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kaigouI have an armband tattoo that's a family motto. It's not in English; it's in Gaelic. Yes, I do know how to pronounce (in Scots-gaelic, at least) because if it's going to be on my body, I should be able to at least say it properly. I didn't get it because I wanted secretly to be Scottish, or because I particularly like the Gaelic language; I got it because it's part of the family stories I was taught over and over, growing up.
If/when I ever return to Scotland to visit family friends, I expect I'll never wear anything that exposes this armband-tattoo. (Mostly because I can't imagine ever being warm enough there to wear something sleeveless, but that's beside the point here.) I wouldn't expose it because I've already had enough comments from folks in my life about it. "That's not English, is that Scottish? Oh, sorry, Gaelic? So you're Scottish? Do you speak Scottish, I mean, Gaelic? How do you say 'hello' in Scottish, sorry, Gaelic?"
(It is possible to have otherwise well-meaning Americans, who you tell you were born & raised in America, assume that you must speak a foreign language by virtue of your surname. Even if you've been in this country for six generations, it appears. If you get a foreign-language tattoo, just be aware: they're even more likely to assume this.)
Most of the time when I catch sight of this tattoo -- and it's hard not to, being on my arm, and right there in my face, or near enough -- I don't think, ohh, Scotland. I don't even think, ohh, not-english. I think, family.
Is this cultural appropriation of Scottish Things because I am a six-plus-generation American, with a non-English phrase on my arm? Is it a declaration of my own family's stories and a sign that they matter enough to me to have them indelibly stamped on my body? Or is it, as several folks in the occult community have asked, a sign that I'm particularly enamoured of S. L. MacGregor Mathers (from the Golden Dawn)? No, yes, most definitely no and the man wasn't even a MacGregor, thanks.
I wouldn't expose it in Scotland because yes, I'm aware I'd get defensive, doubly so if someone else were to get defensive at my obvious (if soft) Southern accent and my non-Scottishness, and take the tattoo as an emblem of "you did that because you thought it looked cool." Then I'd be defensive right back, having to explain because now my tattoo no longer just means "family" but just got saddled with some kind of imperialistic weight. Yet the thing is, that motto is the clan motto; it's not made up, it's not butchered, I know its history, I know the weight, and I chose it anyway because to me the weight of family outranks all of those.
(And besides, if I'd gone with the other major family clan, I'd have spent my life explaining why I had grip fast as a tattoo, and you can just imagine the comments that one would've gotten.)
I spent several hours this evening reading through a whole bunch of the posts on the latest internet flare-up falmes on cultural appropriation, a term that's unfortunately fuzzy in and of itself. (After some discussion, CP and I decided 'cultural imperialism' fits the negative connotations better, for us, and is enough of a clearly negative-laden word that's it far preferable to use, to make it obvious from the get-go when adaptation or appropriation stretches beyond "ooh, that's cool" into "I'm taking this over and my version is going to be the definitive one from now on.")
The acronym 'PoC' is the defining line -- person of color. That's been bouncing around in my head as a result, mingling with the revision process on my current WiP, whose protagonist is Sámi. If you were to see him in a line-up, you might think he's of similar Germanic stock as the traditional Finno-Scandinavian archetype: medium-blond hair, blue eyes, pale skin. By that standard, he's not really a person of color.
But as Sámi, he is as indigenous, marginalized, trivialized, and dismissed as any ruddy-skinned Navajo or Dakota. Even the research texts I've read list the same stereotypical complaints about Sámi as I've seen in discussions of indigenous Americans: alcoholic, stupid, lazy, probably a thief, up to no good, a drain on society. Yet when I look at pictures of Sámi versus pictures of my (Swedish) stepmother and her friends, sorry, but they look pretty much the same to me. Same strong jawlines, a range of hair and eye colors though tending towards paler, from short and stocky to tall and stocky. It's not like the Sámi have third eyes or sixth fingers or some other wildly apparent outward sign of their Sámi-ness.
I can't even tell from the majority of names, either. Most forenames among the Sámi are now Christian; most surnames now follow the Norwegian/Swedish patronymic (Ericsson, Sorensson, etc). But somehow kids in Norwegians schools can identify who among them is Sámi, and to this day show flare-ups of bigotry and racism.
However, the kid's still white-skinned, blue-eyed, blond-haired, yet I would be denying reality to say he's carried the privilege of class without taint throughout his life. Except am I still white-washing my fiction, because I picked an indigenous person who's... not indigenous-looking enough?
While CP and I were discussing this, I was trying to explain what it's like to be from the Deep South and walk into a restaurant in, say, Los Angeles, that claims to have Southern Family Cooking. If I walk in and the hostess is dressed like a knock-off Scarlett O'Hara, and the waiters are in black-face and straw hats and there's pictures of Aunt Jemima on the walls, I'm going to be offended. I'm going to be quadruply offended if someone tells me that this is an accurate representation of my culture.
(Sometimes I wonder why this is so. Wouldn't I be used to it, by now? Everyone in Hollywood on plays the "Southern accent" as meaning "stupid, bigoted, ill-educated", because slow talking is as slow thinking, unless of course the story calls for a feast and then it's always the Southerners who put enough on the table to make it start sinking in the middle, and at least that one detail is accurate, given my father's cousin's family had extra sawhorses just to keep the dining room table from collapsing in the middle.)
