(1) VALUE OF SPECIAL THEME ISSUES. Neil Clarke has written a blog post, “Specials”, to discuss what he learned from a discussion he launched yesterday on Twitter.
So yesterday I took to Twitter to get an answer to a question I had about the value of special theme issues as a tool in addressing representation. It was driven in part by an incomplete editorial sitting on my desktop for a couple of months now…..
Here’s where I made a few mistakes:
- Assuming that the primary goal for these projects was long-term (as in taking a long time) or that there ever was just one. In fact, it appears as though in many of these cases, a goal was to spotlight a specific community or provide a safe entry point, not necessarily to focus on altering the landscape for the field or attract a permanent change in the slush pile for the magazine. Yes, some of these already had existing policies in place to monitor and maintain that specific branch of diversity. They were a celebration rather than a corrective measure, but hasn’t been the norm across the years….
What I learned:
-
That there is a serious and demonstrable benefit to the theme projects, but not necessarily in direct service of the results I hoped for. I heard from a wide variety of people who had career-changing moments from their involvement in projects as ranging from anthologies, to Helix, to Escape Artists, and Lightspeed’s Destroy series. A common refrain was that it encouraged them to try, gave them a confidence boost when they needed it, made them feel like they belonged, and served as a stepping stone. That last one is a long-term thing. It might not be to the big scale of the long-term goal I was talking about, but it was certainly step in the right direction. There is something to be said to the qualitative safety element of these projects even if it doesn’t specifically raise to the level of changing the playing field on a bigger scale….
(2) VERBOSE VERISIMILITUDE. After these introductory paragraphs I found her stylistic demonstration to be deeply intriguing – Sarah A. Hoyt’s “The Quality of Description Should not be Strained” at Mad Genius Club. I enjoyed it quite a bit.
The Quality of Description Should not be Strained, a Dialogue with Bill and Mike.
“Hey there buddy,” Mike said, as he came into the office, slamming the door behind him and making for the coffee maker like it was on fire and he had the only firehose on the planet. “Why so glum?”
Bill blinked from where he sat at his desk, looking across him at the red spires dotting the desert landscape outside the office window. “My writer’s group said I needed more description and sense of place,” he said. “But then when I put in description, they told me I had stopped the action and given them indigestible infodumps.”
(3) INTERNET ANTIQUITY. While rhapsodizing yesterday about the 10-year anniversary of bacon cat and the 18th anniversary of Whatever, John Scalzi said:
It’s an interesting time to be doing a blog, still, because I think it’s safe to declare the Age of Blogging well and truly over, inasmuch as personal blogging as been superseded in nearly every way by social media, including Twitter (my favorite), Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat and so on and so forth. I’m not planning on mourning blogs in general — as a phenomenon they had their moment and it was a relatively good one — but it is interesting to watch the blog tide recede, with just a few die-hards left to do them old-school, like I do.
Reading that, I thought no wonder I’ve really been in the swing of blogging this past year. I’m one of the great late-adopters, and seem to have timed my entry into the field perfectly. Had I waited a few moments longer blogs would have been extinct…
(4) OF COURSE NOBODY’S HAPPY. Aaron has penned a long and thoughtful post about slates and this year’s Hugos in “Biased Opinion: 2016 Hugo Awards Post-Mortem” at Dreaming of Other Worlds. This includes a category-by-category breakdown of the results. Filers actually started discussing this yesterday. I want to point even more people at it by including the link in today’s Scroll.
But why have the Pups erupted in paroxysms of rage when their candidates generally did so well in the final Hugo voting? The first reason is that, despite their claims that they were merely nominating and supporting what they felt were the “best” works, it seems that what they really wanted was for their political allies and personal cronies to win. The Puppy picks that won in 2016 were Nnedi Okorafor, Hao Jingfang, Neil Gaiman, Andy Weir, Abigail Larson, Mike Glyer, none of whom are beholden to the Pups in any way. In fact, one of the things that seems to have enraged the Pups is that Gaiman was insufficiently grateful to them for their support, calling them out on their bad behavior over the last couple of years with his acceptance speech. If supporting quality works was the primary goal of the Pups, then Gaiman’s stance wouldn’t matter to them one way or the other – they would be extolling the victory of The Sandman: Overture as a triumph of what they regard as good work.
(5) NEW BUNDLE. Now’s the time to pick up the New StoryBundle: Extreme Sci-Fi:
For three weeks only, from September 14 through October 6, you can get five or ten DRM-free ebooks (your choice) ready for loading on any e-reading device you like. You decide what you want to pay. After that, this bundle will disappear forever.
The initial titles in the Extreme Sci-Fi Bundle (minimum $5 to purchase) are:
- The Me and Elsie Chronicles by M. L. Buchman
- Climbing Olympus by Kevin J. Anderson
- Orphan – Giant Robot Planetary Competition: Book 1 by J.R. Murdock
- Suave Rob’s Double-X Derring Do by J. Daniel Sawyer
- Star Fall by Dean Wesley Smith
If you pay more than the bonus price of just $15, you get all five of the regular titles, plus five more:
- Away Games by Mike Resnick
- Extremes by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
- Hadrian’s Flight by J. Daniel Sawyer
- Risk Takers by Fiction River
- Fairchild by Blaze Ward
We’ve got a classics, best-sellers, and four brand new books written especially for this bundle celebrating the human spirit. Inside, you’ll find dark tales of murder and intrigue, high-comic farce, young adult adventure, awe and wonder, rapture and redemption.
