Cultural Appropriation

shapes and you would use them. Essentially they had like a hole through them that you would use to tie strings like for purses and things like that, that you would hang from a sash or belt. Yeah. Yeah, I believe I've seen the Yeah, I've got one that's like a little cat. It's an anthropomorphic cat that's wearing a robe and it's supposed to be like a mythical figure of this sort of like cat creature transforming itself so

it looks like a woman in tricking people. Uh. And I got this at the pbody ESX Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. They have this amazing uh collection of Asian artifacts but also just marines stuff. Basically, the gist is that um sailors who are from the area would bring all of these things back after their journeys around the world, and they eventually went into the PVD SX Museum, so you can see all of this really cool historical material there.

But I had this net suk. It sits on my desk as I'm working on episodes like this one, and I kind of wonder, like, is there something inherently weird about me, you know, uh, fetishizing this and it mind's not a historical and that's okay. It's like a mass produced one that you get at the gift shop or whatever.

But there's something kind of odd about me incorporating that into my I don't know, artistic aesthetic my setup of my desk, right, you know, it's next to literally a a plastic sculpture of a Xeno morph that ec Steiner gave me for my birthday, you know, so it's like

it's not like I'm only into Japanese historical aesthetics. Well, this this is an interesting question because I mean, obviously we're talking about the idea of cultural appropriation today and I think we're more and more, uh, we're we're forced to ask these questions about our lives and the things in our lives, the physical objects as well with the ideas. I like what you said about the sailors enturing out into the world and returning home with these essentially knickknacks

and uh and and artifacts. And I mean our lives are kind of like that. We we travel around, we experience new places, new ideas, and we end up incorporating those ideas into our own worldview, into our own sense of self. We end up bringing um artifacts into our home, and our homes become reflections of our of our interest and our travels and our experience. Yeah. Yeah, and that's

how I think about it. I don't just like, it's not like a just collection of random items that I just throw on my desk or something, you know what I mean, although you know, obviously there's certain things that I will that stay on the desk and other things that go in a box somewhere. But yeah, I don't know. It's strange. Like the alien for some reason is fine because that's like American culture, But there's or is it Swiss culture, right exactly? That's true based on our our

Hans Rudy Geeker episode. There's also I have a statue of Ganesh on my desk as well of the Hindu god of removing obstacles. Well, I have I have a goodesh in my pocket. I forgot about that. I always always carry a ges with me. So we're kind of laying out some of the details of our own um, our, own homes, our own sense of selves self. And I imagine everyone listening you're probably doing the same thing. You're thinking about, all right, what what items are on my person,

are in my house and just in my mind? And from what cultures do those things arise? Yeah, and there's probably some of you two who are having a reflex that I think is pretty common in Western culture, which is like, well, what would be wrong about that? You know, there's a there's sort of an immediate defensiveness, and we're

gonna talk a little bit about that today as well. Like, you know, basically, we're looking at cultural appropriation and then we're gonna look at examples that are positive and negative of it, but then look at the arguments for and against it, because there's been plenty, Like, let me tell you, this is an episode that there was uh no lack of research. There was plenty of stuff out there to

incorporate into the literature. And at the end of this episode, we are not going to have This is not one of those episodes where we're gonna have a you know, a bullet list of what something is. We're hopefully going to provide you with some additional tools to evaluate, uh, your own life, your own sense of culture, to know

what sort of the arguments are on both sides. We are also not going to do an exhaustive examination of every form of alleged cultural appropriation out there, because I mean, you get into say, the music genre, the fashion genre, and there's so many different examples that pop up, and many of them are specialized, and they had their their arguments on both sides in many cases. I can think of one example off the top of my head that I came up in a bunch of the articles, but

I didn't include it here. The singer Selena Gomez apparently wore a bindy at one point like a music video or maybe a live performance or something like that, and she was criticized for it. I was just like, I don't feel like this really fits into the discussion that

Robert and I are going to have. That is probably for some of you, like one of the first examples that comes to mind, right like Likewise, I don't think we're going to talk a whole lot about hip hop culture and it's uh and and it's and and how it is treated in an American culture, but that certainly is a huge area of discussion as well. Now, I guess the first thing we need to do is just say what is cultural appropriation? And that really that really

splits into two questions. Here, what what is cultural appropriation? And then what does it consists of? So the first question is a little easier broadly, and I mean broadly speaking, we're talking about the adoption or use of the elements of one culture by members of another culture. But of course that that again, that's extremely broad because this sort of cultural exchange has been going on as long as

human society has experienced a convergence of cultures. Uh, the cats kind of out of the bag in terms of keeping most global cultures entirely pure for a variety of reasons. Now, we'll get on into a lot of this as we progress, but it should come as no surprise that there are plenty of vantage of individuals out there who prefer the term cultural misappropriation. So it's not merely the fact that one culture is adopting or using elements of another culture.

