(Post 1 of 2.)
Rather than beat around the bush, I'll speak to what Shriver said. I will ignore breathless speculation about our inevitable PC dystopia, and go with the specific examples she gave:
Let’s start with a tempest-in-a-teacup at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. Earlier this year, two students, both members of student government, threw a tequila-themed birthday party for a friend. The hosts provided attendees with miniature sombreros, which—the horror— numerous partygoers wore.
When photos of the party circulated on social media, campus-wide outrage ensued. Administrators sent multiple emails to the “culprits” threatening an investigation into an “act of ethnic stereotyping.” Partygoers were placed on “social probation,” while the two hosts were ejected from their dorm and later impeached. Bowdoin’s student newspaper decried the attendees’ lack of “basic empathy.”
The student government issued a “statement of solidarity” with “all the students who were injured and affected by the incident,” and demanded that administrators “create a safe space for those students who have been or feel specifically targeted.” The tequila party, the statement specified, was just the sort of occasion that “creates an environment where students of colour, particularly Latino, and especially Mexican, feel unsafe.” In sum, the party-favour hats constituted – wait for it – “cultural appropriation.”
OK, so what we have here is apparently a defense of racial stereotyping. And it wasn't their first offense.
The school newspaper editorialized about attendees’ lack of “basic empathy” and placed the event in the context of two other controversially themed parties from the past two years: a “gangster party” (at which some students showed up with cornrows and gold chains) and a racially insensitive Thanksgiving party(where some dressed as Pilgrims and Native Americans).
If you want to defend that, go right ahead! I'm curious to see what the justification is there.
Next quote:
Curiously, across my country Mexican restaurants, often owned and run by Mexicans, are festooned with sombreros – if perhaps not for long. At the UK’s University of East Anglia, the student union has banned a Mexican restaurant from giving out sombreros, deemed once more an act of “cultural appropriation” that was also racist.
OK, I don't see what's wrong with Mexican restaurants owned and run by Mexicans using Mexican sombreros...
The University of East Anglia story is interesting because, at a minimum, the student union is apparently hypocritical on this issue, condoning some forms of appropriation while condemning others.
In his masterwork English Passengers, Matthew Kneale would have restrained himself from including chapters written in an Aboriginal’s voice – though these are some of the richest, most compelling passages in that novel. If Dalton Trumbo had been scared off of describing being trapped in a body with no arms, legs, or face because he was not personally disabled – because he had not been through a World War I maiming himself and therefore had no right to “appropriate” the isolation of a paraplegic – we wouldn’t have the haunting 1938 classic, Johnny Got His Gun.
We wouldn’t have Maria McCann’s erotic masterpiece, As Meat Loves Salt – in which a straight woman writes about gay men in the English Civil War. Though the book is nonfiction, it’s worth noting that we also wouldn’t have 1961’s Black Like Me, for which John Howard Griffin committed the now unpardonable sin of “blackface.” Having his skin darkened – Michael Jackson in reverse – Griffin found out what it was like to live as a black man in the segregated American South. He’d be excoriated today, yet that book made a powerful social impact at the time.
The author of Who Owns Culture? Appropriation and Authenticity in American Law, Susan Scafidi, a law professor at Fordham University who for the record is white, defines cultural appropriation as “taking intellectual property, traditional knowledge, cultural expressions, or artifacts from someone else’s culture without permission. This can include unauthorised use of another culture’s dance, dress, music, language, folklore, cuisine, traditional medicine, religious symbols, etc.”
I will freely admit that Scafidi's widely cited definition is troublesome because it includes an impossible component: obtaining permission. How do you get permission from the black community to use elements of black culture? Well, you can't. That's impossible.
