CULTURAL APPROPRIATION
The lines between cultures are vague and fluid. When is it appropriate to borrow from others and best to stand aside?
I start this essay with a personal anecdote. I have raised six children. They have become professionally extraordinarily successful and I am immensely proud of them. I am very close to my middle daughter. She is an award-winning executive. After holding high level positions in her field she recently became the Executive Director of a prestigious non-profit organization that defines itself as the leading international association for operations research and analytics professionals. My daughter didn't apply for her position. The organization sought her out to be its leader.
My daughter is a progressive, a feminist, a lesbian and the parent of two of my wonderful grandchildren. One of the lovely aspects of being a parent is experiencing your children reaching the point wherein they develop their own independent views and opinions on public and political issues. It is a quiet (and at times not so quiet) joy to sit opposite your child and have a serious, intelligent discussion and finding that the views you express are similar and you also disagree. My daughter, who is in her fifties, is well beyond that stage, but your child forever remains your child.
Both my daughter and I are temperamentally argumentative and it is not uncommon that we respectful and lovingly disagree, sometimes heatedly, on issues of common interest. Some of our disagreements, I conclude, are generational in origin. My political commitments were nurtured out of my experiences with the New Left of the 1960s and the anti-war movement. As such, the mainstay of my politics has been rooted foundationally in economic injustice. In more recent decades I have devoted myself, as an activist and academic, to the human rights abuses and atrocities that plague humankind.
By contrast, it seems that my daughter's generation has a preoccupation with gender issues, which frankly don't grip my moral imagination as strongly. The position I take with her is that once we abolish the scourge of pandemic torture, do away with the rape and gang rape of hundreds of thousands of women in Congo, after we ensure that no children starve to death because they can't find enough food to put in their mouths to stay alive, and when we overcome the systemic humiliation, lynching, murder and mutilation with impunity of 170 million untouchables in India, arguably the world's most extensive human rights problem, then maybe I will be ready to concern myself with which bathroom a transgendered person uses. To be clear, on the individual level I can sympathize with the trangendered person facing this problem, but call me names if you wish, I simply can't see this as one of our greatest injustices on the social level.
A short while back, my daughter and I had a debate on the use of the word “Latinx” and as the allegedly preferred use identifying Latinos. I love language. I was a Latin and ancient Greek major and I am enchanted with the elegance, logic and aesthetics of grammar. I also find it engagingly beautiful that the romance languages, and this is true of Greek, Hebrew and many others as well, genderize their nouns. It is as if gender is instantiated into reality (we'll leave the social construction of language for another time) and as such language reflects the interplay and tension of sexuality which is part and parcel of the life spirit.
“Latinx” seems hopelessly contrived and is phonetically ungainly. But I understand the point. When I began my Spanish studies in junior high school it became immediately apparent that Spanish is sexist. The male word for “they” is “ellos.” For women it is “ellas.” If there are a hundred people in a room and 99 of them are women and one is a male, Spanish defaults to “ellos,” the male form. I presume “Latinx” is a wokish contrivance to transcend the inherent sexism by taking sex out of it and replacing it with a neutered form.
It is an employment my daughter defends. Unlike my beloved daughter I have some claim on this issue. My father was a Cuban citizen and Spanish was his strongest language. My Spanish is near fluent and we sometimes conversed in the language when I was a teenager. I have Cuban relatives. I contend very few native Spanish speakers have adopted or relate to the term”Latinx.” It is rather the imposition of primarily outsiders to impose on insiders a contrived neologism in pursuit, in my opinion, of a progressivism which I cannot adopt.
This gets to my point. If the language is to change I argue it is appropriately the task of insiders and not that of outsiders to tell others how they should speak their own language. It is, as concerns this essay, a form of a cultural appropriation. Even worse, it feels like an act of imperialism. If Latinos and Latinas wish to change their language, I will respect and adopt their usage. By analogy, if Jesse Jackson,proclaims that American Negroes prefer to identify themselves as “African-Americans,” I will happily follow and employ that moniker. But, again, it is not my role to tell others how to identify themselves.
But this issue raises a much larger point and a very knotty one. It is a problem that emerges from the evolving American demographic landscape and difficult political conflicts that emerge from it. At its center lies the concept of culture and where to draw appropriate boundaries that respect the integrity, independence and autonomy of cultures not our own.
In academia and beyond culture has become a salient issue and respect for culture a hallmark of progressive values. In my analysis, this stems in part from an increasing awareness of the extraordinarily destructive history of imperialism and Western colonialism. The history is very ugly and its exposure is necessary as a vehicle for undoing unspeakable injustice. In the human rights world, for example, there is increasing recognition of the rights of indigenous peoples, the rights of minority peoples to speak their own language and practice their own religions. There is the emerging concept of group rights, not to protect groups per se, but the individuals who comprise such groups. For example, if we do not protect the right of a minority peoples to speak their own language as a group, the language may die out depriving the individual members of the group the right to avail themselves of it.
