My Culture, Your Culture, Our Culture

            Since I’ve been attacking the vigilantes of cultural appropriation for a while, let me look at things from a different side.  First, a story:

            In 2006 I, a born Catholic, Jesuit-educated, semi-Christian, interviewed in Florida for the interim headship of the largest Jewish day school south of Washington DC.  As you might expect, I faced some tough questions.  One of the easiest, however, was intended as a challenge: “What are you going to do if one of the rabbis says to you, ‘This is a Jewish thing; you wouldn’t understand.”  I immediately said, “I’d say ‘Rabbi means teacher, doesn’t it.  So you must teach me, and then I will understand.”  I got the job, ran the school for two years, and was succeeded by another Catholic.  And I spent two years asking questions, which the rabbis and others were delighted to answer.

            What’s my point?  That cross-cultural understanding is not only vital, it is a positive, life-enhancing activity, and should be encouraged first, and only challenged when there appears to be a negative, hostile, or avaricious motivation on someone’s part.

            Consider the vexed question of clothing, for example, both everyday and special occasion.  Here motivations, uniqueness, and cultural distance all come into play.  Anyone who wants to wear green on St. Patrick’s Day is, I believe, welcome to do so.  A person not of direct Scottish descent can probably wear a kilt in some situations – say a non-Scottish bagpiper, or a friend at a Scots wedding.  People wearing everyday kimonos or yukatas around the house, okay.  Likewise, berets, top hats, Irish caps, tweed, fine.   Women have even more latitude, I think, in many areas – culturally identified blouses, for example. 

            But turbans, dashikis, war bonnets, keffiyahs, pretty much not.  And burkas, kente cloth, any culture’s ritual or religious wear, no.  (I once heard from an Argentine-Jewish family who had gone to Buenos Aires on school vacation.  Visiting a hip coffee house, they overheard two locals speaking in Spanish about the mens’ yarmulkes:  “What are they wearing?”  “Oh that’s the cute little cap that’s all the rage in Miami.”)

            And absolutely not – racially, nationally or other garb that speaks to a group’s oppression or crimes: no slave clothes and no Nazi uniforms.

            I’ve stuck to clothing because it’s less complicated than other areas.  Can whites, for example, use black language?  Well, they have for more than a century: Jazz, jive, juke, mumbo- jumbo, ragtime, chill, crib, tote, voodoo, zombie, to name just a few.  The rules and lines are complex.  Like much slang, a group invents a word to distinguish itself from others, and that word enters common use and therefore often becomes useless for its in-group purpose.  (Compare Yiddish, which has so thoroughly entered non-Jewish usage that numerous words for body parts, as well as many insults, are now common property.)

            The borderlines seem to include words that are viewed as inoffensive when used within the group, but not by outsiders.  The 1902 novel, The Virginian, gave us the memorable phrase (altered over time) “Smile, when you say that,” when an outsider uses the phrase s-o-b, which the cowboys call each other regularly.” 

            They also include words that are newly coined by the ingroup, and considered proprietary.  There’s a sort of cultural copyright: “cool” entered the public domain long ago, but “fleek” hasn’t, and “sick” is too confusing for borrowing.  Unfortunately, slang moves so quickly through modern media that the lag time has become much too short in the ears of many originating groups.  See “bae,” “ratchet,” and the above-mentioned “fleek.”  Watch The Wire, or Dear White People and try to decide which words a white non-Baltimorean can use.

            Finally, they include words created by the majority to denigrate the minority: “gyp,” “paddy wagon,” “hooligan” “Indian giver” “Jew down” “pickanniny,” and of course the n-word and all its cousins: the k-words (for Jews, Germans, or South African blacks), the g-word (for Vietnamese), the w-word (for Italians) the f-word (for the French), c’s, p’s, and  j’s condensed words for Chinese, Polish, and Japanese people, and on and on.  The lists I consulted actually had insults beginning with every letter but A or Z. 