The WIki definition offers this, which is rather closer to the point:
Often, the original meaning of these cultural elements is lost or distorted, which means that these uses may be viewed as disrespectful by members of the originating culture, or even as a form of desecration. Cultural elements which may have deep meaning to the original culture can be reduced to "exotic" fashion by those from the dominant culture.[7][8][13] When this is done, critics of cultural appropriation say that the imitator, "who does not experience that oppression is able to 'play,' temporarily, an 'exotic' other, without experiencing any of the daily discriminations faced by other cultures."[13]
Ultimately, it is the use of the elements of another culture without understanding or respecting them that represents the heart of anti-appropriation criticism. There is nothing wrong, per se, with a white writer creating and using black characters--so long as they have made an earnest effort to understand and represent the kind of experience such a character might have.
So far, the majority of these farcical cases of “appropriation” have concentrated on fashion, dance, and music: At the American Music Awards 2013, Katy Perry got it in the neck for dressing like a geisha. According to the Arab-American writer Randa Jarrar, for someone like me to practice belly dancing is “white appropriation of Eastern dance,” while according to the Daily Beast Iggy Azalea committed “cultural crimes” by imitating African rap and speaking in a “blaccent.”
Hm, what do all of these examples have in common? Ah, right, a person of relative privilege adopts cultural elements in a superficial manner, divorced from their original context and with no understanding of or respect for the elements themselves, nor their original culture. In other words, Shriver is defending laziness.
The felony of cultural sticky fingers even extends to exercise: at the University of Ottawa in Canada, a yoga teacher was shamed into suspending her class, “because yoga originally comes from India.” She offered to re-title the course, “Mindful Stretching.” And get this: the purism has also reached the world of food. Supported by no less than Lena Dunham, students at Oberlin College in Ohio have protested “culturally appropriated food” like sushi in their dining hall (lucky cusses— in my day, we never had sushi in our dining hall), whose inauthenticity is “insensitive” to the Japanese.
I'm fairly indifferent to the yoga issue, though it's perfectly fair to describe the way it's used in the US and Canada as highly appropriative: normally promoted by white people trying to make a buck without possessing any real understanding of the practice nor its religious/philosophical underpinnings. Why even call it "yoga" if the only parts you want are the physical positions and stretching? Because "yoga" makes it sound exotic and cool. Again, laziness.
At least we found one thing to agree on: Lena Dunham sucks.
But what about the Oberlin College thing? Try this:
The core student grievance, as reported by Clover Lihn Tran at The Oberlin Review: Bon Appétit, the food service vendor, “has a history of blurring the line between culinary diversity and cultural appropriation by modifying the recipes without respect for certain Asian countries’ cuisines. This uninformed representation of cultural dishes has been noted by a multitude of students, many of who have expressed concern over the gross manipulation of traditional recipes.”
There's that pattern again: lazy white people ripping off other cultures because they think it's cool (and sometimes to make a buck).
Seriously, we have people questioning whether it’sappropriate for white people to eat pad Thai. Turnabout, then: I guess that means that as a native of North Carolina, I can ban the Thais from eating barbecue. (I bet they’d swap.)
I don't see anything wrong with people "questioning" things like that. Examining one's own actions is a good thing. For what it's worth, there is no real consensus on whether eating food from other cultures is inherently appropriative. It has a lot to do with one's motivations in doing so, and is a thornier issue than, say, a white person with no real connection to Japan or Japanese culture opening a sushi restaurant full of Americanized sushi recipes.
The latter part is the typical false equivalence people who don't understand privilege always engage in. Might as well say "black people are the real racists" for all the understanding of the issues it demonstrates.
This same sensibility is coming to a bookstore near you. Because who is the appropriator par excellence, really? Who assumes other people’s voices, accents, patois, and distinctive idioms? Who literally puts words into the mouths of people different from themselves? Who dares to get inside the very heads of strangers, who has the chutzpah to project thoughts and feelings into the minds of others, who steals their very souls? Who is a professional kidnapper? Who swipes every sight, smell, sensation, or overheard conversation like a kid in a candy store, and sometimes take notes the better to purloin whole worlds? Who is the premier pickpocket of the arts?
The fiction writer, that’s who.
And here we get to the core of her complaint: people might complain about what I write. To which I can only say: too bad. Get used to criticism. If you put some thought into what you write and make an earnest effort to understand and respect the cultures whose artifacts you may employ in your writing, you probably won't run into much trouble. Sure, some people might yell "appropriation" anyway, but you'll always have that--there will always be people complaining about something.
