Category: cultural appropriation

Two more authors banned from Brisbane Writers Festival

July 31, 2018 • 9:15 am

Two years ago there was a big kerfuffle at the Brisbane Writers Festival (BWF) when writer Lionel Shriver gave a talk asserting the right of all authors to write about “marginalized”—or any—groups, which is a violation of many who cry “cultural appropriation” at that stuff. As I wrote at the time,

Not long ago Yasmin Abdel-Magied, a Sudanese/Australian/Muslim writer, described in the Guardian how offended she became when author Lionel Shriver, speaking at the Brisbane Writers Festival, defended the right of authors to write fiction about “marginalized” characters (i.e., people of color and others seen as oppressed). Abdel-Magied, who came off as someone unable to tolerate even the mildest contradictions of her views, stalked out of Shriver’s talk in tears, virtually accusing the speaker of perpetuating racism by appropriating other cultures in her writing.

Not long after, Shriver published her full talk online, also in the Guardian,  and it turned out to be passionate, eloquent, and thoughtful, but not at all offensive—except to the overly tender ears of someone like Abdel-Magied. Read it for yourself. But I had no idea that, as Shriver describes in a new New York Times piece, “Will the Left survive the Millennials?“, that the ostracism of Shriver extended farther than the kvetching of Abdel-Magied. It did.

The Festival authorities publicly disavowed Shriver’s speech and quickly organized a counter-conference to rebut Shriver’s assertions. That of course is fine, but was done only for Shriver’s talk, and was done post facto, as a sort of official announcement of Shriver’s demonization.  It shows that the BWF is simply caving in to those who claim that writers must not culturally appropriate.

Since then Shriver has been further demonized, and has asserted even more strongly her and others’ right to write about what they want. But now, in a further effort to censor authors, the BWF has disinvited two more writers: Germaine Greer and Bob Carr, the former premier of New South Wales.  As the Guardian reported on July 25, the issues were Carr’s views on immigration and other political issues, which apparently did not align with the BWF’s control-Leftism, and, presumably, Greer’s views on transexual women, whom she doesn’t accept as fully “woman-ish” as she does biological women. For that Greer has repeatedly been called a transphobe, and has been deplatformed several times.

Carr told Guardian Australia he was “surprised” by the festival’s response to his new political memoir, Run for Your Life.

“I thought writers’ festivals embraced controversy,” [Carr] said, adding he understood his book didn’t “accord with [the festival’s] values” particularly because it argued for lower immigration, discussed the recent “China panic” in the Australian media and “my encounters with the pro-Israel lobby”.

The festival issued a statement on Wednesday, saying: “Brisbane writers’ festival does not shy away from controversy or challenging ideas, but as all festival organisers know, it’s invariably difficult to choose between the many authors currently promoting books and the need to provide engaging choices for our audience along a curatorial theme. In trying to achieve that balance, we decided in early June not to proceed with including Bob Carr on this year’s program and MUP were advised at that time.”

Those are just disingenuous weasel words, and, in fact, lies. The Guardian‘s report continues:

The Brisbane writers’ festival acting chief executive, Ann McLean, told the Australian there were concerns Carr would not keep discussion to the topic he had been programmed to discuss.

Referring to Greer, the festival’s statement said: “Germaine had not been invited to take part in this year’s program – we’d been asked by a local bookstore to assist with the marketing of an event planned by them for within the dates of the festival. However, when the bookstore decided not to proceed we decided not to host the event alone as it was being held offsite away from the festival hub and (more importantly) it did not fit within the rest of the program.”

Referring to Greer, the festival’s statement said: “Germaine had not been invited to take part in this year’s program – we’d been asked by a local bookstore to assist with the marketing of an event planned by them for within the dates of the festival. However, when the bookstore decided not to proceed we decided not to host the event alone as it was being held offsite away from the festival hub and (more importantly) it did not fit within the rest of the program.”

Greer, who is lauded for her early feminist writing but has fallen out of favour with the left in recent years, in part for her inflammatory comments about trans women and her recent comments on rape, told the Australian: “The Brisbane writers’ festival is very hard work. So, to be uninvited to what is possibly the dreariest literary festival in the world, with zero hospitality and no fun at all, is a great relief.”