CP, on the other hand, saw this as 'ersatz' culture -- ignorant, perhaps, but not venial. He reminded me of the pizza place my sister went to, while she was in Ireland. She and several other classmates were all dying for something of home, and they had a weekend free and roadtripped to, hrm, I want to say Galway. They found a pizza place, and the six of them were just ecstatic. Until up walks one of the waiters, dressed in a Roy-Rogers' like shirt, bolero tie, BIG HONKING BELT BUCKLE, Wrangler Jeans, who says with a thick Irish accent, "Howdy, ya'll!"
Six American kids staring at him with their mouths open, absolutely unable to manage a response.
Until the Irish kid kinda did this little, "uhm, hello?" look and according to my sister, she and her classmates lost it. They laughed themselves silly, and ended up insisting every waiter come by to say it as well. They thought it was hysterical.
Maybe it was, but then, I'm reminded of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
truepenny's comment (in speaking of writing the Other) that seeing similarities is a "luxury [that exists] only from a position of privilege. You can be blind to the differences because they all work in your favor." What I'm twigging on here is the notion of things that "work in your favor": were the American kids not threatened by the Irish (mis)representation of their culture because, all else being equal, it's the American view that defines their world, and not the Irish mis-view?
Would it have been so funny if the six American kids were somewhere that this badly-slanted, one-sided, bizarro-world version were accepted as the de facto correct version of America? Or would it have been as offensive to them as I found it upon walking into a Southern Home Cooking restaurant in Boston and heaping insult on injury by dismissing me, and my offended reaction, as "taking it personally, geez"?
Was it that they could laugh because they had nothing to lose by doing so; that they could find humor because it had no impact on their schoolwork an hour's drive away? Was my offense because I knew that this was just a really in-my-face example of the way all my coworkers, my supervisor, my neighbors, saw me? Is it just that much harder to laugh when you got to a job interview and say hello and they assume -- based solely on your accent -- that you must be there for the receptionist position?
But middle of this discussion about what it's like to be from the Deep South and get this kind of attitude at me, as people look at me through the lens of the dominant-Hollywood version of What The Deep South Is Like and thereby judge me -- that I slipped up and threw at him something I should know better than to say: "well, look at you, you're operating from the privileged---"
Yes, before you ask, he did shut me down fast. Yes, he may look of fine Germanic (and, uh, Filipino) stock, but he was also raised in Asia. As he pointed out, for the entirety of his childhood, he did not live surrounded by people who all looked like him. He was the minority: linguistically, culturally, physically, even religiously. Jay Lake (with curiously similar coloring, heh) mentions similar experiences, though for him replace Asia with Africa.
The criticism in reference to Lake's post on this topic was, "[White men] seem to believe that they hold no ill will; if they hold no ill will, they cannot be part of the problem; if they are not part of the problem, they do not need to think about the issues any longer."
Now, granted, CP's description of the Irish and Southern restaurants -- as ignorant but hardly venial -- does superficially fit the "hold no ill will" veneer. But having lived with CP for coming on a number of years now, I think it'd be wrong to characterize him as thinking he's not part of the problem. It think it's something deeper than that.
I think it's, sometimes, a kind of dis/ease with the external impressions -- like mine, revealed just then -- that put him in category A when his own experiences are definitely categories B, C, some of D, and a few years of A but with a lot more years of the rest before ever getting to A. It's a sense of not being sure how to even tackle the problem at all, from what I can see, because the paradigms learned by someone from a multicultural/multiplicitous, daresay global, background, are just so radically different from those of us raised predominantly in a single, grounding culture.
I think of the photographer in Haiti, who's a Chinese Jew: where does he fit in? What culture does he 'belong' to?
Perhaps, is it that someone raised in such multicultural (all at once or consecutive) nurture/environment eventually reaches a point where the issues are perceived differently enough from those of us grounded in a main/original culture -- even as we observers see only the outward and assume this "no ill will" stems from the same uncaring as those stereotypical suspect "white males"? Can we really proscribe a monolithic mindset to someone solely based on having X skin and Y gender, especially if we then declare we have the right to protest like mad at the stereotyping of us for X skin and XX gender? Alternately, if you are raised to feel genuinely alien in your environment, does this produce a discomfort with the hidden step required for resentment such as I feel, about the Southern Home Cooking diner?
Because, when I say, "that's not the South!" what I am also saying is, "that is my culture, and you can't do that to it." For someone raised as effectively alien in their childhood, there is no culture to own. So the lack of ill will is not necessarily a dismissal so much as a lack of innate relation to that sense of possessiveness.
CP does not consider any Asian culture 'his', nor does he consider the Navajo culture 'his', nor does he consider Chicago or Virginia or anywhere else -- that I can tell -- 'his'. He has mentioned one or two places where he feels 'more at home', but it is not an unquestioning thing; it's not something he takes for granted, like I do the family's roots in Georgia or Tennessee. His apparent lack of ill will comes not from dismissing my ownership, but from having so little of his own.
The global child, I think, does not tread lightly because he pays no mind to the issues, but because he does not genuinely feel himself at home enough to own a position upon those issues.
