This
Halloween we’ll see kids, college students, and other revelers dressed
in costumes ranging from scary to hilarious: Chewbaccas, spandex police
officers, Harry Potters, Frodos… even Elvis. But at any party, we have a
good chance of seeing
cultural appropriation. We might see
white people glibly dressed in mock Native American headdresses, frat
brothers dressing “ghetto”, people who have no real connection to India
wearing red dots on their foreheads, would-be Zulus, Geishas (from
Texas), and of course a gringo in a sombrero.
Such mimicry has come under increasing condemnation recently, and probably for good reasons. But, we might wonder, what
exactly is wrong with it? And how precisely should we define “cultural appropriation” anyway?
On the basis of the examples above, we might say
cultural
appropriation is use or mimicry of artifacts or manners from another
culture without permission from any members of that culture.
But it’s not hard to see that this definition won’t do.
It implies, wrongly, that every time someone from one culture uses an
idea from another culture, without explicitly asking, that “cultural
appropriation” has occurred. But I don’t think, for example, someone who
goes to France and then comes home and makes crepes should be called a
“cultural appropriator.” (In some weak sense, sure, but that’s not the
sense we’re after.) Nor should someone who visits China and learns how
to use chopsticks or how to sing a song they heard on the radio.
Much if not
most culture (good and bad) results from
different cultures bumping into each other and borrowing or just
absorbing ideas. So if we’re to talk about “cultural appropriation”—as
opposed to just “culture”—we have to mean something more.
So the definition above is an instructive failure. I think many
people would be tempted to define “cultural appropriation” in this
fashion. But we’ve seen that it wrongly includes mere cultural
influences and instances of learning that are in no way problematic.
What next?
It seems to me that there is no way to understand the concept of
cultural appropriation properly without understanding the historical
background of
colonialism. Colonialism was and is the
systematic subjugation of one group of people by another, where that
subjugation is motivated and rationalized by racist ideology. Examples
of this have occurred throughout Asia, Africa, and the Americas, usually
with Europeans as the aggressors, though Chinese, Japanese, and Ottoman
empires have historically established colonies as well.
In my view, it’s the latter component of colonialism, the racist
ideology, that is crucial for understanding what cultural appropriation
really is. I think anything worth applying the term “cultural
appropriation” to will be something that expresses at least a
psychological vestige of a racist ideology that figured in one of the
large-scale colonialist projects.
Racist ideologies characteristically portray an entire group of
people, a race or ethnicity, as simplistic, naïve, lazy, untrustworthy,
or violent. And such portrayal, embedded in the mind in the form of
stereotypes, is used in colonialist contexts to rationalize more brutal
forms of mistreatment and ultimately appropriation of much more than
just culture.
So this is what differentiates merely using chopsticks to eat (which
is not cultural appropriation in any interesting sense) from dressing up
for Halloween like a “Chinese” guy from a bad Kung Fu movie (definitely
cultural appropriation). In the latter case, the non-Chinese person
wearing the outfit expresses—typically unwittingly—a psychological
tendency, a tendency to think of another person as a simpler kind of
creature than oneself. Furthermore, it is a tendency to think of a whole
class of other people in simplifying terms. This psychological
tendency is the vestige, or one manifestation of it, that I referred to
above.
So a more accurate definition of “cultural appropriation” goes like this:
cultural
appropriation is where people from a group that oppressed or oppresses
another group mimics or represents cultural artifacts or manners of the
oppressed group in a way that expresses or reinforces psychological
elements of the racist ideology inherent in the colonialist project
responsible for the oppression. Such appropriating mimicry can take
many forms, but what unifies them will be an implicit or explicit view
of other people that makes them out to be less than what they are.
Is cultural appropriation inherently morally wrong? Or is it merely
stupid and abrasive? The progenitor of cultural appropriation,
colonialism, was and is certainly morally wrong, without question. But
does the same go for the mere putting on of a silly Halloween costume?
The details of any given case will matter. Furthermore, I think this
is an area where it’s better to think in continuous terms of morally
better and worse, rather than wrong or not wrong
simpliciter. A
European’s going to a Halloween party in a traditional Congolese suit
they somehow acquired may not be a gross moral transgression, though it
might make us morally uneasy. But whatever its moral status, going in
blackface is clearly much, much worse.
The moral vice, when there is vice, consists in perpetuating
components of a racist ideology that, in more pronounced forms,
motivates and rationalizes much more significant harms. We may grant
that one outfit
on one occasion might not do much more harm
than leaving a few people seriously annoyed. But it signals to members
of one’s group—the currently or historically oppressing group—that
certain patterns of thought about another group are okay, even something
to be enjoyed. Against the background of such signaling, more
coordinated aggression can emerge.
These thoughts may all seem too weighty to be about what to wear to
your next Halloween party. And perhaps in some way they are. But the
psychological fact of implicit racism and other forms of prejudice are
by now well known. Given that, the correct thought is that it’s better
morally safe than morally sorry.
In any case, you can always be Chewbacca, Harry Potter, or a cop in spandex. You’ll then be
merely silly, but perhaps that’s a good thing.
https://www.philosophytalk.org/blog/what-cultural-appropriation
