I’m finding it increasingly difficult to figure out how I fit into (or knowing if I even want to get involved with) discussions about appropriation when the word, used as a description for wide-ranging cultural phenomena, is often used as an absolute negative. I see appropriation as vital to cross-cultural developments in the arts, but it’s hard to bring that perception to conversations that treat it as an evil.
It’s easy to understand why [X] is okay and [Y] is not okay when capital – quantity – is involved: for example, it may not be ethical to sell a product with symbols of an American-Indian/native American tribe, whose people sell their own products for livelihood, when you do not belong to that tribe because that is an intrusion (perhaps even an illegal one) upon a marginalized marketplace. The question’s ethical dimension becomes a little murkier, though, when you’re not profiting. Is it okay for the homeless white man to play a rock tune – as rock is derived from the blues, a black invention – and is it not okay for the housed white man to play a rock tune, given the disparity of privilege?
I started to feel less sure about this subject with the protestations last year of a feature the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston had that allowed visitors to don kimonos. The protests were small, as were the counter-protests, and I was disappointed to find out that the feature was taken down when there was the opportunity to, at that point in time, formalize it into a public discussion while keeping the kimonos available as symbols of complexities. More than anything, to me, the protests felt opportunistic: the sort of easy target of older white people putting on kimonos for photos (“Orientalist!!!”) served as the entry point for broader frustrations with the MFA, and western culture at large, even if that particular case wasn’t especially egregious.
But, to me, there was also the issue of how this negative response might’ve set a precedent for future exhibits that would’ve employed struggling foreign industries, such as the kimono industry (the MFA’s kimonos were from Japan), and thereby helped them. Did this apologetic removal cut off another source of income for the kimono market? Was it actually a form of economic oppression in the name of sensitivity? And – less novelly – what about the Japanese people who were okay with the exhibit? It’s less a question of who gets to be a spokesperson for what – no one person is ever going to be qualified to speak for a whole country or ethnic group – and more of one of how a person’s background grants their perspectives and input gradations of legitimacy within these conversations.
The easiest response to any of this is to say “If you’re unsure about the acceptability of your appropriation, it’s best not to go through with it”, but that only encourages a cultural isolationism that introduces a new and maybe worse problem into the mix. Beyond capitalism, and beyond mentalities that explicitly embrace white supremacy, we have a fairly good idea about why, say, blackface is repugnant – a repugnancy that I would argue is especially noticeable now not just because of its history but because it is a modification of the most symbolically coded part of the human body. What about the things outside of these obvious transgressions, though?
The thought that I’m building towards here is that the more complex the conversations and justifications about Why Appropriation [X] is Okay, While Appropriation [Y] is Not Okay become, the more this sort of cultural gatekeeping may be bound up in class, as class influences our interests to varying degrees. There is going to be some difference of opinion between the black musician in a scraping-by jazz band, whose other members are white, on their involvement with white jazz musicians, and the black academic within a university’s sociological department (I’m using these not as examples of concrete individuals but as different mindsets (NB: there is no intention here to say that anyone who is not an academic is incapable of or never entertains complex thoughts on culture). What’s curious about this intellectual stratification is that it might come about because of a concern for people who themselves aren’t concerned – or are concerned to a severely lesser degree – about such-and-such an appropriation. So then it’s like: do you try to convince them that they should care more? Or is that a transgression in itself?
I… don’t think any of what I’ve written is original, but I wanted to put it down somewhere.