and then Europeans appropriated it in their turn. Chocolate was brought back to Europe by the planet’s most expansive colonial tradition and yet nothing seems more US than a Hershey’s chocolate bar. Now coffee is grown mostly in S. America and Asia. Chocolate is grown most widely in Africa. Who’s appropriating what here? You’ve got agribusiness firms, consumers and let’s not forget, a lot of very poor farmers…

… and about them, here’s what I see as the real appropriation, foodwise: These last two popular, luxury commodities are grown almost exclusively in the tropics by brown people so poor that many of them can barely afford to send their kids to school. In part because their countries are usually in hoc to the IMF and their forced structural adjustment contracts don’t allow for free public schools, and partly because when you and I go to a coffee shop, only 1% of the price we pay makes it back to the coffee farmer. It’s pretty much the same picture with chocolate, if not worse. Don’t get me started on bananas.

If you want some appropriation that means life and death right now, consider the ongoing appropriation of third world labor by those among us who think it’s our god-given right to have $0.79/lb bananas. Consider the ease with which most of us can ignore the effect our purchase of Procter & Gamble, Kraft, Sara Lee and Nestlé coffee products have, instead of being bothered to understand why someone might insist on a fair trade label. Or look at the general obliviousness involved in buying child & slave labor chocolate from Mars, Hershey and Nestlé.

These commodities are loaded with cultural significance, with issues of race and class, privilege and dominance. These appropriations, precisely because they’ve been so seamlessly integrated into our society, are completely invisible. I’m not sure how that fits into the fetishization dynamic (though not to disregard it), because there aren’t big groups of suburban whites that I’m aware of trying to act like indigenous Africans or S. Americans, though it certainly fits into seeing them as subservient enough to be of no consequence.

But the appropriation doesn’t end there. Our society continues to sanction economically damaging thefts of natural and cultural heritage that remain farther below the radar than eating sushi, which at least someone generally got paid for. Consider US patent law as another modern face of colonialism, with private firms able to steal indigenous cultural knowledge and biological wealth and set their seal on it as a product from which no one else may profit. Consider hoodia, which is a cactus that the S. African San tribes have used for thousands of years to stave off hunger, now turned into a patented weight loss supplement for westerners who are Tostitos(TM) on the hoof. This brute force economic racism that should properly be called slavery and theft seems to me to make a textbook example of what ignoring white privilege leads to.

Also, I was recently told that people who live in those parts of the Americas south of the US border consider it offensive for people here to have appropriated the term ‘American’ as if it referred solely to residents of one of the three countries in N. America. This had never occurred to me before, but the more I think about it, the more sense it makes.

I’ve known people from both Taiwan and the PRC. Both are “Chinese” in terms of ethnicity and culture, but Taiwanese also refer to themselves, in my experience, as “Taiwanese” nationality and I have never heard one of them bitch about the use of the term “Chinese” to refer to the nationality of people from the PRC (they bitch about the PRC for other reasons). Maybe I just dont know about it, but maybe its because they assume anyone with a grade-school education can understand the various meanings of the word “chinese” and dont worry about stupid disputes over minor points of terminology. Then again, they are always beating us in tests. Maybe they are just smarter than us north and south “Americans” .

The funny part is that NONE of the people who complain about this have any intention of introducing themselves as “Americans” when they go abroad. They are indignant “Americans” when they come here and peaceful “Canadians” – not associated withthe war in Iraq – in every other country in the world. You’d think they would be grateful for this handy ability to seperate themselves from our unpopular asses, but I am a self-centered United-Statesian so what do I know?