            Finally, the great question of art.  Here things get even harder.  Should we stop reading The Merchant of Venice, Othello, Huck Finn, and all the other works with female characters or characters of color who are not treated according to our modern standards?  Surely the case is different the closer we come to the present moment.  But how should we decide who can write about whom?  Men about women? Women about men?  Persons of different races about each other?  Nationalities? Gender identities?  Ages?  And if we segregate authors, artists, musicians, etc. by such criteria, should we expect that outsiders will be interested in reading the works of our groups?  I recall reading a piece by an African woman attorney who said reading To Kill a Mockingbird and admiring the character of Atticus Finch led her to her vocation.  If I had not read James Baldwin, Bernard Malamud, and Alan Paton in high school, would I have either the awareness or the empathy I have now?  Will I not grow in awareness and empathy by reading female, immigrant, Muslim, and other Others? 

            A young man I know, son of an African American father and a Greek-American mother, has become a successful jazz pianist.  For his first album, Promethean, he chose an epigraph from French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard:  “It’s not where you take things from, it’s where you take them to.”  My sentiments exactly.

Cultural Appropriation Part 2 – Or Simply Culture?

           

            The last post objected to the term “cultural appropriation” for its inaccuracy, as well as for being itself the appropriation of a word with specific meanings.  But the claim of any culture to “own” something in an exclusive way is itself a historical and cultural absurdity.  With a vanishingly small set of exceptions, which we’ll get to later, all cultures exist by taking from other cultures.  No culture (except perhaps some literal or metaphoric islands) is an island.

            Let’s take a few of the most common markers of a culture, and see why appropriation is essential to them.

Religion

            Are you a Christian or a Muslim?  Then you’re a massive expropriator – Christians from Judaism, and Islam from both. These are incontrovertible historical facts.  Christians lifted the Ten Commandments, the Psalms, Proverbs, Prophets, and other stories directly from the Hebrew Bible, and Islam took the same figures, from Abraham (Ibrahim) to Solomon (Suleiman) to Jesus (Isa) from its two predecessors.  In fact, Mohammed may be the greatest individual appropriator of all time, since he alone did what it took Jesus, Paul, Peter, and countless others to do.

            On the other side of the globe, Southeast and East Asia took Buddhism from India, and India re-took the Buddha for a place in the Hindu pantheon (just as Islam takes Jesus as a prophet.)  Numerous syncretic religions – Rastafarianism, Jainism, Bahai, have also taken significant parts of other religions.  Can you accept the claim that a Muslim must be an Arab, a Rastafarian must be a Jamaican, or a Christian must be a former Jew? If not, then you are comfortable with these huge appropriations.

Language

            Perhaps the greatest source of appropriation of them all.  There was, perhaps, an Ur-language that borrowed from no other, but that is assuredly unrecoverable.  Language only esxists because a hearer or many hearers decide to use a word they have heard from another – an appropriation.  Whether language was monogenic or polygenic, it ramified quickly into innumerable branches of a few trunks.  The Indo-European language, for example, has over 400 living successors, and many more that are extinct.  English has taken between 26% and 29% of its words from Latin, German, or French, and about one in six words from other languages. 

            “English” by the way is a perfect example of cultural evolution: as a country it derives its name from the Angles, one of the several peoples of England before 1066 (along with the Saxons, Jutes, Celts, and probably Danes).  Their language is almost entirely incomprehensible to modern day English speakers, or even to the people loving in England during Chaucer’s day (The first poem recorded in “English” begins: “Nu scylun hergan hefaenricaes uard metudæs maecti end his modgidanc. “).   

            Just trying to parse out and return language to its originators and their descendants leads to absurdity.  Jeans are Genoese – return the word to my Italian ancestors, please.  Wearing jams?  Not unless you’re Indian.  You may live on a bayou, but you can’t say it unless you’re Choctaw.  If you’re of African descent, you can ask for banjo, gumbo, and safari back, but you’ll have to give up piano, grits, and diaspora.  Nor can you even curse whites who use the n-word, at least not by using the f-word. You can’t even say language appropriation is taboo unless you’re of Oceanic/Polynesian descent.

           

Art

            This is one of the most common battlefields of cultural appropriation.  Apparently one may only cover material that belongs to one’s ethnicity or one’s ancestors, and may only use artistic methods indigenous to such groups.  From Homer to Shakespeare, writers have taken subject matter from other cultures – Shakespeare, for example, wrote only 4 ½ non-history plays in Britain, but 6 in Italy (and 4 in ancient Rome), 4 in ancient Greece (6 if you include Troy and Tyre), and 5 in other continental sites.  Rome copied Greek sculpture and architecture, everyone in Europe copied each others’ painting methods and ancient themes, and on and on, to Picasso and others of his era’s borrowings from African art.