The Guardian then published a critique of the BWF’s actions written by Australian novelist Richard Flanagan, a Booker Prize winner. Click on the screenshot to read his essay:

First, Flanagan discusses the withdrawal of novelist Junot Diaz from the Sydney Writers’ festival after social media allegations that he forcibly kissed a woman “some years before” as well as that he bullied and displayed demeaning behavior towards other women. Because of these accusations on social media, MIT, where Diaz works, investigated his behavior and found no grounds to punish him. The same held true for The Boston Review, who also refrained from punishment. But the social media demonization was so loud that Diaz withdrew from both Sydney and an Australian tour. You may differ on the rightness of that, but if two investigations found him in the clear, at least the Sydney Writers’ Festival shouldn’t have issued a mealymouthed statement criticized by Flanagan:

None of this proves Diaz is a good person. But nor does it prove he is a bad one. There were allegations, and there remain allegations. Diaz may be a monster, or he may not. But the allegations remain, and they remain allegations.

So on what grounds was the Sydney Writers’ festival justified in passing judgment on a writer about things the truth of which was not established?

The festival, in its statement announcing his departure, referred to Diaz’s essay The Silence: The Legacy of Childhood Trauma published a few months earlier in which Diaz revealed that he had been raped as a child.

“In his recent New Yorker essay, Mr Diaz wrote, ‘Eventually the past finds you’. As for so many in positions of power, the moment to reckon with the consequences of past behaviour has arrived.

“Sydney Writers’ festival is a platform for the sharing of powerful stories: urgent, necessary and sometimes difficult. Such conversations have never been more timely.

“We remain committed to ensuring they occur in a supportive and safe environment for our authors and audiences alike.”

We may ask what on earth was supportive and safe for Diaz in those words? Who had the power at that moment – the writer, who had publicly confessed to being raped as a child only a few months before, or the festival?

The Wheeler Centre, meanwhile, emailed ticket holders to announce that Diaz had also cancelled a scheduled appearance in Melbourne with similarly self-serving cant:

“We always take seriously our responsibility to ensure that our platform and our spaces are safe for our guests and audiences alike,” its statement said. “The Wheeler Centre is inspired by the bravery of those sharing their stories and is committed to an accountable and responsive literary community for everyone.”

None of this is to argue for or against Junot Diaz. But is it to be the case that Australian writers’ festivals will abandon any writer once social media turns against them? And what if the mob have it wrong?

The judgments against Greer and Carr are more clearly misguided, and completely inimical to the freedom of discussion that should attend a literary festival. Flanagan is particularly acerbic in his criticism of the BWF’s disinvitation of these two. I’ll give some quotes, which I agree with completely. Note first, though, that Flanagan himself says that he “[doesn’t] overly care for the recent thoughts of either, and I am confident they would feel the same about me.” I am with Flanagan on this, too. But he adds, “And surely that is the point—that other people’s thoughts are worth listening to.”

Flanagan:

If the BWF is a writers’ festival concerned not to get publicity they are unique on this earth. And perhaps they are, because McLean, in a moment of clarifying folly, says that Bob Carr’s invitation was being withdrawn in “consideration for the brand alignment of several sponsors we are securing for the festival”.

Does this mean money chooses which writers you hear – and don’t hear – at the BWF? Exactly when did the Brisbane Writers festival become the Brisbane Corporate festival? And since when did writing in Australia answer to corporate dictate?

There are questions that should be answered by the BWF. Why were Carr and Greer blackballed? And by whom? When did the BWF stop seeing its role as supporting writers ahead of corporations? Is Greer being dropped because her views on rape are not those of the prevailing orthodoxy? Is Carr being dropped because of his views on Israel or population?

This is not an article I wanted to write. But as forums for public debate and discussion vanish throughout the country, in a week when Nine has announced the takeover of Fairfax, the importance of community events like writers’ festivals only grows in importance. They should not answer either to the mob or to corporations. They should be there for writers and writing, and all that these represent: tolerance, debate, difference.

Ponder all that we now know about how social media is manipulated by power, both national and corporate. Why, with that knowledge, would a writers’ festival ban writers because of fear of a social media backlash?

Beneath their determined, if dreary, attempts at funkiness and fashion, beyond the latest New Yorker sensation imported for our provincial enlightenment, past the wearying social media feeds with their ersatz excitement, writers’ festivals now run the risk of running with dogma, with orthodoxy, with the mob – with fear, in other words – and with money. It’s the new Victorian age wearing a hipster beard.

Indeed: I see this in my local bookstore: 57th Street Books, once a great bookstore but now largely dedicated, at least in the books they push, to Control-Leftist dogma. I of course agree largely with their position on the political spectrum, but why do they refuse to call attention to other points of view? I’ve never seen a book by a conservative advertised in their window; everything is devoted to literature by purportedly oppressed minorities. The Kingdom of Words is rapidly being balkanized. And the balkanization is largely due to social media, which functions at once to create tribalism and to demonize those whose points of view differ from yours.