It's that they're doing so in a way that is dishonest or harmful, insensitive or crass, or plays on some some larger inequity. Yeah, there were actually arguments made in some of the articles that I read for this that essentially we're like, there's a linguistic problem at hand. Here are semantics issue that cultural appropriation is the term we're

all using for this thing, but misappropriation might be better. Yeah, because if you you often hear it just thrown out like, oh, that's cultural misappropriation, that's like that's a sin stop it, where whereas there's obviously going to be a lot more nuance at play. Yeah, if you just look at like the Salem Encyclopedia, it's entry on cultural appropriation says that it is quote the lifting of aspects of one culture or society for use by another culture. Pretty close to

what you just said. This can be anything from art to music, fashion, etcetera. Sometimes the intermingling creates highly regarded new pieces of work, though right and regardless, some argue that the adoption of their culture by outsiders is seen as disrespectful and offensive, so sometimes it's actually defined as quote the use of works of indigenous people's by non indigenous people, so there's a little bit of a distinction there.

The concept actually emerged in academia in the late nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties, and it was a critique of colonialism, so you can see why it applies, for instance, to our Western society, American society, or British colonized society. But by the nineteen nineties it had a solid place in academic discourse, and I can say when I studied for my master's degree between two thousand and six and two thousand, it was a significant part of the literature for rhetoric,

cultural studies, and communication. I mean every class I was in there was at least a section on cultural appropriation and how it fit into the theories and discourse around those ideas. Now, I think one way to help us get started here is to keep in mind, what is culture right? Like that alone is a really hard question

to answer in my mind. When I'm usually just talking about culture casually or on one of these shows, if I don't have a lot of research in front of me, I'm thinking about culture as how people make sense of the world. There's too much of a cacophony of sensory information going on for us as human beings to make sense of There's so much happening our brains literally can't keep up. So culture is how we understand all of this stuff. Is basically like a filter, right uh. And

obviously it's way more complicated than that. But some people will say, well, culture is norms or social behavior, or materialism, or politics, or customs and traditions. But let's not forget there's also subcultures as well that exists within larger umbrella ones. The main one that I always think, well, you just brought up hip hop. Hip hop is a good example of the subculture, but I think of punk is a

subculture that exists within what dain culture, right uh. And then the dictionary says culture is quote the way of life, especially the general customs and beliefs of a particular group of people at a particular time. In general, it's used to refer to our use of symbols to represent our experiences, but done in a creative way. Yeah, this is one of those areas where I often come back to this, this analogy I keep rolling out of lenses and uh.

And while it's it's easy, it's easy to think that our view of reality is completely unfiltered by by anything. Or we might think, oh, I'm seeing reality through a single lens, you know, a single pane of glass that that comes down over my space helmet. But I feel that all of us have multiple lenses that are employed, uh, many at the same time, and then in various combinations.

And and so when you try and yeah, when you try and boil down what is this culture, you end up countering not one lens, but several, and some of them may not be employed at all times. Yeah, that's a really interesting way to look at it. And I think too, And I'll get into this, we'll talk a little bit later about a guy named Gert Hofstad and

his sort of cultural theories. Uh. But I think that is the best way to keep this in mind, that your analogy of lenses essentially is that like, different people have their different lenses on, right, and they're not always seeing the same thing. They're understanding those symbols through different experiences. Yeah, and that's important for understanding how we're viewing the world, but also how another individual is looking at the same topic.

And that's key to this whole entire discussion because it's there's the aspect of how am I interacting with a cultural idea or an artifact? But then how was another person looking at that? And then and then how are we supposed to have a conversation about it? Yeah, that's the inherent problem in human communication, is that there's going to be a misunderstanding no matter what. There's always what's

like referred to as psychological noise is in verbal communication. Right, we're not telepaths, We're not beaming our thoughts directly into somebody else's head. But through words and the use of other symbols, we're trying to convey meaning back and forth to each other. It's just that our way of understanding that meaning is vastly different, especially depending on what kind

of culture you were raised in. All Right, we're gonna take a quick break, and when we come back, we're gonna jump into some examples of sort of positive cultural appropriation, definite negative examples of cultural appropriation or cultural misappropriation, as well as the the ever cantalizing gray areas. Thank Okay, we're back. So before we get into positive and negative examples of cultural appropriation here, I actually have one that

I'm concerned about for myself. It's something that I'm working on. Most of our listeners now that I work on. Well, both of us do we both do fiction outside of the podcast. I do comics. You do short fiction. Uh, well, you've you've written long fiction too, right, Yeah, the short stuff is the main the main material that is out there though, and and of course that that means something. With both of our work, we're talking about multiple characters,

multiple voices, and the characters of varying um ethnicities, cultural backgrounds, etcetera. Yeah, so I mentioned this actually in the Samurai Saw It episode. I'm working on this project right now, and basically I recognize that the diversity of race, gender, sexuality, nationality, and age really needs to improve in modern fiction, especially if we want our culture these artifacts to represent the world that we live in. This is kind of tricky for

a straight white, middle aged guy like me. Uh. And I'm working on a news story that's a sci fi story. It's set in Trinidad and the majority of the characters are black. It's also going to incorporate elements of Japanese culture into it, including the samurai ethos that we're referring to in that other episoisode. So I'm trying to write this thing, and I want to address themes of class and race and violence in it. But I genuinely wonder

am I appropriating somebody else's culture here? Right? Like? This is a tricky tightrope. Should I stick to only what I know? Should my characters only be white, an American and male? Right? Or should I try to improve diversity leading by example through my storytelling. I don't know. It's

something I like, I genuinely worry about. I've done stuff in the past, um where I've had characters of diversity that I've made the focal point of my work, and other stuff I've written have been from characters who are,

you know, essentially variations of meat. Yeah. I mean, this is always a quandary as as a writer, as as a creator, probably of any form, because there certainly are voices that insist that say, an African American perspective should not be approached from from a non African American writer. So is a writer, then, you know, forced to exist within the confines of their own cold sure? And if so, how far does it go? Can Stephen King right about

a Southerner. Did did Tennessee raised Coleman McCarthy appropriate the cultures of Mexico and the American West when he moved out there and started to write westerns. Uh yeah, this is this is the kind of way that I think that the modern writer's mind especially continues to eat away as yourself. You know, it's like a dog gnawing its own tail, your second guessing all of your creative choices.