            Without appropriation: no domes, no Greek columns, no arcades, no caryatids, no Gothic, Federalist, Georgian, etc. etc.  Only 20^th and 21^st century architecture everywhere:  Gehry, Gaudi (in Spain or maybe only Catalonia); no Michelangelo David or Moses, no translations of Dante, Dostoyevsky, Cervantes, Proust, Goethe.  (And let’s not let anyone else have Shakespeare, either.)

           

Food

            As we say in Brooklyn, Fuhgedaboudit.   No tomato sauce in Italy, no olive oil in America, no hot peppers in Asia, no potatoes or corn outside of the Americas, no coffee north of the Tropic of  Cancer?   I have polled people from Japan and from the several Islamic countries and pizza and spaghetti always are the majority’s favorite foods.  Thank God the digestive system does not discriminate on the basis of anything but digestibility

           

            But enough naysaying -- next time: When it IS appropriation, or at least offensive.

Cultural Appropriation, Part One

            For many years I have been disturbed by the term “politically correct,” which in modern use simply means “more sensitive than I am to an issue of justice, civility, or inequality.”  Today however, I’m finding a new irritant – “cultural appropriation.”  In each of these two cases, the modifier distorts the meaning of the word it modifies.  Political correctness tries to dismiss ideas as not “correct” – read “true” or “accurate” -- by making them the idiosyncrasy of an opponent.  However “cultural” modifies “appropriation” in a different way – changing its meaning three times in order to make a false analogy.  First it changes the simple definition of appropriate, second it redefines the class of entities from which things can be appropriated, and third it redefines the things that can be appropriated.

            Let me explain.  To appropriate means to take something that belongs to another.  There are many forms of appropriation, some of which have their own name:

·      Governments appropriate private property.

·      Embezzlers appropriate organizational funds.

·      Armies appropriate (“requisition”) civilian property.

·      Thieves appropriate (“steal”) things that are not theirs.

·      Plagiarists take (”plagiarize”) the intellectual content of others, in verbal, musical, or visual form, in order to gain what belonged to their original creators.

What do all these things have in common?  They’re a zero-sum game.  What A rightfully had, B now has – and A no longer does.  Further, they involve taking from a definable and clearly understood entity, whether a person or a collective of persons.

            However, cultural appropriation distorts this meaning in several ways, making a false analogy between cultural phenomena and other kinds of object, and between cultures, and other kinds of entity.  When the Beat Generation adopted berets, the Basques and the French were not materially affected; their own berets, and the cultural meaning of the beret, were still theirs.  This is true both of any individual Basque or Frenchman, and for the Basques as a people or France as a country.  On the country, when German invaded France and took over its government, the French people no longer had something they once had, and that rightfully belonged to them. 

            In what sense, for example, is a white artist taking anything from someone by painting Emmett Till in his coffin.  She hasn’t taken anything from Emmett Till, or from his family, or from the coffin currently at the Museum of African American History.  Nor from any other depiction of Till.

            As in the case of the beret, someone who wears another culture’s clothing style doesn’t take anything from the originators: It’s ironic that some Japanese have complained about western women wearing kimonos, while all Japanese businessmen wear western suits, for which they even borrowed a name – sebiro (from the English Saville Row). 

            There have been cases of cultural appropriation in a more narrow sense: western archaeologists and others taking artifacts illegally from other cultures, white producers taking songs composed by African Americans for pittances and making money from them with cover artists.  But these kinds of appropriation are also defined as theft, plagiarism, or at a minimum an unjust taking, by might or economic and social power.  And in these cases, the original owner has lost either the object or the economic value thereof.

            To summarize: real appropriation means an unlawful (or perhaps immoral) taking of something of direct or indirect material value, by persons acting alone or in concert, as, for example an army, a government, or a business, from an individual or individuals who rightfully possessed that something, in such a way as to leave the victim materially harmed. 

Tune in for a further discussion.