It starts to feel like someone should be handing out scorecards.
If you're male, subtract ten. If you're female, add ten. If your first/only language is the dominant culture's language, subtract ten. If the language spoken in your home is not the national/dominant cultural language, add ten. If you're medium/olive-skinned where the dominant culture is white, add another five. If you're dark-dark skinned where the dominant culture is white, add ten. If you're light-skinned where the dominant culture is dark-skinned, add five. If you're Anglo where the dominant culture is Asian, add five. If you have pale skin and everyone around you is also pale-skinned, subtract twenty. If your family was top-5% wealthy, subtract fifty. If your family had to subsist on charity and/or food stamps, add fifty. If your family was middle-class, subtract ten. If your parents scraped by, add ten. If your elder siblings worked as soon as they were old enough to contribute to family expenses, add another five. If you looked the same as 75% of the people you knew, subtract twenty. If you looked like 50% or more of the people around you, subtract ten. If you looked like 25% of the people around you, add ten. If everyone around you looked like you, subtract forty. If no one outside your family looked like you, add twenty. If your favorite books were originally written in your native language, subtract twenty. If your favorite books were translated into your native language, subtract ten. If you had to learn some other language to be able to read anything as a child, add twenty. If your family's religion was the dominant-social religion, subtract thirty. If your family's religion was a major world-religion but still minority locally, add ten. If your family's religion was such a minority that you had to drive an hour just to attend services with the other five families who also drove an hour to all meet in the middle, add forty. Oh, and if your culture is usually represented as the Evil Guys, add twenty. If you're ridiculed and dismissed as ignorant yokels or stupid heathens, add thirty, because being a sidekick is far worse than being the bad guy -- at least the bad guy gets feared. The sidekick just gets killed, and never even gets laid.
And then, of course, we should find a way to adjust for the fact that we are a global nation, and a mobile one at that. So break your life out into decades, add up the values for each decade, approximately, and then divide by the number to adjust for comparing someone who's fifty years old versus someone who's twenty years old, just so we can be suitably fair about exactly how many Cultural Imperialism Points each person can have on their final score.
By that standard, I figure that my CIP-score is probably lower than CP's by between five to ten points. That Sámi kid -- for the first decade -- has a score of about plus-five, until he moved to Oslo and became a truly marginalized minority in his own right, at which point his score jumps considerably. My Methodist friend from HS with the Volvo-driving doctor-parents and the big house in the 'burbs -- oh, black friend, I should add! -- would have a substantially lower CIP-score than that Sámi kid. But, of course, the Sámi doesn't look like a person of color.
If that seems a little over-the-top, not to mention pulled out of a hat, that's because it is. Because for all that it's a terribly, terribly difficult and complex and emotion-laden topic, the experiences a person undergoes per culture is not monolithic, any more than we could say "African", like "Africa" is some kind of big contiguous space filled with tigers and antelopes in one massive Savannah and they all speak the same language and agree on the same things. Same goes for Europe, Asia, even the Americas -- to say, PoC is implying a kind of monolithic state that's just as wrong, just as ham-handed as saying "all white men believe X" and "all women choose Y" and "all Europeans like Z". It doesn't work that way, not in fiction, not in life.
Not, of course, that we could really go around quoting our CIP-scores, because that doesn't work any better than PoC, but at least with the CIP-score it's clearer to see where the problem lies. I say, my score is +5, but CP's score is +10. That doesn't tell you anything about how he, with apparent genetic bias of gender and basic appearance, could hit that level. Was he poor? Or from a marginalized religion? Or did he grow up where no one looked like him? Or were none of his childhood stories in his parents' native/home language? What got me to +5 when you might name six things about me that you'd think would put me at -10? Is my +5 somehow more, or less, valid, than the +5 of an Indian woman raised in the highest caste who went to private school in Bangalore and then attended one of the top boarding schools in France to get her high school degree?
I won't name the author (you'll find the link if you go looking, I'm sure) but this line really jumped out at me, in the list of links on this topic: A bunch of white guys talk about cultural appropriation. The first time I opened the post, I dismissed that link as easily as the author's own text. "A bunch of white guys talk about..." I actually heard myself pondering clicking the link for a split-second before skipping it, logic going, "well, what do I care about a bunch of white guys talking about it? probably just bitching about the White Man's Burden or something."
Except that it's a link to Jay Lake's post about being raised in Africa and having significant cultural impact on his world-view as a result of that -- even if you can clearly look at his icon and see (assuming that is him, and judging from other pictures I'm positive it is) that he's as Anglo-Saxon looking, overall, as CP. His post has a damn good point to make -- of whether one's childhood/external culture impacts one's world-view, even though this external/nurture element is nowhere visible on a person's body or gender or skin color -- and yet he's dismissed as one of "a bunch of white guys". Maybe the original link was supposed to be ironic, but without an introduction or context of some sort, I didn't take it that way. The only reason I ended up clicking was to make sure I didn't miss something, to grasp the poster's subsequent comments after the links, and then I read the post and thought, this is an important point.
