Cultural Appropriation

Hot Women: Wrongfully Appropriate Nerd Culture At Your Own Risk

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

Olivia Munn - Cliff Bleszinski - Nerd Culture - Geek - Cultural Appropriation - Identity Politics

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Identity Politics has created an arsenal of shrill and illiberal weapons which can now be picked up and used by anyone

The latest addition to the list of marginalised and oppressed victim communities: geeks and nerds, who are being made to feel unsafe because hot girls are appropriating their culture by daring to display an interest in comics and video games.

I’m not kidding:

Yesterday, video game designer Cliff Bleszinski (widely known on the internet as “Cliffy B”) tweeted that actress Olivia Munn was “appropriating nerd culture”, taking advantage of it for personal gain.

That appears to have partly stemmed from an earlier interview wherein Munn was quoted as saying she did all of her own stunts for X-Men: Apocalypse – which, unsurprisingly, has the stunt community pretty unhappy, since it’s typically a stuntperson’s responsibility to test out a physical stunt for safety reasons before they’ll even allow the actor to try and take it on. So while Munn may have performed a large number of stunts herself, she didn’t give credit where credit’s due (and that also may have been an unintentional gaffe). But that’s not what the Internet glommed onto.

Barring whatever personal issues or history Bleszinski may have with Munn, the fact remains that the phrase he used is particularly unfortunate. The accusation is insulting to the real and on-going issue of cultural appropriation: instances of celebrities or brands embracing a culture other than their own and profiting from it without understanding it or fighting for the issues faced by said culture.

[..] Ultimately, it just feels like a slap in the face to real cultural appropriation and a mere rehash of the old and tired “fake geek girl” meme. At the very least, it’s someone using their beef with another person to manufacture outrage over a thing that doesn’t actually exist.

Another delightful case of Identity Politics cult members self-cannibalising and turning their fire on their own? Yes – and so soon after I had mentioned that this phenomenon seems to be less common in America than it is in Britain. It certainly looks as though the United States is racing to play catch-up.

https://twitter.com/therealcliffyb/status/708526086137708544

But there is a fair degree of nonsense to unpick on all sides here.

Take the stuntpeople who apparently feel “invalidated” – their professional accomplishments made to vanish in a puff of smoke – because one actress (probably unintentionally) failed to acknowledge their behind-the-scenes contribution sufficiently fulsomely. And people like TheMarySue’s Carly Lane, who then take offence at the original offence takers for daring to be offended by something which is less offensive than something else experienced by other, more righteously offended people.

What we are now witnessing – with people who were thus far completely removed from the Safe Space and Trigger Warning culture on college campuses now walking and talking exactly like today’s illiberal student activists – is akin to the efforts of a younger teenage sibling trying to ape the behaviour of their older siblings already at college by adopting their language and behaviour in an attempt to look “cool” and grown up.

If older brother or sister spends all of their time occupying the dean’s office protesting for the provision of more campus safe spaces for minorities, the younger sibling will often unsurprisingly learn to think that this is how young adults are supposed to behave, and apply the same nomenclature of Identity Politics, victimhood and oppression to their own, more juvenile lives. And this is the result:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y1GbBhu9hA

 

Like the Tumblr therians, people who think they are cats and other self-promoting cases of species dysphoria, the idea of nerd culture being unjustly appropriated by outsiders is a natural consequence of what happens when the fussy, victimhood-soaked language of Identity Politics is picked up by ordinary people and used in mundane scenarios to describe everyday life.

The social networks Twitter and Tumblr in particular are awash with outraged ranting and virtue-signalling about the evils of cultural appropriation – only recently, Harry Potter author JK Rowling was hauled over the coals for unintentionally stepping on an Identity Politics landmine – and so it is hardly unsurprising that even people not deeply connected with the movement are adopting the same language and the authoritarian attitudes behind it.

Is the idea that nerd or geek culture can be “appropriated” in a way which is harmful to self-identifying nerds or geeks absurd? Absolutely. But no more so than the idea that a white person practising yoga harms the Indian culture, or that putting an unorthodox ingredient in your breakfast taco causes deep and lasting harm to the people of Mexico.

This is competitive victimhood plain and simple, with Identity Politics cult adherents on both sides of the Atlantic rushing to portray themselves as the most oppressed and “marginalised”, and then furiously denouncing others for supposedly overstating their position in the Hierarchy of Oppression.

The fact that is has now culminated in the spectacle of comic and video game-loving nerds and geeks being outraged that an attractive Hollywood actress has adopted and promotes elements of their lifestyle is only further proof of the ridiculous places you end up when you follow the Identity Politics trail to its logical end.