I would also suggest paying attention to such critiques just in case they are on to something. Did you responsibly employ elements of another culture, or did you engage in lazy stereotyping? Did you say something meaningful about the culture you portrayed, or did you merely reinforce bigotry and oppression? If you aren't thinking about these things when you write about other cultures, you're just plain being a lousy writer.
As for the culture police’s obsession with “authenticity,” fiction is inherently inauthentic. It’s fake. It’s self-confessedly fake; that is the nature of the form, which is about people who don’t exist and events that didn’t happen. The name of the game is not whether your novel honours reality; it’s all about what you can get away with.
Except it's not about "authenticity." Mexican food isn't best when made by Mexicans because it's "authentic," but because they're inherently going to grasp their own culture and its elements better than outsiders will.
A central issue in all this is not just that privileged folks just borrow whatever they want, but that that borrowing perpetuates an ongoing and harmful disrespect to the source culture. Before something is appropriated, it's "weird," or it's "wrong," or otherwise demeaned and marginalized. For instance, minorities who eat their traditional cuisine in view of others get mocked and shamed for it. Then some white chef gets the brilliant idea to rip off that cuisine and turn it into a hot new trend--now it's perfectly acceptable and fine for everyone to enjoy! Except the original food--the real deal--is still stigmatized, and the people belonging to the culture from which it was appropriated don't really get any benefit from it.
Idealistically, it's viewed as a cultural exchange that easily works in both directions. In practice, it doesn't work that way at all. The privileged majority rip off what they want while going on to stigmatize and marginalize the very minorities they are content to appropriate from whenever they feel like it.
OK, on to the next part:
In his 2009 novel Little Bee, Chris Cleave, who as it happens is participating in this festival, dared to write from the point of view of a 14-year-old Nigerian girl, though he is male, white, and British. I’ll remain neutral on whether he “got away with it” in literary terms, because I haven’t read the book yet.
But in principle, I admire his courage – if only because he invited this kind of ethical forensics in a review out of San Francisco: “When a white male author writes as a young Nigerian girl, is it an act of empathy, or identity theft?” the reviewer asked. “When an author pretends to be someone he is not, he does it to tell a story outside of his own experiential range. But he has to in turn be careful that he is representing his characters, not using them for his plot.”
Hold it. OK, he’s necessarily “representing” his characters, by portraying them on the page. But of course he’s using them for his plot! How could he not? They are his characters, to be manipulated at his whim, to fulfill whatever purpose he cares to put them to.
This same reviewer recapitulated Cleave’s obligation “to show that he’s representing [the girl], rather than exploiting her.” Again, a false dichotomy.
Of course he’s exploiting her. It’s his book, and he made her up. The character is his creature, to be exploited up a storm. Yet the reviewer chides that “special care should be taken with a story that’s not implicitly yours to tell” and worries that “Cleave pushes his own boundaries maybe further than they were meant to go.”
What stories are “implicitly ours to tell,” and what boundaries around our own lives are we mandated to remain within? I would argue that any story you canmake yours is yours to tell, and trying to push the boundaries of the author’s personal experience is part of a fiction writer’s job.
I haven't read Cleave's book, either, but from what I can tell it's been very well-received, so again--what's Shriver blowing up about? I looked and couldn't find any charges that Cleave's book was in any way considered appropriative or offensive, perhaps because he treated the subject matter (refugee detention) in a sensitive, humanizing way and portrayed his characters--including the non-white ones--in a respectful, knowledgeable manner.
My most recent novel The Mandibles was taken to task by one reviewer for addressing an America that is “straight and white”. It happens that this is a multigenerational family saga – about a white family. I wasn’t instinctively inclined to insert a transvestite or bisexual, with issues that might distract from my central subject matter of apocalyptic economics. Yet the implication of this criticism is that we novelists need to plug in representatives of a variety of groups in our cast of characters, as if filling out the entering class of freshmen at a university with strict diversity requirements.