The problem is, it's also a point that can kinda rankle if you're used to getting treated -- by virtue of your skin, or your gender, or your accent, or your whatever visual -- as though you're less-than-valid, and seeing someone who -- from all visual dogwhistles -- should have had 'the easy ride' per white/male privilege arguing that he, too, has had similar experiences... well. Yes. It can rankle, which brings us back to whether your +5 is more or less valid than my +5 and do we both have to shut up and beg forgiveness from the person with +20, even if we find out he's a blond-haired, blue-eyed, Sámi-boy? Does it change things that my +5 is over three decades and spread out through three major sub-cultures in one country, while his is two decades within thirty kilometers of his birthplace, while you've got four decades of life on three continents?
I mean, it's not like you can tattoo this shit on your arm, yo. And even if you could, I'd recommend against it. You'd just end up with people reading the +5-10+20 and asking you for the rest of your life whether you know algebra, and trust me, that's got to be right up there with people asking you how to say 'hello' in Gaelic. (For the record, I have no idea.)
Another observation fromtruepenny is that "But for some of us that empathic leap [of putting ourselves into the Other's shoes] is a luxury because the world we live in reflects our subject position back to us. We don't have to negotiate a culture that doesn't represent us or even recognize us--or represents us only as a stereotype."
I am part of the dominant culture. Kind of. First-generation middle-class on one side, third-generation on the other; sixth-plus generation American, college-educated, usually employed, or at least doing my best to fake it. Look at me, I have that luxury. And at the same time, I negotiate daily.
Because to a lot of the world, I am a stereotype, and I don't even get it half as bad as my mother did (with a strong East Tennessee accent), but I sure got enough of it when I lived in New England. Hollywood and media going back for a hundred and sixty years has turned me, and my cultural peers, into walking stereotypes. We are the slow-talking, funny-cadenced, potato-salad making, dim-witted, flower-dress-wearing, big-dinner-making Southerners.
When we're young, we're cute and sell you grape juice and Oscar-Meyer hotdogs. In our teens, we're the innocent fresh-faced girl-next-door unless we're the preacher's daughter in which case we've slept with every boy in town, some twice. In our twenties, we're the young wife who's got a kid and another on the way and still teaches Sunday School and isn't too bright but is just the sweetest thing anyway, insert jokes about marrying cousins (or siblings) -- unless we're the rare sassy girl who runs off to NYC or LA where we get treated even worse thanks to our small-town ways and our small-church values and that stupid stupid accent that tells everyone right off the bat that all we have between our ears must be potato salad recipes.
If we're white, we attended cotillion. If we're black, we picked cotton. We don't get to really show any sign of life until our fifties, when we're expected to wear funny hats -- regardless of skin-color -- and say witty lines and flirt outrageously and grow too many tomatoes.
Yeah, I'm negotiatin' yer freaking stereotypes, RIGHT HERE, BABY.
The issue should not be, is your experience of being stereotyped, of being marginalized behind someone else's definition of who-you-should-be, more or less valid than mine, but: we have all been there, and will be there again, and to understand the Other we must understand that we've gotten that too, and remember just how disgusted and angry and resentful it made us feel, too.
And not to do it to trot out our street-cred on marginalization, but to keep ourselves in perspective when we holler about whether we've got more, or less, right than anyone else. I do not spend all day looking at my skin color and defining myself by it, this is true, but I am acutely aware of my gender nearly all the time, so on that level -- yes, I can say: I have basis for relating to your resentment. What would I have wanted, can I offer you that, would that help you, concretely? It's at least a place to start. In return, being aware of that, I need to also remember that there have been times where I am part of the dominant paradigm; I'm not always the victim, either. Everyone gets their cards taken away from them. No card-playing.
Or more realistically: I can't take away anyone else's cards. But I do owe it to any sane discussion to try and lay my own on the table and refuse to play them. The drawback sometimes is that it seems the harder I try to listen, and think about stuff instead of playing on automatic... the better I get at putting my foot right in my mouth, up to my hip. Y'know, it's bad enough with ADHD the rest of the time, but when I add in general introverted social discomfort, boy, I can say some stupid things sometimes. Not intentionally (in a malicious sense) but just plain stupidity. I think of those cringe-worthy moments and look at posts like this and think, man, am I gonna regret this, too? It's a damn good thing my foot is mint-flavored, at least.
Back on topic: does this kind of think-first attitude do anything to help/bring-along those guys who are born male, white, and wealthy, in cultures where their parents' language and religion and values reflect that of the dominant paradigm? No. But then again, having known my share of guys from that background, I'm not sure anything much will help them short of a baseball bat, frankly. Or maybe send them all off to do two years for the Peace Corps, where their faces are not the faces they'll see around them every day, where they're the minority and must adjust to the majority which is not like themselves.
(Actually, maybe that might be a good idea. Hrm.)
Now, whenmatociquala writes:
However, it can be boring and/or annoying to read someone's thought processes about characters in their own stories (and I've never written anyone else's stories to know their approaches so unfortunately I am stuck with my own), so I figured better to give you the option to skip, or to read if you so choose.
My head hurts. Maybe I should just take up knitting.
also, very much worth reading iszvi_likes_tv's post what I learned about tone.
