When I was a British teenager
in the early 1960s, there was a campaign in the USA to make animals above a
certain size but including both pets and farm animals wear diapers – that’s
nappies to me. It attracted many supporters until - three years into the campaign
- the movement’s founder was caught out and obliged to admit that it had been
started as a hoax. Meanwhile, it gave me and my school friends another reason
for thinking there was something wrong with America. The hoaxer thought so too
and the point of the hoax, as he explained in a subsequent book, was to
highlight the absurdities of American moral conservatism. (For details, start
with Wikipedia’s “Society for Indecency to Naked Animals” – even the name of
the organisation should have given the game away).
When I read news reports of
the latest cry of “Cultural Appropriation!” I think to myself: This is a hoax
waiting to happen (if it has not happened already). In fact, I predict that in
2016 we will be hoaxed.
I hope it’s an effective hoax
which targets the fact that those who cry “Cultural Appropriation” most loudly
often express themselves in terms which show a congruence with apartheid or
segregationist doctrines. They are not flying the flag for liberty or equality
or fairness; they are building walls to protect identity and exclusivity. The
banner they raise often reads Each to Their Own Kind’s Hairstyles.
On the Internet, there are
two main systems operating; these account for maybe 75% of Google Images for
“Cultural Appropriation” :
First, people go to a Fancy
Dress Party with an ill-judged theme, they take selfies of themselves in their
hastily assembled (and dire) costumes and post them on their web page. In turn,
those selfies are re-posted into someone’s “Hall of Shame” specialised to
Native Indian headdress or sombreros or straw skirts or whatever. Of course,
the people look ridiculous. That’s simply what happens when you freeze-frame
your ill-chosen Fancy Dress.
In England, upper class
fraternities like the Bullingdon Club have got wise and ban smartphones from
their gatherings. That way the lower orders will never know how they once
behaved. Unlike Prince Harry, they will never be outed for dressing up as
Nazis. A simpler solution would be to conclude that Fancy Dress Parties are
really not such a good idea anyway, whatever the theme. They are usually coy,
inhibited attempts at transgression and they don't work.
Second, young women get their
hair done and of course post a selfie. In America, this alerts the Hair Police
and if you are a white girl showing off a black hairstyle [ and the Police -
remarkably - know what makes someone White and what makes a hairstyle Black]
then you are hauled off to the neighbourhood Hall of Shame and Discussions
will occur – I read one in which a mature black woman (ten years a college
counsellor and now enrolled as a Ph D student) solemnly discusses a 12 year old
white girl’s box braids and concludes that there was no malicious
intent but, nonetheless, she has no right …
Something has gone badly
wrong if that is where we have ended up.
All cultures at all times everywhere have copied, borrowed,
appropriated from their neighbours. The traffic is ceaseless and does not just
go from oppressed to oppressor, from low to high, from poor to rich. It goes
all ways. You do not need wealth or an army or control of a school system to
copy the way those guys over there are whistling. You don’t even need those
things to learn your neighbour’s language – and languages are the most
appropriated cultures of all. We do it all the time.
A textbook of cultural anthropology is always going to be a
textbook about cultural appropriation. The “isolated tribe” is a myth: it’s
hard to find a tribe without a very lively interest in what their neighbours
are or were up to, with frequent visits (friendly or hostile) to find out
what’s going on and, sometimes, to copy it.
The History of Religion is a history of ripped-off ideas.
That's probably the most important fact about it if you want to challenge your
local religious police. But they won't like you for it.
No one (to my knowledge – and
we have a Hoax upcoming in 2016 remember ) has ever said that you need
permission to learn their language. No one claims copyright on languages.
That’s partly to do with an understanding that languages are not things which
can be stolen – they are not finite physical resources. That I speak French
does not stop French people doing the same, only better. In the same way, if I
copy your hair style, it leaves you with your hair to style. You will probably
do it better just because you have been doing it for longer.
I don’t steal anything from
you if I copy your hairstyle and you don’t steal from me if you copy from me. I
don’t demean you nor you me. If we want to, we can compare notes. If we want
to, we can be friends. When a white woman has her hair done in corn rows or
plaits or locks or whatever she is not doing anything like what is done in
“blacking up”. She isn’t going to talk differently, move her hands differently,
because of her hair style. She is not pretending . She is a white woman wearing
a black hairstyle in the same way that she might be a white woman wearing a
(Kashmiri) pashmina. She’s not on her way to some Fancy Dress Party themed
“Passing For Black”.
In England, not so long ago,
there was an advertising campaign on the sides of London buses: “Some People
are Gay. Get over it”. Maybe in America they need “Some People want to try out hairstyles. Get over It”.
I know there has been a very
bad history but with a black woman and her children in the White House, it’s
not now all one way history.
My question is this:
Does it help America become a
better place to live - and it really does terrify me from this distance
away - Does it really help to call out a 12 year old white girl on
the Internet and tell her that, No, she has no right to have her hair done in
box braids? And make her apologise for the offence? Is the Hair Police really
helping things along to a fairer, more equal, more just society?
The question isn’t something which can be dealt with by some kind of computer
app. which generate offending selfies, their categorisation and their
place in a Hall of Shame. Each bit of history has to be thought about and
weighed separately. There is no one size that fits all. Of course, some general
principle might underly it all.
If it’s about defending
chosen people, superior people, exclusivity, purity ... – well, I’m against it.
I don’t believe in segregationist ideas. They lead to Alt Right places like
Trumptown.
But if the principle is about
moving forward to a fairer more equal society where people can live well, move
about free of fear, feel respected, eat in other people’s restaurants …
then, yes, I am on side.
I want to think more about one area where I have some sympathy with the people I am disagreeing with: very marginalised groups,
very small groups who are always on the receiving end of discrimination and
Fancy Dress Parties, may have a good claim on different kinds of advocacy and
protection than big groups, more powerful groups who aren’t so threatened , who
aren’t living with their backs to the wall all the time, who have a big say
already in how things are done.
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