I see no point in rewriting Flanagan’s eloquent words in my own style, so I’ll finish with a few other bits from his essay:

Of course, not all writers’ festivals are like this. But the large ones are increasingly becoming that way. If they were to rename themselves “Festival of Safe Ideas”, or “Celebration of Conventional Thinking”, or “Festival Approved by Twitter Bots” I wouldn’t mind. But having dropped two writers because, it would seem, of what they have written, for Brisbane to call itself a writers’ festival smacks of false advertising.

The individual examples of Shriver, Diaz, Carr and Greer, all point to a larger, more disturbing trend. Writers’ festivals, like other aspects of the literary establishment such as prizes, have in recent years become less and less about books and more and more about using their considerable institutional power to enforce the new orthodoxies, to prosecute social and political agendas through reward and punishment.

. . .McLean is quoted in the Australian as saying the BWF was “fully prepared to embrace controversy”.

What nonsense. The BWF embraces conformity, and two who threaten that conformity it punishes by banning. In doing so, it’s an enforcer, not an enabler; a punisher, and not a promoter.

. . . now, more than ever, we need places and forums where we can listen, reflect and discuss different perspectives and ideas that are not our own. This is not to suggest promoting propagandists and provocateurs to an equal footing with serious writers – but it is to argue that writing worthy of the name is not always comforting or reassuring, but that it does matter. The alternative is a Trumpian world of mindless Milo Yiannopoulos provocations on one side, and conformist clap trap on the other, both serving only to deliver power to those who would destroy us.

As this kind of banning and deplatforming spreads, nearly always promulgated by the Left, I find myself no longer surprised at the kind of censorhip and demonization practiced against those whose ideas are deemed ideologically impure. This is what religions like Islam and Catholicism do; it should not be the practice of writers and literary festivals.

Why white people aren’t allowed to sing along to rap music

July 30, 2018 • 12:45 pm

The latest invidious and Pecksniffian raid by the Culture Police is this article in HuffPo by Brandi Miller, a columnist described as “a campus minister and justice program director from the Pacific Northwest.” (I presume that the “justice” means social rather than legal justice.) Click on the screenshot if you want to read about the multifarious ways that whites are practicing cultural appropriation by trying to “access” black culture via attending concerts by black musicians.

Miller:

A few years ago, I went to a Chance the Rapper concert in Portland, Oregon. It was his biggest show of the year in one of the whitest cities on the tour. About 12,000 people packed into the stadium, most of them not black, and the majority of the room loudly sang the word “nigger” along with every track that played during the pre-concert and Chance’s performance. The majority-white audience clearly felt the freedom to abandon decorum and fully participate in blackness because they had paid $60 to be there.

. . . Now, as a black person, being in a space with 10,000 or more non-black people yelling/singing “nigger” is not a neutral experience. White people being that free is terrifying. If they feel free enough to yell the N-word as loud as they please, who knows what other things they may feel, believe or do when their inhibitions are gone.

Let’s stop right there. The word “nigger” is in many rap songs, but somehow it’s become taboo for white people to sing that particular word (this isn’t the first time that ludicrous demand has been made). But it’s part of the song. Is singing the words of a rap or hip hop song “fully participating in blackness”? How? And if it is, so what?

Look, if black people want white people to stop using that word, then they need to stop using it themselves. If they want to reserve use of that word for themselves, then they’ll have to put up with other people using it when they sing rap songs. Are we supposed to just hum when we get to that word?  And as for the experience being “terrifying” for Ms. Miller, I simply don’t believe her. She’s making that up to cast herself as a victim.

It’s always puzzled me that a word considered odious when used by whites—and it is odious—is somehow innocuous when blacks use it. As a secular Jew, I don’t call other Jews “kikes”, “sheenies” and “Hebes”; this is not customary, and it would be seen as offensive if were used to greet fellow Jews. So if black people want to call each other by a slur, and use that word in songs, I really can’t see anything wrong with singing along. After all, you’re not being a racist if you’re singing along with a lively rap song: you are appreciating the music.  This kind of Pecksniffery need not be countenanced, nor would I feel I was a racist by singing that word. I suppose it’s a good thing, then, that I’m not a fan of rap and hip hop!