 

Safe Space Notice - 2

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Tales From The Safe Space, Part 12 – Harry Potter Edition

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

History of Magic in North America - JK Rowling

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Is it always wrong to misrepresent other cultures in art, or only when the culture in question is condescendingly considered to be “marginalised” and therefore insufficiently robust to withstand inaccurate portrayal in a book or movie?

The latest public figure to unintentionally step on a hidden Identity Politics landmine and self-detonate in an explosion of outraged Twitter condemnation is none other than Harry Potter creator JK Rowling.

The Guardian picks through the shrapnel for us:

JK Rowling has been accused of appropriating the “living tradition of a marginalised people” by writing about the Navajo legend of the skinwalker in a new story.

The Harry Potter author posted the first part of a four-part series, the History of Magic in North America on her website Pottermore, on Tuesday. Subsequent episodes are being published each day at 2pm until Friday. Tying in to the release in November of the film Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, the short piece of writing deals with the magical New World in the 14th to 17th centuries.

Although the new insights into the universe of Harry Potter were welcomed by many, the author was strongly criticised online by a number of voices from Native American communities, particularly over her writing about skinwalkers, which in Navajo legend are said to be evil witches or wizards who can take on the form of animals.

Needless to say, JK Rowling has been summarily tried on Twitter and found guilty of the high crime of cultural appropriation and misrepresentation for taking Native American legends which were not her own (and God forbid that cultures ever intermix or borrow from one another) and using them for her own grubby commercial purposes. For shame.

And public shaming is exactly what was swiftly visited upon Rowling by the Twitter mob:

But campaigner Dr Adrienne Keene told Rowling on Twitter that “it’s not ‘your’ world. It’s our (real) Native world. And skinwalker stories have context, roots, and reality … You can’t just claim and take a living tradition of a marginalised people. That’s straight up colonialism/appropriation.”

The academic also took issue with Rowling’s use of the phrase “the Native American community”, saying that “one of the largest fights in the world of representations is to recognise Native peoples and communities and cultures are diverse, complex, and vastly different from one another.”

[..] Navajo writer Brian Young wrote on Twitter that he was “broken hearted” about the new piece of writing. “JK Rowling, my beliefs are not fantasy. If ever there was a need for diversity in YA lit it is bullsh!t like this,” said Young. “My ancestors didn’t survive colonisation so you could use our culture as a convenient prop.”

Well, when you put it like that, let’s waste no time No-Platforming JK Rowling, emptying library bookshelves of Harry Potter volumes and throwing them on the fire we have already set ablaze to dispose of our unwanted Cecil Rhodes memorabilia. Because the difference between the sins of these two “colonialists” is only one of severity, not of kind, at least according to the Identity Politics police who act as judge, jury and executioner in these cases.

One such typical virtue-signalling, outraged response to Rowling’s creation comes courtesy of Katherine Trendacosta, writing in Gizmodo:

Rowling reveals a lack of knowledge of American history that makes this an extremely hard read. She also either doesn’t realize the sensitive nature of some areas she’s treading on or does not care.

Who could have predicted that a white lady from the UK would have problems with appropriating Native American culture? Oh, wait, that should have been completely obvious to anyone even thinking of doing what J.K. Rowling did. When you’re combining a history of magic with Native Americans, you’re falling into an already prevalent trope of making them “mystical.” And Rowling not only didn’t avoid that trap, she leaned into it.

[..] Associating Native Americans with “animal and plant magic”—with, it should be noted, no more detail than that—is leaning so hard on a stereotype it’s hard not to find it offensive. It’s also not great that she says that wands originated in Europe, which reads very much as a Europe being the center of innovation and building in the magic world. You know, Native Americans and their “Earth magic” while European wizards were the ones smart enough to make wands.

Rowling may say that great things can be done without a wand, but it doesn’t offset the implications—that Native Americans may have raw power, but it’s refinement that only comes from Europe. Implications that she, with her background, was completely blind to.

You get the idea.

This level of wand-obsession is more commonly associated with the likes of Donald Trump than Social Justice Warriors, but when it comes to the Identity Politics brigade clearly no literary or descriptive detail is too small to be pecked over and analysed to death in the search for smoking-gun evidence of cultural insensitivity.

Note also the constant references to JK Rowling’s ethnic background. It almost seems as though Trendacosta’s anger is not so much that somebody misrepresented Native American culture, but rather that a “white lady” did so. It is almost as though there is some latent anger and rage against whiteness bubbling away under the surface, and that this whole cultural appropriation furore is just a convenient device with which to bash “white privilege”.