But but I have to I have to say from my own part, like when when I've written, say, I wrote about a biracial character in one of my Grave Stoppers tales and it was a it was a slide

homage to Joe Christmas and Faulkner's Light in August. But and personally, I always approach a character like that as an attempt to understand another viewpoint, uh, you know, to to respectfully understand how they are viewing the world, what their worldview consists of, and and you know, and putting in some research as well, like looking at at authentic voices from those realm is to try and create it.

I mean, that's part of the exercise. What what you don't want to do in My opinion is to is to sort of go the the old school pro wrestling, you know, root where someone is is nothing more than the archetype. There's nothing more than the stereotype character, and that's all they are, right. Yeah, that's a really good example. Um the like sort of wrestling characters from like the eighties.

I'm thinking of like the Iron Cheek here, and that guy is kind of still performing that personality, Like have you ever seen the Iron Cheeks Twitter feed? That's pretty wild. I understand there's some disagreement on to what extent that is him or people who handle it for him, So I didn't know that, but I don't know a lot of detail about about that argument. But to Glow on Netflix is a is a big right now, and that

that discusses some similar territory. Yeah, And Glow is fascinating because you see these women come in in the first couple episodes and they have all of these different backgrounds, right, but they are essentially coming to the same project, Like what on earth is this? Like they've all got this like what we're gonna be female wrestlers? Huh. But then the characters that are created for them are totally two dimensional.

And kind of grotesque. Um. Yeah, And so like, when I'm thinking about these projects, I think, well, diversity should be improved behind the scenes as well. Right, it doesn't just make up for a lack of diversity to have white people appropriating culture there. There should be more creators

of diversity given a platform. And I was trying to think of recent like examples to do like a uh compare and contrast here, And the two that came up for me was I just started watching the American Gods TV show that's based on that Neil game and novel, and it really attempts to tackle the African American experience. But at the same time, it's based on a book by a white Englishman and it's adapted by a white American.

Then I think of a show like Atlanta, which we talked about in this Ironically we talked about Atlanta in the in the Samurai storied episode. Uh, that is written and run by a majority of African Americans. Is one necessarily better than the other? Is one more authentic than

the other? They both. As I'm watching them, I'm getting different things out of them, and I'm enjoying the experience and maybe listeners out there who are engaged in creative projects to have this floating in the back of their head, like what am I allowed to engage with? Yeah, alright, well, let's let's continue to discussion then by discussing some some some first of all clear positive examples or or what

I'm I'm presenting as a as a positive example. So one that came to mind instantly is British British singer of Swiss and Greek heritage, Cat Stevens. He famously converted to Islam and uh and became use of Islam. Now, clearly this is a case of an individual entering into another culture's customs and religious worldview with with clear permission to do so. As with Christianity and Buddhism, Islam is a missionary religion with a clear mandate to bring other

people's into the faith. Everyone, it is said, our our Muslim at birth. So actually, one of the pieces that I turned to for research on this was in the Atlantic and it was by an author named Jenny Avans, and she argued that without cultural appropriation, we wouldn't have the following things. These are positive examples. New York pizza, Japanese Denim. I didn't know that was a thing. Uh, yeah, I didn't either reading what she was talking about. Apparently

it's an older style of denim may democratic discourse. That's interesting. It makes sense like democratic discourse came from Greece, but here in America we've sort of assumed that it's like our thing, right, you know. Uh, and then from the Atlantic as well. Connor Freedersdorf also had an interesting interview, and he provided the following examples. Imagine a Korean food truck owner who puts beef bulgogie in a burrito. Are

they appropriating Mexican culinary culture? Or a malays Asian housewife who rents a kimono when they're on holiday in Kyoto? Is that appropriating traditional Japanese dress? Or a Canadian who writes a novel that's inspired by Cervantes, they're technically appropriating Spanish literary culture. Or an Irish American who sings opera for a living they're benefiting from the world's appropriation of Italian art. So there's a lot of complication here, right.