I’ve about had it with this desire to build border walls around cultures. Yes, black people have been terribly oppressed historically, and still are, but they can’t demarcate their culture as their exclusive territory, by implying, as Miller does, that jazz can’t be be played by whites because “it’s participating in black culture”.  Is she aware that jazz bands were one of the earliest forms of artistic racial integration in America? Liking black music is almost always a vehicle for mutual understanding, not hatred. So when Miller says something like the following, she’s trying to cast herself simultaneously as a victim and also claim that her culture must remain off limits for that reason:

This [cultural] experience is not unique or new. It has long been the operating posture of white people, particularly at festivals and concerts, to assume that minority culture itself is up for grabs. Blackness, though, is not something that can be sojourned into for the price of concert or festival ticket. With the approach of Afropunk, Lollapalooza and Outside Lands, all featuring prominent black artists, it may be time for a refresher course on the implications of loving and mimicking black culture while still operating in rampant anti-blackness.

I find that paragraph both risible and offensive, especially the claim that white people who like black music are “operating in rampant anti-blackness.” Really—we’re all racists? But I guess Miller thinks we all are, and so her hyperbole knows no bounds:

Outside of concert arenas in the real world, black people cannot have a bbq, mow a lawn, sell water or have a pool party without a white person feeling threatened. The reality is this: White people love to participate in black culture, but seem to feel threatened by black people who they don’t pay to perform for them.

Concerts and festivals become training grounds for this sort of problematic behavior and a place to practice defensiveness. They are freewheeling spaces, where, in the busyness and hype of everything going on, cultural appropriation gets a special pass.

Here she conflates real racism—calling the cops on people just because they’re black—with cultural appropriation, which is at worst neutral and at best an appreciation of another culture.  The mutual interchange of cultures has been a good thing, and, as I’ve written before, I can think of very few examples where cultural appropriation has really been damaging. In the main, we’re all better for it. Each culture appropriates the others, and it’s simply not possible to devise a hierarchy of cultures and say that “appropriating upward” is okay but “appropriating downward” is not. Is a Chinese businessman who wears a suit appropriating Western culture? Or is that okay because Chinese are “appropriating up”?

You can’t get more divisive, or more engaged in maladaptive identity politics, than this:

Proximity to black people seems to transfer blackness for a few nights, but at the end of the day, it is the highest mark of privilege to systematically oppress people for hundreds of years and then to mimic, perform and market everything within their culture. Racial propriety is ejected in the name of letting loose and being free.

Some might try to argue that because black art is now mainstream, the culture belongs to everyone. The mainstream popularity of black art and life doesn’t transfer to the highest bidder, nor does it mean the end of oppression for black people. Black people are the authority on what should and can be done with our culture. [JAC: Really? Did Benny Goodman need permission to play jazz?] In 2018, white people cannot seem to fathom that there are limits to what they can do. They act as though, through small acts of claiming black culture, they are exempt from the harmful implications of racism on black people.

The cultural appropriation trope is simply divisive and xenophobic, and almost never a sign of racism. Yes, of course there’s still racism, and we need to root it out, but the hill you want to die on is not named “Mount Dreadlocks.”

More about cultural appropriation of cuisine

July 2, 2018 • 1:45 pm

The Washington Post has an article on cultural appropriation of food (click on screenshot to read it) in which people agonize about whether it’s okay for people of one ethnicity to sell the food of other ethnic groups, or write cookbooks about it. (The title refers to the shutting down of a Portland food cart in which two white women sold burritos from recipes they’d garnered in Mexico. They were faulted for not compensating the Mexican women whose recipes they’d adapted.)

In general I agree with author Tim Carman, who thinks that cultural appropriation of food is okay so long as a modicum of cultural sensitivity is exercised. There’s not much new here, including what Carman see as “The Problem”:

The problem, of course, is not that a white diner falls in love with an immigrant cuisine. It’s that a white person profits from the cuisine or, more troublesome for many, becomes the leading authority on it, rather than a chef born into the culture. I’m thinking specifically about chefs and/or authors such as Rick Bayless (with Mexican cuisine), Andy Ricker (with Thai food) and Fuchsia Dunlop (with Sichuan cooking). Bayless, a James Beard Award winner multiple times over, has faced the question of cultural appropriation so often, he once wondered aloud if it’s a matter of reverse racism.

I don’t even have that much of a problem. Of course white people will profit from appropriating cuisine if they produce something good, and I don’t care if they become the leading authority on it, given that most cookbooks in the U.S. are written in English. We can’t guarantee, for instance, that the leading authority on Szechuan cuisine in America happens to be from Szechuan.  But I do agree that one might ponder the origins of the food while you’re eating it, and that alone might increase cultural sensitivity. It’s hard to hate a group whose food you love.