If/when I ever return to Scotland to visit family friends, I expect I'll never wear anything that exposes this armband-tattoo. (Mostly because I can't imagine ever being warm enough there to wear something sleeveless, but that's beside the point here.) I wouldn't expose it because I've already had enough comments from folks in my life about it. "That's not English, is that Scottish? Oh, sorry, Gaelic? So you're Scottish? Do you speak Scottish, I mean, Gaelic? How do you say 'hello' in Scottish, sorry, Gaelic?"
(It is possible to have otherwise well-meaning Americans, who you tell you were born & raised in America, assume that you must speak a foreign language by virtue of your surname. Even if you've been in this country for six generations, it appears. If you get a foreign-language tattoo, just be aware: they're even more likely to assume this.)
Most of the time when I catch sight of this tattoo -- and it's hard not to, being on my arm, and right there in my face, or near enough -- I don't think, ohh, Scotland. I don't even think, ohh, not-english. I think, family.
Is this cultural appropriation of Scottish Things because I am a six-plus-generation American, with a non-English phrase on my arm? Is it a declaration of my own family's stories and a sign that they matter enough to me to have them indelibly stamped on my body? Or is it, as several folks in the occult community have asked, a sign that I'm particularly enamoured of S. L. MacGregor Mathers (from the Golden Dawn)? No, yes, most definitely no and the man wasn't even a MacGregor, thanks.
I wouldn't expose it in Scotland because yes, I'm aware I'd get defensive, doubly so if someone else were to get defensive at my obvious (if soft) Southern accent and my non-Scottishness, and take the tattoo as an emblem of "you did that because you thought it looked cool." Then I'd be defensive right back, having to explain because now my tattoo no longer just means "family" but just got saddled with some kind of imperialistic weight. Yet the thing is, that motto is the clan motto; it's not made up, it's not butchered, I know its history, I know the weight, and I chose it anyway because to me the weight of family outranks all of those.
(And besides, if I'd gone with the other major family clan, I'd have spent my life explaining why I had grip fast as a tattoo, and you can just imagine the comments that one would've gotten.)
I spent several hours this evening reading through a whole bunch of the posts on the latest internet flare-up falmes on cultural appropriation, a term that's unfortunately fuzzy in and of itself. (After some discussion, CP and I decided 'cultural imperialism' fits the negative connotations better, for us, and is enough of a clearly negative-laden word that's it far preferable to use, to make it obvious from the get-go when adaptation or appropriation stretches beyond "ooh, that's cool" into "I'm taking this over and my version is going to be the definitive one from now on.")
The acronym 'PoC' is the defining line -- person of color. That's been bouncing around in my head as a result, mingling with the revision process on my current WiP, whose protagonist is Sámi. If you were to see him in a line-up, you might think he's of similar Germanic stock as the traditional Finno-Scandinavian archetype: medium-blond hair, blue eyes, pale skin. By that standard, he's not really a person of color.
But as Sámi, he is as indigenous, marginalized, trivialized, and dismissed as any ruddy-skinned Navajo or Dakota. Even the research texts I've read list the same stereotypical complaints about Sámi as I've seen in discussions of indigenous Americans: alcoholic, stupid, lazy, probably a thief, up to no good, a drain on society. Yet when I look at pictures of Sámi versus pictures of my (Swedish) stepmother and her friends, sorry, but they look pretty much the same to me. Same strong jawlines, a range of hair and eye colors though tending towards paler, from short and stocky to tall and stocky. It's not like the Sámi have third eyes or sixth fingers or some other wildly apparent outward sign of their Sámi-ness.
I can't even tell from the majority of names, either. Most forenames among the Sámi are now Christian; most surnames now follow the Norwegian/Swedish patronymic (Ericsson, Sorensson, etc). But somehow kids in Norwegians schools can identify who among them is Sámi, and to this day show flare-ups of bigotry and racism.
However, the kid's still white-skinned, blue-eyed, blond-haired, yet I would be denying reality to say he's carried the privilege of class without taint throughout his life. Except am I still white-washing my fiction, because I picked an indigenous person who's... not indigenous-looking enough?
While CP and I were discussing this, I was trying to explain what it's like to be from the Deep South and walk into a restaurant in, say, Los Angeles, that claims to have Southern Family Cooking. If I walk in and the hostess is dressed like a knock-off Scarlett O'Hara, and the waiters are in black-face and straw hats and there's pictures of Aunt Jemima on the walls, I'm going to be offended. I'm going to be quadruply offended if someone tells me that this is an accurate representation of my culture.
(Sometimes I wonder why this is so. Wouldn't I be used to it, by now? Everyone in Hollywood on plays the "Southern accent" as meaning "stupid, bigoted, ill-educated", because slow talking is as slow thinking, unless of course the story calls for a feast and then it's always the Southerners who put enough on the table to make it start sinking in the middle, and at least that one detail is accurate, given my father's cousin's family had extra sawhorses just to keep the dining room table from collapsing in the middle.)
CP, on the other hand, saw this as 'ersatz' culture -- ignorant, perhaps, but not venial. He reminded me of the pizza place my sister went to, while she was in Ireland. She and several other classmates were all dying for something of home, and they had a weekend free and roadtripped to, hrm, I want to say Galway. They found a pizza place, and the six of them were just ecstatic. Until up walks one of the waiters, dressed in a Roy-Rogers' like shirt, bolero tie, BIG HONKING BELT BUCKLE, Wrangler Jeans, who says with a thick Irish accent, "Howdy, ya'll!"