It's not as easy as just pointing at Selena Gomez or Miley Cyrus or somebody and saying stop doing that. Yeah,

I mean the culinary example. Um, I'm glad you brought it that up, because I was I was turning a number of these around it in my mind, like, oh, what about the Portuguese influence on Thai cuisine, you know, the incorporation of of peppers for instance, Or a better, more clear cut example, I suppose would be the French influence on Vietnamese cuisine, because there you have an even clearer, uh, colonial influence. And of course this leads to an important

detail in charges of cultural misappropriation. It's it's usually the superior power, the colonial force, that is charged with misappropriating something, and the reasons should be obvious. I mean, for instance, if you're if you're a population of Africans transposed to to a Caribbean island, and you incorporate aspects of the colonial and local culture under your own practices, I mean that survival that falls in line with a lot of

what we're talking about in our Cargo Cults episode. But when the colonist appropriates the culture of subjugated people, I mean, that's that's where it gets a lot ickier or potentially ickier. Right, Okay, So yeah, I'm seeing that as like definitely like a hallmark for these cases that are brought up with outrage, right, is that usually it's if somebody who is from a colonial culture is appropriate again indigenous versus non indigenous. Um. One of my favorite books of all time is a

graphic novel called Pride of Baghdad. It's about lions that escape the zoo after the Americans bomb Baghdad in two thousand three, and the lions, or of the story, they essentially become symbols for us to see different versions of the war through. It's written by Brian K. Vaughan, is drawn by Nico Henrikin. Neither of them are Iraqi, but this modern folk tale really made me think about the

Iraqi experience differently. I think about, uh, this is a non colonial example Japanese post rock bands I like Mono and the band Boris. Uh. These musicians adapt Western styles of rock. They come up with something that's totally new and kind of wonderful in the process. I'd never dream of referring to Boris as cultural appropriation, right, but arguably it is. It's just because Japan is not a colonizer of the United States, we don't really think of it that way. In fact, part of why I think I

like it so much is the multiculturalism to it. And I think we'd be remiss if we didn't recognize. One of the major examples that comes up over and over again the literature is that white people have been accused of appropriating rock from African American culture. Uh. And then you and I were trying to we were talking earlier before we went on air, like, what's a great positive example of the sort of colonizer, white vanilla guy really doing a great job representing another culture, And you said,

David Simon, the guy who created the wire and tremay. Yeah, Yeah, this has come up a lot and uh, and in some of the resources we were looking at for this episode. And I think the reason that it is often brought up as a good example is because David Simon and the teams that he as symbols, they tend to approach these topics with, you know, out of a sense of wanting to understand a very empathic, uh journalistic mission in mind. Yeah, yeah,

I think that's important. Uh. And as we go through these examples, it becomes clearer to me that that part of it is like actually engaging with the culture that you're influenced by or appropriating, right, like engaging with that and not just the artifact. Uh. That goes a long way.

Now that being said, I do have to I do have to throw out there that I know that David Simon does make an effort to bring in members of of of cultures that are that are depicted in his shows, because I remember him talking about The Wire and towards the end and saying that if they were going to do another season, they would have to incorporate like another racial demographic of Baltimore, and if they did not have anybody uh on the team that had had expertise or

knowledge or or participation in that culture. Yeah, I was gonna say, I can't remember the character's name. There's like a preacher on the show, and I want to say, like the real life version of him is in the writer's room for that show, or was in the writer's room. I don't want to call off remember, isn't I'm sure some Wire fans will point we'll answer that question for us. So then let's let's look at some really clear negative examples.

And this again maybe where some people sort of react defensively and say, what how is that how is that negative? The most people agree the adaptation of Native American garments in the fashion industry UH isn't seen in a positive light.

UH So in a brief period of time in the last couple of years, we had Victorious Secret feature a model wearing a feathered headdress and turquoise jewelry, and a fashion show that at the same time, Michelle Williams was criticized for wearing braids and feathers in a magazine photo shoot, and contestants on Germany's Next Top Model also did a photo shoot wearing headdresses UH in Native American style clothing UH and Native American writer Jessica Metcalf actually points out

in The Guardian. She says, quote, our cultures have been reduced to nothing more than patterns on a shirt. I think this is a good point. This is again it's the culture is about understanding the world through these symbols. But when their symbolic meaning is completely discarded, they're divested of that power, right, and then the meaning is lost, and so why engage with it other than just like I like feathers, or I like turquoise, you know, or or to what extent is that even are you engaging

with it? Are you are? You're not really engaging with it at all, if you're just taking it on as a hollowed out, superficial thing. It's especially viewed as worse because these artifacts have spiritual and ceremonial significance to them too. So I think like maybe looking at this example, it seems that cultural appropriation is quote unquote worse when it's done for commercial purposes. So we've got sort of two hallmarks here, the colonial one a commercial one in this sense.

For instance, fashion businessman Oscar mets of it. I think that's how you say his name. Met sav Hot gave royalties from his twenties sixteen spring collection to the asha Nika tribe that these clothes were inspired by. They also contributed to public awareness about the tribe struggle with illegal loggers. This was in Brazil, so you know, he's clearly like trying to uh put out any fires. I guess ahead of time because he knew like he had a commercial

product essentially and that he could be criticized for it. Now, if that was a clear negative example, that had some perhaps some wiggle room for for some people to say, well, I don't understand you know, I need that explained to me a little more wine. That's offensive. I feel like the next one should be pretty pretty clear cut, you think so, And yet there's so many there's so many examples of this one still being used. So blackface is

essentially like the big no no. Right. Uh, And this is where I think he gets important to like, is that cultural appropriation or is that just making fun of race or ethnicity? You know, well, yeah, it's I guess it's It tends to be the the the most unrefined example of just blatant um mockery. And you have to ask yourself, to what degree is this energy present in more deluded amounts in other acts of alleged cultural misappropriation exactly?