But it cuts both ways, of course. I cannot say that it’s okay for minority groups to appropriate the food of white people, but not the other way around: that’s too much like saying that only white people can be racist because racism equals prejudice plus power. Nor do I demand that the expert on French food in, say, Hong Kong, be a French person rather than a Chinese person (there’s a fair amount of French food in Hong Kong, and widespread cultural appropriation of food). Who cares, so long as people get what they like to eat? The situation in which serving ethnic food leads to exploitation of a culture is vanishingly rare, and it seems to me that it enriches every culture to adopt the food of others.

One disturbing part of the Post article is this:

One writer has stated, flat out, that “Portland has an appropriation problem,” going on to explain (the boldface emphasis is the writer’s):

Because of Portland’s underlying racism, the people who rightly own these traditions and cultures that exist are already treated poorly. These appropriating businesses are erasing and exploiting their already marginalized identities for the purpose of profit and praise.

Someone in the City of Roses has even created a Google doc, listing the white-owned restaurants that have appropriated cuisines outside their own culture. For each entry, the document suggests alternative restaurants owned by people of color. One “Appropriative Business” is Voodoo Doughnut, the small doughnut chain accused of profiting off a religion thought to combine African, Catholic and Native American traditions.

The Google document seems to have vanished, but it sounds pretty ridiculous. And I’ve been to Voodoo Doughnuts in Portland, which makes an awesome bacon/maple donut. Those who practice Voodoo come from several cultures and lands; it’s not an ethnicity but, more or less, a form of quasi-religious woo. I have no problem with the name, but I do have a problem with those Leisure Fascists and Culinary Pecksniffs who spend their time policing places like this.

A maple bacon donut from Voodoo Donuts in The People’s Republic of Portland

 

The Southern Poverty Law Center goes after cultural appropriation

May 7, 2018 • 11:00 am

How far the mighty have fallen, and how well the termites have dined! I am, of course, referring to the odious Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), once an important voice against racism and a major player in dismantling it in America. With tons of money but not so much work to do these days, they’ve taken on a distinct Authoritarian Leftist cast, making lists of “anti-Muslim extremists” that include Muslim reformers like Maajid Nawaz and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. (The SPLC quietly took down that list when Nawaz, a Muslim, threatened to sue.)

They also stash their millions of saved bucks in offshore bank accounts, which is legal but sleazy. You can see my posts on the SPLC here.

But now it’s not enough for the SPLC to make little lists of “Muslim haters”, for they’ve decided to start tut-tutting about cultural appropriation. Get a load of their recent tweet and the website they run:

I don’t think anybody who celebrates Cinco de Mayo thinks or intends for their celebrations to encapsulate “all of Mexican culture.” Yes. there can be stereotypes, and I deplore those, but I don’t know who has the right to distinguish between good or bad cultural appropriation.

If you go to the page they link to at “tolerance.org,” you find first that this is a project of the SPLC, though it’s in small print at the bottom of the page. Then you get a snooty little lecture about cultural tolerance that touts one incident of Mexico-bashing (an unwise attempt by Anglo students at a California high school to exacerbate tensions with Mexicans by wearing USA-flag teeshirts on Cinco de Mayo), but that also gives us the usual but bogus definition of cultural appropriation as “borrowing + power” (my emphasis):

Most of the festivities surrounding Cinco de Mayo in the United States are textbook examples of cultural appropriation, relegating the vast history and culture of Mexican people to a few novelty items. Mexican culture cannot be reduced to tacos, oversized sombreros and piñatas.

Cultural appropriation occurs when a person or other entity—a sports franchise, for example—claims as their own an aspect of a culture that does not belong to them. Doing so can, knowingly or unknowingly, deny the authenticity of that culture, particularly if it belongs to a marginalized group, and it can send harmful messages rooted in misinformation, prejudice and stereotypes.

Well, the incident the SPLC describes is manifestly not cultural appropriation but instead simple bias against Mexicans, despite the SPLC saying it’s an “example that shows how far the celebration of Cinco de Mayo has come from its original purpose of honoring Mexicans.” And yes, there can be cultural appropriation that is bigoted and harmful, but the Cinco de Mayo celebrations by non-Mexicans rarely cross that line. And why is the SPLC lecturing us on these things? It’s a task far removed from what they used to be good at.