Six American kids staring at him with their mouths open, absolutely unable to manage a response.
Until the Irish kid kinda did this little, "uhm, hello?" look and according to my sister, she and her classmates lost it. They laughed themselves silly, and ended up insisting every waiter come by to say it as well. They thought it was hysterical.
Maybe it was, but then, I'm reminded of
truepenny's comment (in speaking of writing the Other) that seeing similarities is a "luxury [that exists] only from a position of privilege. You can be blind to the differences because they all work in your favor." What I'm twigging on here is the notion of things that "work in your favor": were the American kids not threatened by the Irish (mis)representation of their culture because, all else being equal, it's the American view that defines their world, and not the Irish mis-view?Would it have been so funny if the six American kids were somewhere that this badly-slanted, one-sided, bizarro-world version were accepted as the de facto correct version of America? Or would it have been as offensive to them as I found it upon walking into a Southern Home Cooking restaurant in Boston and heaping insult on injury by dismissing me, and my offended reaction, as "taking it personally, geez"?
Was it that they could laugh because they had nothing to lose by doing so; that they could find humor because it had no impact on their schoolwork an hour's drive away? Was my offense because I knew that this was just a really in-my-face example of the way all my coworkers, my supervisor, my neighbors, saw me? Is it just that much harder to laugh when you got to a job interview and say hello and they assume -- based solely on your accent -- that you must be there for the receptionist position?
But middle of this discussion about what it's like to be from the Deep South and get this kind of attitude at me, as people look at me through the lens of the dominant-Hollywood version of What The Deep South Is Like and thereby judge me -- that I slipped up and threw at him something I should know better than to say: "well, look at you, you're operating from the privileged---"
Yes, before you ask, he did shut me down fast. Yes, he may look of fine Germanic (and, uh, Filipino) stock, but he was also raised in Asia. As he pointed out, for the entirety of his childhood, he did not live surrounded by people who all looked like him. He was the minority: linguistically, culturally, physically, even religiously. Jay Lake (with curiously similar coloring, heh) mentions similar experiences, though for him replace Asia with Africa.
The criticism in reference to Lake's post on this topic was, "[White men] seem to believe that they hold no ill will; if they hold no ill will, they cannot be part of the problem; if they are not part of the problem, they do not need to think about the issues any longer."
Now, granted, CP's description of the Irish and Southern restaurants -- as ignorant but hardly venial -- does superficially fit the "hold no ill will" veneer. But having lived with CP for coming on a number of years now, I think it'd be wrong to characterize him as thinking he's not part of the problem. It think it's something deeper than that.
I think it's, sometimes, a kind of dis/ease with the external impressions -- like mine, revealed just then -- that put him in category A when his own experiences are definitely categories B, C, some of D, and a few years of A but with a lot more years of the rest before ever getting to A. It's a sense of not being sure how to even tackle the problem at all, from what I can see, because the paradigms learned by someone from a multicultural/multiplicitous, daresay global, background, are just so radically different from those of us raised predominantly in a single, grounding culture.
I think of the photographer in Haiti, who's a Chinese Jew: where does he fit in? What culture does he 'belong' to?
Perhaps, is it that someone raised in such multicultural (all at once or consecutive) nurture/environment eventually reaches a point where the issues are perceived differently enough from those of us grounded in a main/original culture -- even as we observers see only the outward and assume this "no ill will" stems from the same uncaring as those stereotypical suspect "white males"? Can we really proscribe a monolithic mindset to someone solely based on having X skin and Y gender, especially if we then declare we have the right to protest like mad at the stereotyping of us for X skin and XX gender? Alternately, if you are raised to feel genuinely alien in your environment, does this produce a discomfort with the hidden step required for resentment such as I feel, about the Southern Home Cooking diner?
Because, when I say, "that's not the South!" what I am also saying is, "that is my culture, and you can't do that to it." For someone raised as effectively alien in their childhood, there is no culture to own. So the lack of ill will is not necessarily a dismissal so much as a lack of innate relation to that sense of possessiveness.
CP does not consider any Asian culture 'his', nor does he consider the Navajo culture 'his', nor does he consider Chicago or Virginia or anywhere else -- that I can tell -- 'his'. He has mentioned one or two places where he feels 'more at home', but it is not an unquestioning thing; it's not something he takes for granted, like I do the family's roots in Georgia or Tennessee. His apparent lack of ill will comes not from dismissing my ownership, but from having so little of his own.
The global child, I think, does not tread lightly because he pays no mind to the issues, but because he does not genuinely feel himself at home enough to own a position upon those issues.
It starts to feel like someone should be handing out scorecards.