I mean, really, any dressed up perpetuation of an ethnic stereotype is going to be bad here. Don't make fun of someone else's culture or ethnicity. Don't treat it like a joke. Right. You remember this from our previous Halloween episode that we did must be two years ago. Now, Uh, there's a kind of in clothed performance that happens around that holiday. Another example of this is, for instance, when white people think that Dio de los Muertos is Mexican Halloween,

and they wear skull face paint. They don't even consider sometimes the cultural implications of the actual tradition. And Connor Friedersdorf again, he has a good quote about this. He says, a white college student who dons black face is not engaging with African American culture. He or she is just caricaturing physical features of another race. The act is offensive partially because it's reducing people to the color of their skin. Uh. My example that I came out from this recently, I

meant in this I think in previous episode. I'm rereading it this summer. Stephen King's in anticipation of the new movie. I had forgotten how racist some of the characters in that are. The Richie Tozier character puts on like a quote black character voice in the book, Uh, and it completely pulls me out of the story every time it happens. I don't think Stephen King is racist. I don't think

he was making fun of ethnicity. I think he was probably trying to critique the era that he grew up in the nineteen fifties, when something like Amos and Andy was acceptable. Right. It still feels super culturally weird to read that today. I can't imagine in that movie the kid from Stranger Things is playing Richie Tozier. I can't imagine they're gonna have him repeat those lines when he plays that character, especially since are they updating the backstory

to the eighties? Yeah, they are. Yeah, They're going to be in the eighties, and I think the modern version will be in present day. Yeah. Uh. Jonathan Blanks was interviewed in the Atlantic and he says there's nothing wrong with adopting terms like was up as they come into white pop culture through various media. But there's a difference between the natural assimilation of language and black imitation as

a caricature. Yeah. Obviously yellow faces another example of this, and the big the big like just cringe worthy example, I mean, at least crunch worthy. Is Um Breakfast a Tiffany's wonderful film, except you have this this horrible character played by Mickey Rooney, Mickey Rooney playing a Chinese American and the most stereotypical way possible. Uh, just blatantly offensive to to to to modern viewers of the film. Uh, and and some contemporary viewers of the film as well.

If you look back at at some of the reviews. But again, there's this, there's not an attempt to really understand this person or to embody this character as anything other than a mockery. You know, another one that I had forgotten about from our childhood adolescents Twin Peaks. Yeah, I had completely forgotten about this. Uh there's a character who does yellow face and that uh Katherine at one point pretends to have died. Spoilers for the but I

haven't haven't seen it yet. You've never seen the original the original Twin Peaks. Oh well, okay, I won't go too far with it, but as long as you don't spoil who done it, I'm not fine. Oh yeah, I won't go there. But there is a character who dresses up like a Chinese man. Uh. And it's super offensive. And when you watch it now you realize, like, oh, this was David Lynch making a commentary on Americans and racism. Right.

It wasn't like David Lynch was being racist, but it is extraordinarily weird to watch something like that or read something like it that you know I was consuming when I was a kid and not really recognizing, oh, hey, this is this is wrong, not quite right. Here, so Jenny Avans again in her article she argues that we shouldn't just engage with the culture on an aesthetic level. It was put another way actually by an actress named

Amanda Stenberg. She was in the Hunger Games, and she said in a video that was actually very much criticized, what would America be like if we loved black people as much as we love black culture. Nicki Minaj of all People, actually echoed this. Her point was basically, don't cherry pick cultural elements without engaging their creators as a part of a process of understanding the world from a different perspective than yours. And this is where it gets interesting.

You see a lot of these contrasting viewpoints. In NPR actually did a story about how young Americans don't identify hip hop with race. They actually think that that culture is now possibly seen as global because you can see it as far away as places like Korea and Russia. At the same time, others are arguing, well, when you culturally devalue black people, that subsequently paved the way for

violence against them. Right, and as we're seeing in so many cases of incidents in which police are shooting young black men, Okay, so let's talk a little more about gray area is here, um briefly, So as always, you know, the gray area is only as gray as the critic paints it. So if it helps, think of think of these as less as gray areas, but areas of question, areas of possibility even as we discussed them, and as

you discussed them and think about them in your own lives. Uh, places where the charge of cultural appropriation or misappropriation become less clear. So one example that comes to my mind a video was making the rounds recently on social media in which a group of Caucasian women performed at traditional African dance in presumably traditional costume. Now, it is often the case with social media content, any context was completely lacking.

Here we didn't we were not told who these women were, why they were doing it, where they were doing it, even there was no no, no clue at all, the messages in the hand of the share and then in the in the commentator. Now, a number of commentators on this video, when I was looking at they strongly condemned the footage, saying that it was, you know, just a

blinding example of cultural misappropriation. A few credit commentators, however, pointed out that we didn't know to what extent these women had permission to engage in this dance and really what the spirit of their performance was. It did not I mean, they certainly were not wearing black face. It did not seem to have comedic um aspects to it, But we just simply don't know. In short, did they

do it to mock anybody? Did they do it to engage in a surface level experience, or was it part of a deeper effort to understand is their honor instant and understanding there is their permission there? Essentially context is important here. Yeah, I feel like I mean again, it's it. It kind of depends on the commentator here and who is making the charge of cultural misappropriation, and they're going to go to varying extremes in making that charge. Another