And there’s a lot of stuff like this, too, which is meant to apply not to colleges, but to secondary schools:Should the SPLC be lecturing schools on the urgency of amplifying LGBTQ Asian identities in the classroom, and constantly? I don’t think so.

If you want to donate to an organization fighting for civil rights, I’d suggest the ACLU, not the SPLC. I wouldn’t give a penny to that offshore-cash-stashing pack of Pecksniffs.

h/t: John B.

The Cinco de Mayo “cultural appropriation” warnings begin

May 5, 2018 • 10:45 am

At many sites, including the Spokane (Washington state) newspaper The Spokesman Review, there are reports that a Vice President of Gonzaga University (a Jesuit school in Spokane) sent out an email to students warning them against cultural appropriation and inappropriate celebration on Cinco de Mayo (today), a day that often serving as an excuse for Mexican-themed parties with boozing. Here’s the VP’s email, which appears at Campus Reform:

The Unity Multicultural Center is in fact a Gonzaga University organization. On their Facebook page cited by Vice President Garbuio, you’ll find this list of dictates, including the last one suggesting donations to a social-justice organization. Your’e also supposed to call out your friends if they don’t celebrate with proper respect:

More from the Spokesman:

After Ben McDonald, a Gonzaga student, penned a story about the email for Red Alert Politics, a horde of other popular conservative websites, including the Daily Wire, followed suit.

“Colleges have become havens for the easily offended on campuses across the nation to complain about people enjoying themselves as being ‘offensive to their culture,’ ” McDonald wrote. “Whether it was Yale students getting offended for Halloween costumes or Pitzer College students saying that hoop earrings are racist, Gonzaga is just the next addition to the many other universities who have caved in the face of ‘cultural appropriation.’ ”

Biggs Garbuio told The Spokesman-Review she was surprised to see so many websites sound off on her email. She said she wrote a similar email a year ago and annually sends emails during Halloween about avoiding racially insensitive costumes.

“The intent was purely to educate the students on the history of Cinco de Mayo,” she said. [JAC: No it wasn’t; it was mainly to control their behavior.]

After seeing some schools across the country dealing with the backlash of cultural appropriation in party settings, Biggs Garbuio said she wanted to get ahead of the issue.

Now don’t get me wrong.  There are ways to celebrate the date that are inappropriate and offensive, at least to me: these include wearing fake mustaches or anything that mocks Mexico or Mexicans. Serapes and sombreros are a judgement call; I sure as hell wouldn’t wear one, but you can wear them without the intent of making fun of Mexicans. They are, after all, clothing worn by some Mexicans, and wearing them might be a celebratory rather than a denigrating move, like wearing green on St. Patrick’s day. (Believe me, lots of Chicago-ans without Irish ancestry wear green top hats and bow ties on St. Paddy’s Day—clothing not even worn by the Irish.)

What I object to is that a university takes it upon itself to give students cultural lessons, and even suggest donating to immigrants’ right organizations. That’s something a good liberal would do anyway, but it’s not a college’s function to police your behavior in this way. Let the students learn for themselves if they overstep boundaries, and where those boundaries lie and why.

This all reminds me of Erika Christakis’s response at Yale to an email from the Intercultural Affairs Committee telling students to dress in non-offensive ways on Halloween. Christakis, a housemaster at the university, wrote students an email saying that perhaps they themselves should decide appropriate dress rather than be dictated to by others. Well, you know what happened to her: she was demonized and ultimately hounded out of her job and Yale itself. What happened to her was unconscionable. So let me play Christakis to Gonzaga: Vice President Biggs Garbuio, stop telling students what “cultural appropriation” is and how to behave properly. Don’t police them; let them learn for themselves.

When I was in India at Christmas, there were many parties at which Hindu citizens celebrated the holiday by drinking and dancing. I even met a Santa Claus who was most likely not a Christian but a Hindu (see here). Would Gonzaga write a note to Hindu students, telling them to knock off the revelries at Christmas because, after all, it is a religious holiday celebrating an event sacred to Christians? I doubt it.

For other Pecksniffian policing of the holiday, see here, here, and here.

The Chinese are proud of the cultural appropriation of the qipao; liberal media criticize cyberbullying of its American wearer

May 3, 2018 • 1:00 pm

Amazingly, pushback in the liberal U.S. media has begun against the social-media nastiness heaped on Utah teenager Keziah Daum for wearing a qipao, a form-fitting Chinese dress, to her senior prom (see here and here). Although of course the New York Times won’t editorialize against cultural appropriation, they did publish this article, reporting the furor in the U.S. But that furor didn’t take place in China, as the Chinese were either baffled by the reaction on American social media or were proud of Daum for appropriating “their” culture. (It’s likely that the qipao was in fact influenced by Western fashion.) Click on the article below to see what the Times said:

An excerpt:

When the furor reached Asia, though, many seemed to be scratching their heads. Far from being critical of Ms. Daum, who is not Chinese, many people in mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan proclaimed her choice of the traditional high-necked dress as a victory for Chinese culture.