And this is the key question (to which we already really know the answer). Is the failure to represent every culture in a painstakingly accurate way always such a terrible crime, or is it only truly offensive when somebody from a majority (i.e. white) culture do it to a supposedly marginalised culture?

I’m British, and constantly see my culture represented less than wholly accurately in all manner of ways, particularly in American movies and television shows. A character might be studying at Oxford University and yet inexplicably live in London (because of course England is just one small, uniform place), or everyone might speak like Hugh Grant in one movie and like a soot-smeared Cockney in another. More galling still, Hollywood seems to go through phases where every villain in every movie has to be a suave, upper-class British guy, speaking in an accent not unlike my own. Sure, it’s irritating, but am I incurring “harm” when this happens?

Or is any harm that I might have suffered because of the misrepresentation of my country and people in the popular culture negated by the fact that as a British citizen, I hail from an Evil Colonial Power, responsible for so much that is terrible in the world? The sun may have set on the British Empire, but has it set on my apparent share of our collective guilt for the actions of kings and queens and statesmen who lived and died centuries before I was born?

The fundamental question is this: are JK Rowling’s critics angry because Navajo culture was misrepresented or because Navajo culture was misrepresented? Was the offence to commit an apparently heinous act of cultural appropriation against Native Americans specifically, or to have misrepresented any culture in the first place?

It hardly needs pointing out that it is the latter. Because the whole Identity Politics culture is based on the neo-colonial and racist assumption that certain cultures are “weaker” than others, and that the people belonging to those cultures are childlike victims with less agency than those from white, Western backgrounds.

Without a steady supply of “victims” to protect – and unwitting “villains” to blunder into their cultural booby traps – Identity Politics practitioners would have nothing to do, and so have no means of asserting their power over our language and discourse (which is the ultimate goal).

Of course, this dogma presupposes that those from minority cultures can actually be physically or mentally harmed by the mere act of having their culture, customs or history either accidentally misunderstood or deliberately misrepresented, even if they are not necessarily aware that it is happening at the time – a hugely condescending attitude to hold toward racial and cultural minorities in the present day.

At every stage it is taken for granted that even today, those from minority cultures totally lack any agency to seize control of the narrative for themselves and disseminate more truthful and accurate perceptions of their culture if they wish to do so – and if how they are perceived by complete strangers really matters that much to them.

And as always, it is the Identity Politics practitioners and those who believe that individuals can be harmed by non-malicious misrepresentations of their culture in the media who display the real contempt for these “marginalised” groups, even though that contempt is dressed up in the language of care and concern.

 

Safe Space Notice - 2

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Yoga Banned: Cultural Appropriation Zealots Are Creating A New Apartheid

Samuel Hooper13 Comments

Cultural Appropriation - Can I Wear A Bindi

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Today’s virtue-signalling, totalitarian student activists will stop at nothing to let everyone know just how enlightened and considerate they think they are, and how backward and oppressive they consider the rest of us to be

If you haven’t heard the term “cultural appropriation” before, you can expect to hear it a lot over the next few years. And if you have the misfortune of living anywhere near a university campus, you may even hear it shouted in your face by a raucous student protester, high on their own self-importance.

In fact, even if you’re not committing the modern day sin of cultural appropriation right now, you are almost certainly guilty of doing it at some point over the past twenty-four hours. Go and do your penance now. I’ll wait.

Cultural appropriation is the latest verbal weapon used by virtue-signalling lefty student activists – snivelling Millennial egotists who arrived at university only to find the worst oppression and discrimination already vanquished by previous generations, and who are now desperately casting around for a new cause to justify their Chinese-manufactured Che Guevara t-shirts.

Let’s put it like this: are you a white person who likes rap music, or who (heaven forfend) listens to music by white rappers from Eminem to Iggy Azelea? Then you’re a white supremacist cultural appropriator. By appreciating or assimilating something from outside of your own ethnic community, you have plundered the culture of your downtrodden minority friends and neighbours, making light of their most sacred and noble traditions for your own carefree amusement. Didn’t realise that’s what you were doing? Doesn’t matter, you’re still guilty.

Or maybe you really fell in love with Thai cuisine when you were on that round-the-world trip, and now you love to cook Thai-inspired meals at home, with your non-Thai hands, in your non-Thai kitchen, for your non-Thai friends. That’s cultural appropriation too. Shame on you. If you are a white American you should subsist entirely on cheeseburgers, barbecue and other culturally appropriate fare. God help you if you’re a Cockney but not mad for jellied eels.

Stay away from that lasagne if you’re from Idaho or Utah – can’t you see how eating pasta belittles and marginalises Italian Americans? And as for ordering Kung Pao chicken from your favourite Chinese takeout, why don’t you just start reading aloud from Mein Kampf in the town square, you nasty little fascist? Clearly you have no feeling for the mental safety of Asian Americans, who might feel mocked and excluded by your thoughtless foodcrime.