example that came to mind Big Trouble in Little China. Yeah, this one. When you put this in the new It's immediately like a light bulb went on over my head. I was like, oh, yeah, Like again a thing from our childhood never even occurred to me as a kid that that would be any in any way offensive to somebody. Yeah, and this is I have to say this is uh, this has always been one of my my favorite films. But it's a thing, and it's a you know, film I've I've always loved, but it is a film by

a group of Western Caucasian filmmakers. Now, it does it does invoke Chinese martial arts movie stereotypes. But on the other hand, it does feature a large Chinese American cast. It plays with its stereotypical stereotypical characters to some degree, and even counters some stereotypes, uh within key characters. Plus, while it certainly plays fast and loose um Hollywood style with Chinese mythology, it does seem to try reasonably hard

to incorporate some key elements there. So in my current experience of the movie, I'm inclined to appreciate it within those parameters and see it as a net positive expression. But I also understand that other individuals might take a different view. I have a hard time imagining Big Trouble in Little China getting made the same way today. Now.

I know, like there's been rumors that they're like they're going to remake it with a rock or something like that, But I just I can't imagine that it's going to engage with Chinese culture in the same way, because like again I'm bringing this up twice in a week Transformers, uh whatever the whatever number five that I saw this weekend. Like don't get me wrong, I have a problem and I go see all those movies in the theater, but they are really offensive at some points and how they

appropriate culture. And there's like a basically like a Japanese stereotype Transformer that like dresses like a samurai and has a katana and has um. I can't remember the actor's name, but isn't it a Tokyo drift based car transfer might be Yeah, it's some sports car I don't recognize, but he it's a Japanese actor performing this character. It's like super offensive in the same way that like some of those Star Wars aliens were seen as being like caricatures

as well. Uh. And that they had another one in this in this recent one that was French, and they're like, oh, yeah, can Transformers be French? And somebody says, oh, no, he's not actually French. He just he's just pretending to be French, like he really likes French culture. And I was like, this is like, I mean, there's so many things about those movies that are confounding. But yeah, any statement it tries to make about ethnicity or culture I wouldn't take

with a whole lot of brain as salt. All Right, well, let's take another break, and when we come back, let's get a little more into the case against cultural misappropriation. Alright, we're back, al right, so let's look at cases against in cases for this. Now. Bell Hooks actually said about this topic, and we're talking about cases against here quote at nicity becomes a spice a seasoning that can liven

up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture. Uh. In the New York Times Pulse, Agal actually argues that cultural appropriation is actually about America's original sins, whereas origins are bound up in quote, theft and colonization. This gets back to what we were talking about earlier with some of those negative examples. It really seems like the colonization aspect in the commercial aspect are the two big no nos here, right. Uh So if you're if you're combining

the two, it's even worse. Yeah, I mean, we always come back to the idea of America is a melting pot. But did everyone want to go into the pot, and to what extent is the pot proportionally stirred? Right, Yeah, that's that's a fair question. Connor Friedersdorff actually argues that the claims of cultural appropriation are actually objectionable if there's an underlying animous dis or dehumanization to them. That's his words, not mine. The problem him becomes when this is conflated

with cultural appropriation that's seen as absurd. So for instance, the example he gives is if a college cafeteria serves sushi, uh and for starters, Well yeah, I mean you probably can get sick. But but his example is basically like somebody could find that as a case of cultural appropriation, and then somebody else would see that as being absurd, as being a conflation right off, if you saw that

as cultural appropriation. So this is where you get into this like sort of battle between whether or not something is or isn't offensive, and it gets worse when the conflation backfires. Then all examples are considered absurd. So, for instance, even when something is malicious like the fraternity party where everybody's wearing black face for example, right, uh, And I just realized as I was doing the research for this, and I had this moment where I was just like, oh, uh,

that you could use this. This is basically cannon fodder for content creation on the internet, right, for little media outlets like without engaging with the larger question in any manner like we're trying to do today. It's basically any time an incident like this happens, it's just all right, that's a perfect five word piece that we can just like spit out there and get people to click on, right, Like if we feign outrage over something, or we feign

outrage over somebody else's outrage. I mean, you see this everywhere. It's it's so much of what I think makes a Facebook probably uh intolerable right now? Yeah, and then commenting or critiquing another individual's outrage and what degree is that outrage appropriate? Right? So, I think what we're finding here is this is essentially a problem with language, right, that we're not using words accurately to describe the differences between

something like racism and cultural appropriation. And the example I think of, uh, and when you first brought up this topic to me it came to mind was Paton Oswald has this great comedy bit about this on Netflix. The specials called talking for clapping. He jokes about the difference between terminology versus listening to someone's heart, on the difference between their words and their intent, And he does these

these sort of caricature characters. You know, one person is using all the exact right terms, but they're what they're saying, the content of what they're saying is offensive, versus like somebody who doesn't know the exact right terminology, but they meanwhile, um, and it's probably. This is where I think is a good point to mention Gert Hofstad and his cultural dimensions theory. Now, the idea here, we could whole episode on this, but