Domestically such values are evident in the emergence of multi-culturalism. These manifestations, I contend, are more fraught and come with virtues as well as problems. Multi-culturalism is premised on the notion that people are to varying degrees molded by their cultures, cultures differ from one another, have their own integrity, and are worthy of respect by outsiders. “Tolerance” is the watchword of multi-culturalism. But as I like to point out to my students, tolerance is a grudging virtue; we tolerate what we otherwise can't stand. Mutual understanding, appreciation, respect and love are much better. But, in the world of testy inter-group relations, it is certainly better to tolerate than it is to annihilate.
But as much as multi-culturalism can foster an environment of mutual appreciation, and at best an enriching one, it also comes with its problems. We can tolerate and respect other cultures, but what if those cultures are internally intolerant? What if they are fiercely patriarchal or homophobic? What if they are oppressive of minorities within their own cultural group? What if they abuse the fundamental rights of members of their own group? How is the liberal to respond? Are we to ignore such abuse on the grounds of cultural relativism? Or, is there a supervening moral demand to strive to change the culture of another from the outside?
This returns us to the nature and meaning of culture. In my view, the concept of culture, perhaps out of deference to undo the history of destruction wrought by colonialism, has been overvalorized. In one sense, one can define culture merely as what people do. And though cultures are worthy of respect, I don't believe they are sacrosanct.
It is essential to bear in mind two things: First, cultures are not static. Cultures change as a result of both internal dynamics and influences coming from the outside. Second, no culture is homogeneous. Rather, cultures are comprised of numerous subcultures; of people within holding to different, diverse and competing values. To the gaze of the outsider, cultures other than one's own may seem monolithic. But all one needs to do is enter these cultures, and one soon finds that people are at each others' throats. We can talk of Latino culture. But whom are we referring to? The Salvadoran peasant or the Cuban business man living in Miami and is a staunch conservative? Do we mean George Gonzalez, a third generation Latino of Mexican heritage who doesn't speak a word of Spanish? Latinos all, but individuals holding to very different values. In the sanctuary organization I started, we once had a client who was an asylee from Kenya. She fled because of persecution by members of her own tribe. She was a leader of a movement for women's empowerment and opposed female circumcision. Her persecutors were more traditional and affirmed circumcision. Same tribe, same culture, opposing values.
The reality is that culture is a fluid and changing concept and where to draw the lines are vague. And they are open, I believe, to continuous discussion and debate. I don't think there is much room here for dogma.
I hold to my own views, which are admittedly open to revision in a changing society. Indeed I am raising more questions than providing answers. I have already expressed my view with regard to language. When it comes to religion, I believe that the moral teaching of the religions flow into and are the common heritage of humankind, but not specific doctrines, rituals and practices. I balk at Episcopalians or Unitarians holding Passover Seders. I think it is wrong for New Agers to regale themselves as Native Americans and adopt their practices. It is fine and good to be educated in the ways of other religions. But to bring them under one's own tent and make them one's own I conclude is unwarranted appropriation. Indeed all religions are syncretistic. But there is a difference between religious evolution over time and the wholesale raiding of other religious cultures out of less then sensitive motivations and interests.
When it comes to human rights abuses in non-Western cultures, the best approach is for the Western human rights worker to find activists within those cultures who hold to similar human rights positions and work together with them as allies in a common cause. Such cooperation across cultural lines I believe is preferable to merely critiquing others from the outside, which often engenders blow back and resentment.
Can a Caucasian teach Black history and a Christian teach Jewish studies and vice versa? Can a male novelist compose a book in which a woman is the protagonist and a white author pen a book speaking the voice of a non-white characters? I would think so. In the final analysis we are all members of the same society, cultures meet, and at various points our lives and interests intersect.
Such crossing over can be accompanied with greater education and honed sensitivity. In other words, such outsider/insider endeavors may be a good thing but even better if they are undertaken seriously, knowledgeably and with respect. Humility is in order.
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A fine essay, with which I can find no disagreement. An observation: The term "Latinx" used by people like us is objectionable not only for the reasons you indicate, but also because it is politically tone deaf. I read an interview of a Latino politician ( I forget who) in which the journalist asks what Democrats could do to regain Latinx support. The answer: they can start by avoiding use of the term "Latinx."
So glad you discussed cultural appropriation. And I agree with sensitivity to origins while eschewing dogmatic stances.
I’m admittedly a bit sensitive on this topic of cultural appropriation having been chastised by feminists for daring to express an opinion about women’s issues. The term “mansplaining” was applied despite my invitation to challenge the views I expressed. Rather than challenge the views, my right to express any view was questioned. If I accepted this view, I should not have written books about W.E.B. Du Bois or James Baldwin.
In trying to think through the cultural appropriation minefield - where to draw lines of appropriation versus sharing, I wondered about music. Music is both intentionally and organically borrowed. So, in a culturally dogmatic world, Harry Belafonte would be entitled to perform calypso and Wizkid (Ayodeji Ibrahim Balogun) permitted to make Afro-pop. However, damned your eyes Paul Simon for cultural appropriation.
I kind of think steeping oneself in other cultures is a way to learn, appreciate, and share.