I really dislike this concept. Cultures mixed and borrowed from each other since forever. To clamp together awefulness like blackface with the wearing of a kimono as a costume is just crazy.
Men writing women characters (and vice versa) have created wonderful representations that echoed in positive ways with countless people.
The Japanese culture 'appropriated' alot from the Chinese culture and made it their own. We all enjoy this diversity, there's nothing wrong with that.
Why use such an umbrella term when the negative instances are usually done with obvious malice?
Why should people stifle their creativity because they are influenced by 'not their' culture.
I wish people would stop using this term, and just call out people bent on intending harm, and not just for being insensitive to some made up norm.
With that said, a lot of the problem stems from the fact that a popular author from the "outside" culture is going to have a lot more influence on what others in the outside culture believe/understand about the "inside" culture.
As an example from my community, just about every movie written about transgender people by a cisgender person spends a lot of time showing the subject putting on makeup or wearing heels, implying that the essence of what it means to be a trans woman is wearing makeup or high heeled shoes... But it isn't the case.
That would almost be ok, but the popular movie is going to get a lot more airtime than an indie movie made by a trans person which shows what our real lives are like. In fact, that movie may not get made at all.
So it's worse having the popular movie out there, making money off of our lives, but misrepresenting them at the same time. (And this is all assuming that no harm was intended... it's still harmful, and it happens all the time.)
Popular movies are popular because they have been optimized for popularity. It's easier to optimize for popularity if one isn't constrained by the burden of being accurate.
Interestingly, this suggests that accurate portrayals of marginalized group X probably do exist, for most values of X. But their accuracy prevents them from becoming popular, so most people in the complement of X are either unaware these portrayals exist, or aren't interested in them. Popularity partly involves pandering to confirmation bias, so portrayals of X that land too far outside X[complement]'s biases are in danger of being dead on arrival in terms of popularity.
There also seems to be some evidence we can overcome this in the long run through a kind of successive approximation. Portrayals of (for example) homosexuality are more accurate today than they were two generations ago, partly because each successive popular portrayal built on the increasing accuracy of the previous one.
In time, we may see the same thing happen here, though that may come as small comfort to the folks who are living through the transition.
Hollywood/mainstream scripts very rarely survive the gauntlet of director, producers, funders, product placement "partners", and studio executives entirely unchanged. All it takes is one person in the chain saying "this doesn't seem relatable to the American public" to force in stereotypes. The bigger problem is most of those aforementioned individuals are from a rather homogenous group so their "horizons" aren't exactly very broad and they are the ones who control the purse strings.
An indie film about transgender people is far more likely to be representative of reality regardless of who writes the script because those films often self select for funding that doesn't come with the same kind of strings attached.
(somewhere I once ran across a discussion of "Starship Troopers" the book vs. "Starship Troopers" the movie, complete with a matrix of reactions depending upon how ironically one thought the ideas presented in each should be taken)
All films' portrayal of anything is crap when it's something familiar to you. (Or crucially, I suppose, more familiar to you the viewer than to those responsible.)
Though I think it should bear an asterisk: the stakes are higher for some people. Based on my experience, I think movies about musicians are often pretty stilted, but that kind of thing can be brushed off a little easier for me than misrepresenting a person's innate identity can be for them (as in the parent comment's position). And then—enter the always waiting host of philosophical questions.
edit: Felt like adding a little to my comment. I've always figured art was as much an exploration as an expression. I'm not sure anyone should be judged for a single work in that case—but there are abundant nuances to that kind of statement so don't hold it against me.s
We live in the age of YouTube and almost unlimited access.
Any group can get together, make a film, put it up on YouTube, etc.
The thing is, membership in a group is no longer sacrosanct. Ask all the women who opposed men entering their space by being trans. Further, freedom of speech guarantees you can never have a monopoly or even majority of the portrayal of anything.
You do have some options though. Someone says “oh, I saw X movie, I know all about you”. Better than saying “that movie sucks” is “you really should check out Y. They really went out of their way to get it right”.
Black, Hispanic, etc portrayals have all gone through “lazy, stupid, subservient, gangster, normal guy in sweater with honest job, formerly criminal, now reformed older wiser person” till finally successfull, intelligent maybe lawyer, doctor, whatever person who is X first, ethnic second.
Having a few films at the ready is the best but most expensive solution I suspect.
Blackface (and minstrelsy) wasn't done with "obvious malice", and was the foundation for virtually all world pop music (not directly from a drinking song Irish/English folk tradition) and dance. It was done as an expression and fantasy about what black American lives were like, painting us as the most interesting, fun, crafty people in the world. It also depicted us as stupid and lazy, because that was how we were seen as white-consensus fact; not out of any (additional) malice, other than the assumption that black peoples' place in US society was a natural and logical order of things.
Blackface is only incidentally poison, because white depictions of black people were harmonious with white treatment of black people. Any condemnation of minstrelsy in my opinion should cover most current popular music and dance. From my perspective, if blackface is "obviously malicious", so is Britney Spears and Lady Gaga.
So I wonder how you can so confidently draw the line there, without being suspicious at all (in fact finding the thought distasteful) that majority interpretations of other marginalized groups would normally end up reinforcing that marginalization?
I do feel that cultural appropriation of black Americans is such a deeply baked part of US culture, and by extension US-imitating world culture, over the past 200 years, that insisting that people stop is not a thing that is possible, and may not even be justifiable. Aping a caricature of black American culture is as intrinsic to most non-black people as actual black culture is to black people. You would think there were more than 40 million of us around: there are far more people pretending to be us at any moment than actually being us. Things that we do are seized upon so quickly that non-black sales determine black distribution.