I'm gonna try to boil it down quickly. He breaks down cultural factors and communication and how they contribute to miss communication. And there's five factors that he's pointing us to here, power, distance, individualism versus collectivism, uncertainty, avoidance, masculinity

versus femininity, and long term versus short term orientation. Now, I'm not a hundred percent of propos of his theory, but I recognize I think he's kind of on the right track here of looking at how different cultures communicate and understanding one another. Differently, And basically the idea here is to ensure that the symbols themselves aren't misunderstood. Communicators

need to be cognizant of the factors themselves. Right. The way he actually does it, he'll he breaks them up by nation, which I think is probably part of the problem here, because I don't think one nation necessarily has a culture per se, right to say, like American culture, uh doesn't recognize like so many of the subcultures within it, right Oh yeah too. I think to to to boil down another nation to a singular, you know, monolithic culture is generally to betray a very incomplete idea of of

who these people are. Yeah, And so I think that might be why a lot of the examples we're seeing in the literature here come from mass media. The communicators themselves aren't actually targeting like a single audience, so they're subsequently unintentionally offensive to people that they just forgot about that would be part of this mass broadcast. Right. Um, yeah, I mean countless examples. I don't think when Selena Gomez puts on a bindy or um, what what did Katy

Perry do? Did she have corn rows? I think that was what people. Uh, I think that was the example. She was Egyptian. I don't know that dark Horse. The Egyptian culture is an interesting example too, because what is we'll get into it will discuss the idea of like what happens if a culture is not appropriated and it runs the risk of becoming outdated. It kind of runs

the risk of becoming something like Egyptian culture. Which not to say that you could not misappropriate ancient Egyptian h iconography your dress in a way that would offend someone. But given the distance, given the time, given the fact that the the ideas of the ancient Egyptians did not travel well even during their time, much less into modern times, um, it makes it a little safer for some for sale pop singer two to utilize. I haven't seen that new

Tom Cruise Mummy movie. I can't imagine that it is in any way portraying Egyptian culture in a positive I mean, like I said, it tends to be this this safe zone, or relatively safe at least, you know, compared to so many things. I mean, we still have Mommy movies. We talked before about how kind of weird it is that we have these tales about Uh, these bodies that were stolen from from tombs by by colonial powers and they come to life and start killing people, and and for

the most part, like no serious self examination is conducted. Yeah, yeah, well right and again, so like I think all of this comes back to like a matter of semantics and language, kind of paying attention to what you're saying and what you're doing, and probably where the term misappropriation needs to be clarified and used instead of appropriation. Now, another notable area here or that that the factors into our discussion concerns American sports teams and the use of Native Americans

stereotypes as mascots. Now, certainly this is a this is a whole discussion onto itself. But what's interesting here for the purposes of our discussion is that is that there was a study that was published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology by a team of researchers from the University of Montana, the University of Washington, and Washington State University, and they set out to empirically test the use of American Indian brand imagery and how it increases UH stereotype

beliefs in the broader population. And they wanted to see what kind of impact the brands would have on both negative and positive stereotypes. So examples here would be Indians are warlike versus Indians are noble, so it's a noble savage, right that kind of Yeah. Then the idea that these are the two private predominant stereotypes and these are the only two that can exist when you're doing just search

a surface level understanding of another culture. So interestingly enough, they found that while conservative individuals that they tested, they did not change their opinion about Native Americans upon seeing such imagery. Uh. Liberal individuals were far more malleable. Uh, and they were affected by both positive and negative stereotypes.

And this apparently falls into line with previous studies that have revealed that that liberal individuals tend to have more malleable worldviews and are therefore sometimes more sensitive to contextual clues. So I have a great example of this. We live in Atlanta, Georgia. Have you ever going to see the Braves play? No, yeah, it's not my thing, but a couple of coworkers at a job previous to this took me to a Braves game. And did you know about this?

The tomahawk chop? Oh yeah, yeah, I'm sir, I'm familiar enough with it to know that as we chop your arm. Yeah, So, like there's a certain point during the game where that, you know, the crowd gets excited in support of the home team in Atlanta Braves, and they do this tomahawk chop thing where they like use their arms like the tomahawks that they're like bringing them down on the skulls

of their opponent. There's actually like a I don't even know what it is, like a robot like animatronic thing that kind of comes out and swings the tomahawk and everything. And I remember the first time I saw that just being like WHOA, Like, what is happening here? This is super offensive? Um, But again that might just be like my predilections, right, Like uh, I just saw it as being like, Okay, this is the the savage stereotype being

brought out to play here. Now. They had a separate field study as well, and the researchers also found that exposure to a quote more negative ethnic logo A significantly strengthened negative stereotypes among liberal individuals, while exposure to the less negative logo did not significantly influence negative stereotypes At any level of political identity. So what what does all

this fit into our conversation here. Well, I think one of the things that's interesting is that it reveals that one can interact with such artifacts of cultural appropriation without necessarily thinking about them, without certainly without engaging with them, but also not realizing why they could be offensive. And it also is interesting to see how malleable worldviews can

cut both ways. So the very the very, the very aspect of your psyche that makes you more willing to to see the situation from another individual side and to shift your worldview accordingly. Uh, that can also lead to the to the less desirable effect that you're influenced than by bits of negative stereoto typing um and and you know, negative cultural misappropriation. So this is actually part of the sort of factor of leading to the whole like is it absurd? Is it not absurd? Should it be blamed?