If you're male, subtract ten. If you're female, add ten. If your first/only language is the dominant culture's language, subtract ten. If the language spoken in your home is not the national/dominant cultural language, add ten. If you're medium/olive-skinned where the dominant culture is white, add another five. If you're dark-dark skinned where the dominant culture is white, add ten. If you're light-skinned where the dominant culture is dark-skinned, add five. If you're Anglo where the dominant culture is Asian, add five. If you have pale skin and everyone around you is also pale-skinned, subtract twenty. If your family was top-5% wealthy, subtract fifty. If your family had to subsist on charity and/or food stamps, add fifty. If your family was middle-class, subtract ten. If your parents scraped by, add ten. If your elder siblings worked as soon as they were old enough to contribute to family expenses, add another five. If you looked the same as 75% of the people you knew, subtract twenty. If you looked like 50% or more of the people around you, subtract ten. If you looked like 25% of the people around you, add ten. If everyone around you looked like you, subtract forty. If no one outside your family looked like you, add twenty. If your favorite books were originally written in your native language, subtract twenty. If your favorite books were translated into your native language, subtract ten. If you had to learn some other language to be able to read anything as a child, add twenty. If your family's religion was the dominant-social religion, subtract thirty. If your family's religion was a major world-religion but still minority locally, add ten. If your family's religion was such a minority that you had to drive an hour just to attend services with the other five families who also drove an hour to all meet in the middle, add forty. Oh, and if your culture is usually represented as the Evil Guys, add twenty. If you're ridiculed and dismissed as ignorant yokels or stupid heathens, add thirty, because being a sidekick is far worse than being the bad guy -- at least the bad guy gets feared. The sidekick just gets killed, and never even gets laid.
And then, of course, we should find a way to adjust for the fact that we are a global nation, and a mobile one at that. So break your life out into decades, add up the values for each decade, approximately, and then divide by the number to adjust for comparing someone who's fifty years old versus someone who's twenty years old, just so we can be suitably fair about exactly how many Cultural Imperialism Points each person can have on their final score.
By that standard, I figure that my CIP-score is probably lower than CP's by between five to ten points. That Sámi kid -- for the first decade -- has a score of about plus-five, until he moved to Oslo and became a truly marginalized minority in his own right, at which point his score jumps considerably. My Methodist friend from HS with the Volvo-driving doctor-parents and the big house in the 'burbs -- oh, black friend, I should add! -- would have a substantially lower CIP-score than that Sámi kid. But, of course, the Sámi doesn't look like a person of color.
If that seems a little over-the-top, not to mention pulled out of a hat, that's because it is. Because for all that it's a terribly, terribly difficult and complex and emotion-laden topic, the experiences a person undergoes per culture is not monolithic, any more than we could say "African", like "Africa" is some kind of big contiguous space filled with tigers and antelopes in one massive Savannah and they all speak the same language and agree on the same things. Same goes for Europe, Asia, even the Americas -- to say, PoC is implying a kind of monolithic state that's just as wrong, just as ham-handed as saying "all white men believe X" and "all women choose Y" and "all Europeans like Z". It doesn't work that way, not in fiction, not in life.
Not, of course, that we could really go around quoting our CIP-scores, because that doesn't work any better than PoC, but at least with the CIP-score it's clearer to see where the problem lies. I say, my score is +5, but CP's score is +10. That doesn't tell you anything about how he, with apparent genetic bias of gender and basic appearance, could hit that level. Was he poor? Or from a marginalized religion? Or did he grow up where no one looked like him? Or were none of his childhood stories in his parents' native/home language? What got me to +5 when you might name six things about me that you'd think would put me at -10? Is my +5 somehow more, or less, valid, than the +5 of an Indian woman raised in the highest caste who went to private school in Bangalore and then attended one of the top boarding schools in France to get her high school degree?
I won't name the author (you'll find the link if you go looking, I'm sure) but this line really jumped out at me, in the list of links on this topic: A bunch of white guys talk about cultural appropriation. The first time I opened the post, I dismissed that link as easily as the author's own text. "A bunch of white guys talk about..." I actually heard myself pondering clicking the link for a split-second before skipping it, logic going, "well, what do I care about a bunch of white guys talking about it? probably just bitching about the White Man's Burden or something."
Except that it's a link to Jay Lake's post about being raised in Africa and having significant cultural impact on his world-view as a result of that -- even if you can clearly look at his icon and see (assuming that is him, and judging from other pictures I'm positive it is) that he's as Anglo-Saxon looking, overall, as CP. His post has a damn good point to make -- of whether one's childhood/external culture impacts one's world-view, even though this external/nurture element is nowhere visible on a person's body or gender or skin color -- and yet he's dismissed as one of "a bunch of white guys". Maybe the original link was supposed to be ironic, but without an introduction or context of some sort, I didn't take it that way. The only reason I ended up clicking was to make sure I didn't miss something, to grasp the poster's subsequent comments after the links, and then I read the post and thought, this is an important point.
The problem is, it's also a point that can kinda rankle if you're used to getting treated -- by virtue of your skin, or your gender, or your accent, or your whatever visual -- as though you're less-than-valid, and seeing someone who -- from all visual dogwhistles -- should have had 'the easy ride' per white/male privilege arguing that he, too, has had similar experiences... well. Yes. It can rankle, which brings us back to whether your +5 is more or less valid than my +5 and do we both have to shut up and beg forgiveness from the person with +20, even if we find out he's a blond-haired, blue-eyed, Sámi-boy? Does it change things that my +5 is over three decades and spread out through three major sub-cultures in one country, while his is two decades within thirty kilometers of his birthplace, while you've got four decades of life on three continents?