“I am very proud to have our culture recognized by people in other countries,” said someone called Snail Trail, commenting on a post of the Utah episode by a popular account on WeChat, the messaging and social media platform, that had been read more than 100,000 times.

“It’s ridiculous to criticize this as cultural appropriation,” Zhou Yijun, a Hong Kong-based cultural commentator, said in a telephone interview. “From the perspective of a Chinese person, if a foreign woman wears a qipao and thinks she looks pretty, then why shouldn’t she wear it?”

If anything, the uproar surrounding Ms. Daum’s dress prompted many Chinese to reflect on examples of cultural appropriation in their own country.

 

h/t: Bill, Greg Mayer

More on “cultural appropriation” of the Chinese dress

May 2, 2018 • 11:18 am

Yesterday I reported on the fracas about a Caucasian woman from Utah, Keziah Daum, who wore a qipao (also called a “cheongsam”), a form-fitting Chinese-style dress, to her senior prom. She found the dress in a vintage clothing store and admired it. For this gross breach of propriety, she was called out by many people for “cultural appropriation.” First, here’s the dress on Ms. Daum:

The qipao is a special dress, one invented in Shanghai in the 1920s and worn by socialites of the upper class. Further, I didn’t think of the possibility that its form-fitting nature may actually have been influenced by Western styles, which becomes more plausible if you read about its origins and alterations (from Wikipedia):

The original qipao was wide and loose. It covered most of the woman’s body, revealing only the head, hands, and the tips of the toes. The baggy nature of the clothing also served to conceal the figure of the wearer regardless of age. With time, though, the qipao were tailored to become more form fitting and revealing.

The modern version, which is now recognized popularly in China as the “standard” qipao, was first developed in Shanghai in the 1920s, partly under the influence of Beijing styles. The streamlined and body-hugging cut of the modern cheongsam was popularized by the socialite and one-time First Lady of China Madame Wellington Koo. Voted several times by Vogue into its lists of the world’s best-dressed women, Madame Wellington Koo was much admired for her adaptations of the traditional Manchu fashion, which she wore with lace trousers and jade necklaces. Cheongsam dresses at the time had been decorously slit a few inches up the sides, but Madame Koo slashed hers to the knee, ‘with lace pantelettes just visible to the ankle’. Unlike other Asian socialites, Madame Koo also insisted on local Chinese silks, which she thought were of superior quality.

People eagerly sought a more modernized style of dress and transformed the old qipao to suit their tastes. Slender and form fitting with a high cut, it had great differences from the traditional qipao. It was high-class courtesans and celebrities in the city that would make these redesigned tight fitting qipao popular at that time. In Shanghai it was first known as zansae or “long dress” (長衫—Mandarin Chinese: chángshān; Shanghainese: zansae; Cantonese: chèuhngsāam), and it is this name that survives in English as the “cheongsam”.

If you click the link on Madame Wellington Koo above, you’ll learn that she served as China’s nominal first lady for a year, but was also an international socialite, living in Paris and New York.  (Her Chinese name was Oei Hui-lan, 黃蕙蘭.) She also frequently wore Western clothes (see photo below), but I suppose nobody accused her of cultural appropriation. Well, that wasn’t in vogue back then (though Ms. Koo was in Vogue as a “style icon”), but my point is that it’s certainly plausible that Koo changed the baggier dress to a form-fitting style because she was influenced by Western dresses. In that case the qipao is itself a form of cultural appropriation that’s been “reverse appropriated.”

US ambassador Averell Harriman (C) greeting people with Mrs. Wellington Koo (L) during a party at the US Embassy in London. January 01, 1946

As for Chinese people wearing jeans, having Western names, and wearing Western suits, a new piece in the Independent explains why that’s okay (click on screenshot):

The author is Eliza Anyangwe, described on YouTube a “Cameroon-born, London-based freelance journalist and founder of The Nzinga Effect.com, a platform to celebrate African women’s stories. She naturalised in Britain but her parents are South African residents, living and working here. She is an example of a phenomena that is called the third culture children, who can’t lay claim to one culture because they are constantly on the move. Eliza joins us in the studio to tell us more about the Third culture Movement.” (my emphasis).  In the video she says that the “third culture” people float between several different cultures, which means they can appropriate elements of any culture. Isn’t that convenient? If I have genes from Ireland, as I might, is it okay if I wear green on St. Patrick’s Day?