> just call out people bent on intending harm
You can't actually believe this. This is about harm prevention, not punishment. I don't think it's my job to judge intention.
The obvious problem I see with blackface, is the inherent condescendence and mockery in it. When you say someone is stupid and lazy, it's pretty clear it's not intended as a complement. It's deragatory.
In this sense I find it "intending to do harm".
The intention is to peripitate a deragatory notion about an entire population. I can't see a way this is painted as positive. Even if it is accompanied by 'compliments' like crafty and fun.
It's obvious to the performer and crowd that lazy and stupid is morally bad (according to their moral code) so the negativity is not incidental as you say.
> You can't actually believe this. This is about harm prevention, not punishment. I don't think it's my job to judge intention
First, I see calling out as a way to prevent harm. Because it sets the norm that this 'bad thing' is bad.
Regarding intention, I may have miswrote. Like in the example above, it's clear that the blackface performance was making negative claims about a whole population. I say clear, because the participating parties agree that lazy and stupid are morally bad. It's easy to test. call them lazy and stupid and see how they react.
I also think it follows that painting a marginalized population as morally bad is marginalizing. Not the fact that it is white performers in black face.
I don't really understand how the actual act of appropriation is bad in it self. As you say, black American culture is a major part of American culture. Taking this sentence alone, it's hard to understand how that is a bad thing.
The bad thing, is the social 'revenue' isn't collected by originators. Again, the problem is not appropriation, it's the dissonance between the value generated by black American culture and the black American economic and social status.
I hope I was clearer now. English is not my first language so be gentle :)
The author of this essay does ultimately come to the conclusion that writers should be willing to write from perspectives outside their own, and lists a number of positive examples of such writing.
The question he seems to be wrestling with is where the boundary is in his own mind between doing so for right or wrong reasons. It is not as obvious as blatant ill-intent: the desires for fame and commercial success, while perfectly reasonable on their own and necessary for a writer who makes a living from their craft, could blind the author to ways in which they fail to do justice to the experience of others.
My guess though is that for most authors the problems of ill-intent are rare, and that a failure of execution is far more likely the real issue. Writing believable characters of any stripe is tough work.
I think this article is a lot more nuanced than you give it credit for. In talking about blackface alone, the author talks about Al Jolson but also John Howard Griffin and his book "Black Like Me". Very, very different!
It feels like you're talking about the views of cultural appropriation you bring to the table, but you aren't addressing "American Dirt" and the money that went into that book and the inaccuracies that reside in it* -- I think Russo treated this point quite lightly and quite deeply at the same time -- nor are you addressing the very real questions writers themselves have about representation, mis-steps, and the place of "own voices".
If you hang out with writers, for instance, you will find that many are concerned with how to 1) make their characters reflect the world they live in, which does have people from many ethnic/racial/religious/socioeconomic/gender backgrounds, and yet 2) write that diversity in a way that isn't fake, isn't offensive, isn't distracting for stupid reasons, etc. That's why this article was a good read. If you wanted to write a scene in which your black female main character was taking care of her hair before she goes to bed... would you know how? How would you learn? Would you understand the nuances?
There's a reason that the scene where Annalise Keating removes her wig in How to Get Away With Murder happened in a show conceived of and run by a black woman. I don't think most white guys know the first thing about Black women's hair! And the question there is not about appropriation, it's about getting the details of a character and scene right. If you were driven to write the story of your black woman fighter pilot or whatever and a Black woman training at Vance Air Force Base read it, 'Would [your character] feel real to them? Or would they laugh her out of the [plane], and [you] along with her? Because, come on. Who is this middle-aged American writer who clearly never spent a minute in a[n air force base], or in a [fighter pilot's seat], or probably even [being a Black woman]? What gives him the right to intrude so arrogantly into our lives? Why doesn’t he understand that [her] story simply isn’t his to tell?' And are those the right questions?
* there are some poignant and pointed articles about American Dirt as well as some hilarious twitter takedowns making fun of the inaccurate Spanglish and the 'machete' in the book that's very small and folds like a penknife...
Tons of my favorite media from Japan are a result of the Japanese blatantly ripping off other cultures, and it's wonderful. All of the scolds talking about "cultural appropriation" and the like would effectively condemn Dynasty Warriors, Castlevania, Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, and so much more
I've always found it a funny thing that for me, the thing that got me really interested in Chinese history where I never had interest before was playing the Dynasty Warriors series. I ended up buying the Romance of the Three Kingdoms and a book on Chinese history as a result. It opened my mind to a whole new part of the world. Also Bioware's Jade Empire deserves a mention. It'd be a shame to imagine people shying away from making art that draws from other cultures.
The intensity of cultural appropriation claims is proportional to the amount of plausible deniability in currency, which is most American culture at this point. We can thank the faux-prima facie legalism of American ethics for Black culture evolving to be so terribly intolerant of ambiguity. Enough Black people have had to hear the term "It's just a joke", amongst other forms of plausible deniability.I hope this helps make it clearer where this intolerance comes from. I'm not a fan of this, but transparent behavior generally takes two to tango.
They appropriated tempura from the Portuguese too. Everyone has appropriated from China. Otherwise you wouldn't be allowed to have a pet dog, or eat pork.
Why use such an umbrella term when the negative instances are usually done with obvious malice? Why should people stifle their creativity because they are influenced by 'not their' culture. I wish people would stop using this term, and just call out people bent on intending harm, and not just for being insensitive to some made up norm.