Should it not be blamed? So, yeah, there's so many complex factors here. Now let's look at some of the cases for cultural appropriation and see if we can get anything more out of them. Uh. Sometimes it's seen as being positive when it's seen as appreciation and influence rather than appropriation. Also when creators seek permission from the person or culture they're appropriating from, or they're paying homage to the artistry, then it gets complicated. How do you know

who you're supposed to ask? Like this whole thing gets into intellectual property. I found so many articles about intellectual property and ownership of cultural artifacts, and that there's actually legal precedent for culture being copyrighted in certain cases. To Um and Jenny Avan's argues in that Atlantic piece, the cultural appropriation is actually a result of globalization, so subsequently

it's inevitable, but it's also ultimately positive. In her mind, it's an exchange of ideas, styles, and traditions, and it's showcasing the joy of living in a multicultural society. Susan Scaffitti wrote a book that is called Who Owns Culture? Appropriation and Authenticity in American Law, and she says that culture shouldn't freeze itself in time as if it's like part of a music e M diorama. She actually argues

cultural appropriation can save cultural products from fading away. And Pakistani novelist Camilla Shamsi called for more, not less, imaginative engagement with her country. She says, quote, the moment you say a male American writer can't write about a female Pakistani, you are saying, don't tell these stories. And even worse so, you're saying, as an American male, you can't understand a Pakistani woman. She is enigmatic, inscrutable, and unknowable. Therefore she's other.

Leave her and her nation to its otherness. Write them out of your history. I ran across a wonderful article in Ian magazine. No surprise that they come up pretty frequently here. Nabilia At jeffre Uh makes some really good points in the article is Nothing Sacred? And when she discusses, among other things, the experience of seeing non Sufi Muslims

take up the dervish whirling. Okay, he talks about, you know, the origins of this custom and then what it's like to see it, uh, it practiced by by non Muslims and say, uh, West London, and you know, it's hard to to see it as anything other than like a

hollowed out portion of someone's culture. But he also points out that quote religions and cultures, and indeed nations have survived only by being open to new ways of representing themselves, and that the survival and spread of a culture's core values come at a price, and the alternative to paying that price is sometimes fossilization. Uh, your your culture just becomes irrevalent. So this is again like plays right into

that whole American Gods thing. Essentially, the thesis of American Gods as a TV show and a novel is that these gods are are representations of cultures, and they either become fossilized and are forgotten and subsequently die, or they incorporate themselvesselves somehow into these new cultures. Yeah, like belly dancing comes to mind as a as as a potential, you know, area to ask questions like this, but one that so maybe a little more related to to you

and me. Yoga. I think it fits nicely in here because you have a practice with roots in India, but a practice that has undergone heavy alteration, alteration by Western practitioners and continues to undergo alteration as it takes takes on various forms, sometimes increasingly secular forms, other forms that reinforce spiritual concepts, concepts that that might uh that that you might argue or misappropriated as well. But if the core physical practice improves the human experience, then isn't it

worth the adaptation? That's what I'm asking in, and can't the same beset of meditation in various spirit spiritual models as long as there's a you know, an openness there, and uh, an honesty and its use. So there is actually an article in the Boston Globe that came up about this, about yoga specifically and whether it was cultural appropriation.

The tone of this article is a little bit more confrontational than I'm really willing to engage with here, but essentially the author was pushing back because there was an accusation that Western practitioners of yoga were ignoring colonialism and the oppression of where the practice originated from. Uh. And his pushback was similar to what you said, which is essentially like, well, if the practice is beneficial to mankind, shouldn't we do it anyway? Yeah? I think that at times.

I'm certainly not trying to boil all this down to this one question, but I think sometimes we have to ask ourselves is there a legacy of horror here? And in the answer, no matter where you are in life, for culture is almost always yes, uh. And again that's not not too blanketly forgive any cultural transgression, but maybe it's simply important to on some level acknowledge the legacy

of horror and everything we do. Uh. And I realized it sounds a bit dark even for us, but but you know it, it kind of falls in line with what we've been talking here, like be prepared to, uh, to slip on the horror lens from time to time, if only for a moment, if only to ground or present choices, beliefs and privileges. Uh, you know, in in a in an appropriate frame of reference. That's my personal take on it. Anyway. Yeah, so you know we're winding

up here. I think uh that you know, the research looking at this it helped me a little bit with my question in terms of like the work that I'm creating, but also in terms of, you know, what are things that I should be offended by or or things that I maybe should question out loud versus other things where it's sometimes, like I said, there's lots of content created on the internet about this because it's fuel for the fire and it gets AD clicks. So you know, is

this worth clicking on? Is this headline worth engaging with? Or should I just skip right past it. So hopefully we've provided you with some additional insight here and some additional tools, uh for you to just figure out where you stand on all of this and and to understand where other people are falling on on the topic of

cultural appropriation and cultural appropriation. Yeah, and I have to say, as a fan of the show before I joined the show, Robert does a really good job on Stuff to Blow your Mind dot Com of incorporating a lot of different cultures into our examination of sciences and philosophy over the last what is it now, six seven years that the

show has been going on that. Yeah, So if you visit stuff to Blow your Mind dot com, you're just gonna find a lot of really interesting insights and that are connected to what we were talking about here today. And not only that, we've got all these are from our blog posts, are podcast episodes, videos that we've done. And then you've also got links out to all of our social accounts if you want to interact with us about this topic. That links to our Facebook, Twitter, Instagram

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