As you can tell from Anyangwe’s title, she takes an extreme position—so extreme that she sees wearing a qipao as an element of systemic oppression practiced by whites. But Chinese people wearing suits aren’t oppressing Westerners.  Why? Anywangwe tells us (my emphasis):

Daum does not deserve online abuse, no one does, but the debate her prom pictures have prompted is justified. Cultural appropriation is about power, and to many she’s the embodiment of a system that empowers white people to take whatever they want, go wherever they want and be able to fall back on: “Well, I didn’t mean any harm.”

Yes, the qipao can probably be acquired fairly cheaply anywhere in the world where there’s a Chinese store, and in the same way that jeans are part of US cultural imperialism, there are certainly some in China who would see Daum’s sartorial choice as an extension of Chinese soft power – but whichever way you look at it, it wasn’t “just a dress”.

. . . Of course, it’s not just white people who are capable of appropriation (black people wearing bindis to music festivals has always irked me) – but it is unfair, enraging and a reflection of more deeply rooted inequalities when young people from various ethnic minorities are ridiculed for wearing their traditional dress; when they fight their afro hair into submission or dream of surgery on their eyelids, all so that they fit a white ideal.

Well, there you have it. The adoption of Western clothes by Chinese is the U.S.’s fault—cultural imperialism! But how does that work? Did Levi Strauss force the Chinese to wear their gear? I doubt it. Rather, the Chinese like jeans, either for their comfort or as an appropriation of Western style. Whatever the reason, it’s cultural appropriation—but not to Anyangwe. As the saying goes, “When WE do it, it’s okay!”  Either that or “We were forced to do it by those Western imperialists.”  Her last sentence is simply window-dressing, for the kinds of “black cultural appropriation” she mentions can be imputed to white imperialism.

How ludicrous this is! Are Asians oppressed in the U.S.? And is the qipao an item of clothing ever worn by oppressed Chinese? The answer to both questions is “no.” Anyangwe’s rationale is the same as the rationale for saying that blacks and Hispanics can’t be racist, because racism supposedly equals oppression plus power. To Anyangwe, cultural appropriation equals borrowing plus power. In both cases the “power” part has been added to excuse one group from what they impute to other groups as bigoted behavior. But wearing a qipao is not bigotry—it’s an expression of admiration for a dress style. As Seth Andrews has said, Anyangwe and the other critics of Daum’s dress are practicing “recreational outrage” (something I’ve called “leisure fascism”, but I like Seth’s term better). While some forms of cultural appropriation are worthy of being called out, this isn’t one of them.

For a palliative to the rant of Ms. Anyangwe, read the article below, also in The Independent, by Kassie Draven (click screenshot), who identifies herself as “Samoan, and part German, Dutch and British.”

An excerpt:

The qipao itself was culturally appropriated from Western figure-hugging dress designs as early as the 1920s, and was intended to be a luxurious evening gown. Did Keziah not wear it for its intended purpose? If so, how was she being in any way, shape or form disrespectful?

Personally, I think it’s deeply conservative to tell people what to wear, let alone what they can and can’t enjoy, based on their race or outward appearance. As someone who wants equality for all and for racism to end, I find it worrying to hear people discouraging the mixing and appreciation of other cultures. That mixing is actually the driving force towards acceptance and positive anti-racist change.

No culture is ‘pure’, as in completely removed from influences of other cultures around it. Humans have culturally appropriated ideas from each other since time immemorial. We in the West scoff our Pop Tarts (surely descended from the Cornish pasty? Don’t quote me on that!), use maths (which Arabs developed from the ideas of the ancient Greeks and Indians) and enjoy the comfort of electricity (which many different people from all backgrounds contributed towards harnessing) as we tap away on Twitter, quick to forget that what makes us great isn’t necessarily what makes us different; it’s the things we learn and share among each other despite being different.

In other words, what makes us great is cultural appropriation. To oppose it would be madness.

Indeed! Although, as I’ve said, some acts of “cultural borrowing” are unsavory, in general it’s not only harmless but salubrious. Opposing things like eating ethnic food or wearing ethnic garb is madness, and Anyangwe is truly mad—in both senses of the term. Those senses, of course, tend to go together.