I mean, it's not like you can tattoo this shit on your arm, yo. And even if you could, I'd recommend against it. You'd just end up with people reading the +5-10+20 and asking you for the rest of your life whether you know algebra, and trust me, that's got to be right up there with people asking you how to say 'hello' in Gaelic. (For the record, I have no idea.)
Another observation from
truepenny is that "But for some of us that empathic leap [of putting ourselves into the Other's shoes] is a luxury because the world we live in reflects our subject position back to us. We don't have to negotiate a culture that doesn't represent us or even recognize us--or represents us only as a stereotype."I am part of the dominant culture. Kind of. First-generation middle-class on one side, third-generation on the other; sixth-plus generation American, college-educated, usually employed, or at least doing my best to fake it. Look at me, I have that luxury. And at the same time, I negotiate daily.
Because to a lot of the world, I am a stereotype, and I don't even get it half as bad as my mother did (with a strong East Tennessee accent), but I sure got enough of it when I lived in New England. Hollywood and media going back for a hundred and sixty years has turned me, and my cultural peers, into walking stereotypes. We are the slow-talking, funny-cadenced, potato-salad making, dim-witted, flower-dress-wearing, big-dinner-making Southerners.
When we're young, we're cute and sell you grape juice and Oscar-Meyer hotdogs. In our teens, we're the innocent fresh-faced girl-next-door unless we're the preacher's daughter in which case we've slept with every boy in town, some twice. In our twenties, we're the young wife who's got a kid and another on the way and still teaches Sunday School and isn't too bright but is just the sweetest thing anyway, insert jokes about marrying cousins (or siblings) -- unless we're the rare sassy girl who runs off to NYC or LA where we get treated even worse thanks to our small-town ways and our small-church values and that stupid stupid accent that tells everyone right off the bat that all we have between our ears must be potato salad recipes.
If we're white, we attended cotillion. If we're black, we picked cotton. We don't get to really show any sign of life until our fifties, when we're expected to wear funny hats -- regardless of skin-color -- and say witty lines and flirt outrageously and grow too many tomatoes.
Yeah, I'm negotiatin' yer freaking stereotypes, RIGHT HERE, BABY.
The issue should not be, is your experience of being stereotyped, of being marginalized behind someone else's definition of who-you-should-be, more or less valid than mine, but: we have all been there, and will be there again, and to understand the Other we must understand that we've gotten that too, and remember just how disgusted and angry and resentful it made us feel, too.
And not to do it to trot out our street-cred on marginalization, but to keep ourselves in perspective when we holler about whether we've got more, or less, right than anyone else. I do not spend all day looking at my skin color and defining myself by it, this is true, but I am acutely aware of my gender nearly all the time, so on that level -- yes, I can say: I have basis for relating to your resentment. What would I have wanted, can I offer you that, would that help you, concretely? It's at least a place to start. In return, being aware of that, I need to also remember that there have been times where I am part of the dominant paradigm; I'm not always the victim, either. Everyone gets their cards taken away from them. No card-playing.
Or more realistically: I can't take away anyone else's cards. But I do owe it to any sane discussion to try and lay my own on the table and refuse to play them. The drawback sometimes is that it seems the harder I try to listen, and think about stuff instead of playing on automatic... the better I get at putting my foot right in my mouth, up to my hip. Y'know, it's bad enough with ADHD the rest of the time, but when I add in general introverted social discomfort, boy, I can say some stupid things sometimes. Not intentionally (in a malicious sense) but just plain stupidity. I think of those cringe-worthy moments and look at posts like this and think, man, am I gonna regret this, too? It's a damn good thing my foot is mint-flavored, at least.
Back on topic: does this kind of think-first attitude do anything to help/bring-along those guys who are born male, white, and wealthy, in cultures where their parents' language and religion and values reflect that of the dominant paradigm? No. But then again, having known my share of guys from that background, I'm not sure anything much will help them short of a baseball bat, frankly. Or maybe send them all off to do two years for the Peace Corps, where their faces are not the faces they'll see around them every day, where they're the minority and must adjust to the majority which is not like themselves.
(Actually, maybe that might be a good idea. Hrm.)
Now, when
matociquala writes:...the difference between Ben Kenobi and a magical Negro is that Ben is not Other to everybody else in the film. And that's also the solution, right there. Because if you only have one of something, it automatically becomes a poster child.I find myself thinking of the analogy of this post's title (from Albert Camus' statement, "We come into the world laden with the weight of an infinite necessity"), and to badly mix metaphors -- when you put all your Other-eggs into a single Other-type basket, it gets really freaking heavy, and you only need to drop it once to smash everything.
However, it can be boring and/or annoying to read someone's thought processes about characters in their own stories (and I've never written anyone else's stories to know their approaches so unfortunately I am stuck with my own), so I figured better to give you the option to skip, or to read if you so choose.
My head hurts. Maybe I should just take up knitting.
also, very much worth reading is
zvi_likes_tv's post what I learned about tone.![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 20 Jan 2009 12:54 am (UTC)At least my family *did* have the stories there that we'd had relatives who escaped the Trail of Tears, even if we didn't have a hell of a lot else besides yearly trips to North Carolina and the Smokies and all. I know a lot of people have less than that (I've a good online friend who's Miccosukee and he's gone through that whole "recapturing your heritage when your folks actively denied it" thing).