Category: cultural appropriation

U. Mass. Amherst creates “scream meter” to measure levels of offensiveness of Halloween costumes

October 25, 2016 • 10:00 am

This is how far it’s gone. As Business Insider and Campus Reform report, the Halloween Costume Police have gotten out of hand, and of course it’s at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where they simply cannot let people be adults and make their own decisions. Both articles appear to be the same, so I’ll just reproduce some of the text and the S.C.R.E.A.M. meter:

The University of Massachusetts, Amherst is posting “cultural appropriation” posters in each of the residence halls on campus featuring a detailed “racism evaluation and assessment meter.”

The initiative is being spearheaded by the Center for Women and Community, the Center for Multicultural Advancement and Student Success, and the campus’ diversity office, the Stonewall Center.

“Don’t be an asshole,” one display urges students, providing several leaflets to help them understand the effects of cultural appropriation.

The board also includes a poster to help measure the “threat level” of a potential costume using what it calls the “Simple Costume Racism Evaluation and Assessment Meter” (S.C.R.E.A.M.) which poses several costume-related questions, the answers to which take one to various points on a “threat meter” that ranges from green (low) to red (severe).

If one intends to represent a person on Halloween, the only way to get a “green” threat rating is for the person to be of one’s own race. If one represents a person of another race, the “threat level” increases roughly in conjunction with the amount of makeup that one intends to use.

Even representing a “thing/idea” is dangerous, though, the flyer says, warning against costumes that can only be understood in the context of “controversial current events or historically accepted cliches,” particularly if “these events or cliches relate to a person or people not of your race.”

But if “race” is a social construct, what, exactly, do they mean by “people not of your race”? Are Hispanics of a different race from Native Americans, or Caucasians?  If “race” means “ethnic group”, is it now not okay (as it used to be) to “punch up”, so that a black can’t dress as Batman, or an Asian as the Wizard of Oz’s Scarecrow? But the “offense meter” below indicates that you can’t wear costumes representing anyone “less powerful” or “more socially marginalized” than yourself, so one would have to have some hierarchy of oppression laid out to decide if your costume was inappropriate. As we know, the hierarchy of oppression is constantly under revision.

Here’s the S.C.R.E.A.M. meter, which you can enlarge and read for yourself.

umassscream

More from Business Insider:

Another display on a different bulletin board asserts that “cultural appropriation is an act of privilege, and leads to offensive, inaccurate, and stereotypical portrayals of other people’s culture.”

It then goes on to outline steps that students can take to inform their peers if a costume may be considered inappropriate or offensive, using Native American costumes as the prime example.

“No, it’s cool, it’s not like your ancestors killed them all or anything,” reads one flyer alongside a cartoon of two white women in headdresses. “Hypersexualized racism…is still racism,” states another flyer featuring pictures of women dressed in “sexy Indian” costumes.

Here are those:

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To be fair, there is one poster—just one—that says this:

“It’s not fair to ask any culture to freeze itself in time and live as though they were a museum diorama,” one poster quotes author Susan Scafidi. “Cultural appropriation can sometimes be the savior of a cultural product that has faded away.”

Indeed, and that undercuts much of the other messages, for many of the cultural products that have largely faded away, like Native American costumes or kimonos, are being admired, not mocked, by many kids who wear them. Further, cultural appropriation can not only preserve disappearing cultural elements, but can express admiration for the admirable parts of other cultures. What is good about America is how the various people who immigrated here have cross-pollinated each other’s cultures, something that is of course not unique to our country but especially noticeable here. So when someone claims “offense” if you’ve culturally appropriated something you like—perhaps because you don’t have a detailed awareness of what that culture has suffered—my response would be “go away.”

Now I’m not saying that no costumes are offensive, for some surely are. Blackface, for example, has bad historical connections with racism. What I dislike about these campus-wide efforts is the policing involved: one group takes it upon itself to arbitrate or censor the costumes of everyone else. It’s simply leisure fascism, and students, who after all are adults living in this world, can learn these lessons on their own—the process is called “growing up”—rather than being subject to arrogant and hectoring propagandizing by student Pecksniffs who flaunt their moral purity.

So although some Asians claim that they are a marginalized and oppressed group in the U.S., I’d have no patience for someone calling out a little girl, or a student, wearing a Princess Mononoke costume. We don’t have to accept (as U. Mass. apparently has) the dicta of groups like the Amherst Leisure Police, who succeed only out of liberal’s desperate fear of being called racists.

h/t: G. B. James

Musical “Aida” canceled because racial balance of cast not achievable

October 8, 2016 • 9:15 am
No, not the opera Aida, but a musical by Tim Rice and Elton John based on Verdi’s masterpiece. The reporting on this incident at the University of Bristol, by the Torygraph, is a bit confusing, but apparently the musical was cancelled over a student protest about “cultural appropriation”.  It was, though, justa threatened appropriation: the possibility that, due to a shortage of students of color, white students would have to play the role of blacks and Nubians. And that shortage, so the Torygraph says, caused the play’s cancellation:

It is understood that there were protests amid fears that white students would be cast as leads and expected to portray Ancient Egyptians and slaves.

The musical, by Tim Rice and Elton John, is based on Verdi’s opera of the same name. It centres around an Ethiopian princess, Aida, who is held prisoner in Egypt, where she serves as a slave but falls in love with an Egyptian general.

One student commented: “White washing still exists, it’s been done enough in Hollywood, look at Liz Taylor in Cleopatra.”