You get the idea. Before doing anything, first get out your Hierarchy of Privilege and remind yourself exactly where you fit on the Spectrum of Oppression. White and male? Tough luck, you can sample only from those other white, male cultural pursuits. Black, disabled and of undefined gender and sexuality? Then the world is your oyster – at least in the surreal world of academia.

Cultural Appropriation - Fourth Wave Feminism.jpg

 

And now the Stepford Students are coming to take away your Yoga classes, because chances are you aren’t from India – and therefore you are guilty of the cultural appropriation of Indian culture.

From Brendan O’Neill’s weary report in The Spectator:

Just when you thought uptight, fun-dodging, thought-policing millennials couldn’t get any worse, they go and brand yoga as racist. Apparently, when white people bend themselves bonkers while humming or thinking happy-clappy thoughts, they’re not only being self-punishing saps: they are also ‘culturally appropriating’ a practice that has ‘roots in Indian culture’.

That’s according to student leaders at the University of Ottawa, who put pressure on a yoga teacher at the uni’s Centre for Students with Disabilities to call off her yoga classes. She was told ‘there are cultural issues of implication involved in the practice’. In these people’s minds, in which the Offence-Seeking Antenna is forever turned to High, a white person doing yoga is not that different to a white person donning blackface and singing ‘Mammy’.

O’Neill goes on to point out:

The PC rage against cultural appropriation is ultimately a demand for cultural segregation, for black people, white people, Latinos, gay people, women and every other racial, gender or sexual group to stick with their own culture and people and not allow themselves to be diluted by outsiders.

Gay men have been condemned by the National Union of Students for ‘appropriating black female culture’. Barmy NUS officials think it’s the height of racism for a gay guy to talk about having an ‘inner black woman’. The irony being that it’s hard to think of anything more racist, or at least racially divisive, than the ideology of cultural appropriation: its obsession with cultural purity echoes some of the darkest political movements of the twentieth century.

It’s easy to dismiss these incidents as merely a case of a few activists getting a bit too carried away, or going a bit too far. But incidents such as these are happening more  and more often, on both sides of the Atlantic.

Whether it is British students shutting down a debate about abortion and trying to get Germaine Greer banned from campus, or pampered Yale students insisting that the point of university is not to learn but rather to feel warm and snuggly, these stories are becoming more extreme, more frequent and ever more ludicrous to the uninitiated.

This is in large part because the authorities – university chancellors, society presidents and anyone else called upon to be an auxiliary parent to these toddlers-with-diplomas – too often reward this hysterical behaviour by apologising for offending the Stepford Students and giving in to every one of their tyrannical demands. Which then encourages the next crop of baby-faced tyrants to make even more outrageous demands in the name of creating a “safe space”.

With their accusations of “cultural appropriation” and unquestioning embrace of the politics of identity, these student activists are starting to create a New Apartheid – on their university campuses and in their hermetically sealed social circles of likeminded social justice warriors. Their overriding concern with protecting the “purity” of various minority cultures resembles nothing so much as the anti-miscegenation laws of the last century. And all of this they do without a hint of irony.

These students are nothing so much as High Priests of the Politics of Identity. Like other clergy before them, they derive their power from claiming the exclusive ability to speak on behalf of their secular god and telling the rest of us what we must believe and say. But in place of stoning or crucifixion being the penalty for blasphemy we now have new, modern shamings carried out on social media.

In a famous scene from Aaron Sorkin’s show The Newsroom, the lead character described the American Tea Party – with their intolerance of dissent and insistence on ideological purity – as being like an American Taliban. But I wonder if the real progressive Taliban can’t actually be found on our university campuses, in our student union bars and in the front row of your nearest anti-austerity rally, shouting “Tory Scum!” at terrified old ladies.

If we let these fragile young tyrants win, we will eventually all be ghettoised, forced to keep strictly to our own “communities” (community being defined strictly by racial or religious criteria) and only allowed to engage with other people in the controlled environment of “safe spaces“, where our speech and behaviour is micromanaged to ensure that we do not “trigger” anybody else with the problematic “microaggression” of our mere presence.

Yes, there is a dangerous radicalisation process taking place on our university campuses today. But deluded young radicals are not only rallying to the black flag of ISIS – we should also mark those who drink so deep from the well of Social Justice that they would make us all slaves to their cause.

 

Yoga - Cultural Appropriation

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Top Image: Northmont Surge

Middle Image: 4th Wave Feminism

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