One reviewer! My god! It's torches and pitchforks!!
I would argue that if one has a book set in the US and it's about Americans, if all or almost all the characters are white it might be worth asking why. But tokenism isn't the point--you shouldn't include black or Hispanic people or anyone else under the mistaken belief that there's some kind of ethnic quota to fulfill. Rather, it's about self-examination and self-criticism. If all your characters are white while living in a culture that's quite diverse, why are non-white characters missing? Why have they escaped your notice, as a writer?
Besides: which is it to be? We have to tend our own gardens, and only write about ourselves or people just like us because we mustn’t pilfer others’ experience, or we have to people our cast like an I’d like to teach the world to sing Coca-Cola advert?
And so Shriver caps off her strawman and follows up with a false dichotomy. For a talented writer, she sure falls into lazy argumentation all too readily.
For it can be dangerous these days to go the diversity route. Especially since there seems to be a consensus on the notion that San Francisco reviewer put forward that “special care should be taken with a story that’s not implicitly yours to tell.”
I guess she's suggesting special care shouldn't be taken? Again, an endorsement of lazy writing. Tsk tsk.
In The Mandibles, I have one secondary character, Luella, who’s black. She’s married to a more central character, Douglas, the Mandible family’s 97-year-old patriarch. I reasoned that Douglas, a liberal New Yorker, would credibly have left his wife for a beautiful, stately African American because arm candy of color would reflect well on him in his circle, and keep his progressive kids’ objections to a minimum. But in the end the joke is on Douglas, because Luella suffers from early onset dementia, while his ex-wife, staunchly of sound mind, ends up running a charity for dementia research. As the novel reaches its climax and the family is reduced to the street, they’re obliged to put the addled, disoriented Luella on a leash, to keep her from wandering off.
Behold, the reviewer in the Washington Post, who groundlessly accused this book of being “racist” because it doesn’t toe a strict Democratic Party line in its political outlook, described the scene thus: “The Mandibles are white. Luella, the single African American in the family, arrives in Brooklyn incontinent and demented. She needs to be physically restrained. As their fortunes become ever more dire and the family assembles for a perilous trek through the streets of lawless New York, she’s held at the end of a leash. If The Mandibles is ever made into a film, my suggestion is that this image not be employed for the movie poster.”
If your only black character is presented as a disabled freak who needs to be leashed, yeah, maybe you have a problem.
Thus in the world of identity politics, fiction writers better be careful. If we do choose to import representatives of protected groups, special rules apply. If a character happens to be black, they have to be treated with kid gloves, and never be placed in scenes that, taken out of context, might seem disrespectful. But that’s no way to write. The burden is too great, the self-examination paralysing. The natural result of that kind of criticism in the Post is that next time I don’t useany black characters, lest they do or say anything that is short of perfectly admirable and lovely.
"Paralysing," really? Maybe writing is just too tough for you.
Seriously, it's just paragraph after paragraph of "why can't I just be lazy and use whatever elements I want without regard for their original cultural context, significance, or political character?" I mean, sure, you can go ahead and be lazy and do that, but don't be shocked when the critics are unkind.
In fact, I’m reminded of a letter I received in relation to my seventh novel from an Armenian-American who objected – why did I have to make the narrator of We Need to Talk About Kevin Armenian? He didn’t like my narrator, and felt that her ethnicity disparaged his community. I took pains to explain that I knew something about Armenian heritage, because my best friend in the States was Armenian, and I also thought there was something dark and aggrieved in the culture of the Armenian diaspora that was atmospherically germane to that book. Besides, I despaired, everyone in the US has an ethnic background of some sort, and she had to be something!
OK, so two things about this bit: there's literally an "I can't be anti-Armenian, my best friend is Armenian!" here. Then it ends with yet another exasperated plea appealing to lazy thoughtlessness. "She had to be something! Gosh, why do I have to think about my choices? You just can't please anybody!"
Or, you know, you could just ignore letters like that because you're not actually obligated to accept every piece of criticism you receive.