Here’s the “explanation” by the theater group:

. . .  In its statement, the theatre said: “It is with great sadness that we are announcing the cancellation of Aida in this year’s MTB show calendar.

“This show that was voted in by our members has since caused controversy in terms of racial diversity.

“It is a great shame that we have had to cancel this show as, of course, we would not want to cause offence in any way, and that was certainly never our intention. Our intention was to tell this story, one which surely is better heard than not performed at all.”

Now clearly theaters should strive for racial diversity within the pool of qualified actors, and the time has long gone when actors must play “race-appropriate” characters. After all, look at the success of “Hamilton” on broadway, with many of America’s founding fathers played by people of color. We go to plays, after all, to suspend disbelief. But it’s unconscionable to simply cancel a play because, due to lack of actors, you can’t find enough people of color to play Nubians and slaves.

Once again, we see people deprived of a good artistic experience because of the college Offense Culture. Bristol University and its theater department should be ashamed of themselves.

“We would not want to cause offence in any way”: the touchstone of censorship in our age.

Adam Kirsch on writing and cultural appropriation

October 5, 2016 • 10:00 am

Just to show how ridiculous is the claim that writers should generally avoid producing fiction about “marginalized groups” unless they belong to those groups (see here, here and here re the Lionel Shriver affair), have a butcher’s at a new kerfuffle: that involving “Elena Ferrante,” an Italian author of wildly popular novels, especially the “Neapolitan Novels”, a series of four books about two poor girls from Naples. Here’s the last one of them:

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Ferrante was known to be a pseudonym, but had closely guarded her (or his) real identity for years, despite many speculations.  Some people said that only a woman who wrote those books, and a woman who, like the protagonists, had known deep privation. Others, presumably sexist, said that no woman could be capable of writing such books, and even though I haven’t read them I find such a claim extraordinarily stupid in light of the history of wonderful novels written by women. But the going idea seemed to be that “Ferrante” must have had some of the experiences of poverty of her subjects, and have lived in Naples.

The falsity of that view has now been revealed in an article by Claudio Gatti in the New York Review of Books, showing with little doubt that “Elena Ferrante” is neither from Naples nor was poor: she is a translator from Rome named Anita Raja. This has people up in arms, as many of them wanted “Ferrante’s” identity to remain secret.

But the main lesson is that one can write convincingly about other’s lives without having lived them, and this is the point made by Adam Kirsch in a piece in Monday’s New York Times, “Elena Ferrante and the power of appropriation.” For what we had was something that Lionel Shriver’s critics said was not possible, an empathic and convincing portrayal of people completely unlike the author. If you think about it, though, you’ll realize that the combination of an author’s imagination with her observation and research on another group’s life—or another person’s life—can produce compelling fiction.

No, the two Neopolitan girls weren’t black or Muslim, but they were poor, something that Raja doesn’t seem to have experienced. Indeed, one reason Gatti revealed Raja’s identity was that he was fed up with the lies that Raja apparently promulgated when feeding her readers a few crumbs of biographical information, crumbs meant to suggest that she had indeed had a life that gave her credibility to write about poor girls from Naples.

From the BBC:

So why did Gatti do it? He says Ferrante lied in her journalistic writing in theFrantumaglia – a book of essays first published in Italy in 2003, which will be released in English with new material next month. Ferrante put it together after her Italian co-publisher, Sandra Ozzola, suggested she provide her readers with a few autobiographical details in the form of non-fiction articles.

Gatti takes issue with Ferrante writing that her mother is a seamstress, that she has three sisters and grew up in Naples. He accuses her of inventing a backstory to provide, “crumbs of information seemed designed to satisfy her readers’ appetite for a personal story that might relate to the Neapolitan setting of the novels themselves.”

He told the BBC’s Today programme, “She lied about her personal life. I don’t like lies, and I decided to expose them.”

Ferrante’s attitude toward lying also angered him – she has previously quoted Italo Calvino, the most translated Italian writer before herself, who once said to an interviewer: “Ask me what you want to know, but I won’t tell you the truth, of that you can be sure.”

Regardless of Gatti’s motivations, though, Kirsch says what’s important: that accusations of “cultural appropriation” in literature are largely nonstarters. Kirsch:

But there are also good reasons to welcome the revelations about Ms. Ferrante. In recent weeks, the literary world has been at war over the idea of cultural appropriation — whether a writer has the right to tell stories about people unlike herself. Lionel Shriver’s speech at the Brisbane Writers’ Festival said yes; many critics of that speech said no. But now it appears that one of the world’s best-loved writers is actually a sterling example of the power of appropriation.

For it turns out that in telling the story of poor Neapolitan girls like Lina and Elena, Ms. Raja was claiming the right to imagine the lives of people quite unlike herself. In doing so, she was able to write books in which millions of people found themselves reflected — books about feminism and patriarchy, poverty and violence, education and ambition.

This is the paradox of literature, which is also the glory of humanism: the idea that nothing human is alien to any of us, that we all have the power to imagine our way into one another’s lives. If the exposure of Elena Ferrante reminds us of that truth, which today we are too inclined to forget, perhaps it will turn out to be justified.

Combine that with the “truth” that even members of oppressed groups are not identical to one another, which should be obvious, and you come up with the argument that although someone who has lived in a certain way may be able to write about that way with greater accuracy, that doesn’t mean that the resulting fiction is more compelling, or has the emotional resonance with readers that passes for “truth in literature.”