(6) JACK VANCE. Paul Weimer analyzes one of Jack Vance’s richly inventive fictional worlds in “Robinson Crusoe of Tschai: Jack Vance’s Planet of Adventure Tetralogy”, posted at Tor.com.
Strange customs and societies, a hallmark of Vance’s fiction, populate (and almost overcrowd) the world. What is near-mandatory in one region of Tschai will get you killed in another. Anyone who despairs of planets in SF which feature all the same terrain and the same people have never visited Tschai. This variety and diversity is such that most people who encounter Reith and hear his story just think he’s from some corner of Tschai that they are unaware of, and probably crazy to boot.
(7) PASSENGER. NPR reports what it’s like to ride along in a self-driving Uber car.
Fourteen self-driving Ford Fusions idle in front of Uber’s Advanced Technologies Center in Pittsburgh.
On each vehicle, dozens of stationary and spinning cameras collect 1.4 million distance measurements per second, guiding the car on its journey.
Beginning Wednesday, the cars will be deployed on Pittsburgh’s streets in a striking experiment by Uber to introduce self-driving technology to its passengers.
“For me this is really important,” says Anthony Levandowski, the head of Uber’s self-driving car team, “because I really believe that the most important things that computers are going to do in the next 10 years is drive cars.”
(8) LICENSE TO WRITE. Larry Correia says don’t be bullied: “Writers should be Cultural Appropriating all the Awesome Stuff”.
I’ve talked about Cultural Appropriation before, and why it is one of the most appallingly stupid ideas every foisted on the gullible in general, and even worse when used as a bludgeon against fiction authors.
First off, what is “Cultural Appropriation”? From the linked talk:
The author of Who Owns Culture? Appropriation and Authenticity in American Law, Susan Scafidi, a law professor at Fordham University who for the record is white, defines cultural appropriation as “taking intellectual property, traditional knowledge, cultural expressions, or artifacts from someone else’s culture without permission. This can include unauthorised use of another culture’s dance, dress, music, language, folklore, cuisine, traditional medicine, religious symbols, etc.”
The part that got left out of that definition is that engaging in Cultural Appropriation is a grievous mortal sin that self-righteous busy bodies can then use to shame anyone they don’t like.
Look at that definition. Basically anything you use that comes from another culture is stealing. That is so patently absurd right out the gate that it is laughable. Anybody who has two working brain cells to rub together, who hasn’t been fully indoctrinated in the cult of social justice immediately realizes that sounds like utter bullshit.
If you know anything about the history of the world, you would know that it has been one long session of borrowing and stealing ideas from other people, going back to the dawn of civilization. Man, that cuneiform thing is pretty sweet. I’m going to steal writing. NOT OKAY! CULTURAL APPROPRIATION!
Everything was invented by somebody, and if it was awesome, it got used by somebody else. At some point in time thousands of years ago some sharp dude got sick of girding up his loins and invented pants. We’re all stealing from that guy. Damn you racists and your slacks.
In his customary swashbuckling style, he treats anyone’s concern about this issue as an absurd failure to comprehend how culture and the sharing of ideas works. That tone naturally makes people want to fire back on the same terms – whereas I wonder what everyone might say if he had expressed the same views in a persuasive structured argument.
One of Correia’s commenters implied that would look like Moshe Feder’s recent comment on Facebook.
MOSHE FEDER: I’ve always found “cultural appropriation” a weird concept. To me, it’s usually a progressive step toward a future in which humanity realizes that from a galactic point of view, we all share ONE culture — albeit a complex and varied one — the planetary culture developed by homo sapiens over tens of thousands of years. It was by this very so-called “appropriation” that fire, animal husbandry, agriculture, the wheel, and other crucial advances were spread to the benefit of all. Of course, there _are_ cases where CA is rude or inappropriate, as when you use it to mock or misrepresent other groups, and people of good will try to avoid those. But even those uses are protected by our free speech rights. (As are the protestations of those who resent such uses.) But all too often, complaints about cultural appropriation are another example of political correctness carried to the point of absurdity, the point at which it gives unscrupulous demagogues like Trump something they can look sensible for complaining about.
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOYS
- Born September 14, 1914 — Clayton Moore, TV’s The Lone Ranger.
- Born September 14, 1936 — Walter Koenig (age 80). He was 31 when he started Star Trek.
(10) SQUARE DEAL FOR NUMBER ONE FAN. Although the neighbors didn’t succeed in having Forry Ackerman’s last home designated a cultural landmark, the city may agree to name a Los Feliz neighborhood intersection in his honor. The Los Feliz Ledger has the story:
“Sci-Fi” Square: Beloved Local, Ackerman, Up for Honor.
The intersection of Franklin and Vermont avenues may soon be known as “Forrest J Ackerman Square,” thanks to an August motion by Los Angeles City Councilmember David Ryu (CD 4).
The square would honor Ackerman, a lifetime Angeleno best known for coining the term “sci-fi.”….
The notion of honoring Ackerman with a city square was first brought up at a March meeting of the city’s Cultural Heritage Commission, where a group called “Concerned Citizens of Los Feliz” tried and failed to gain historic status for a bungalow on Russell Avenue, which Ackerman called home for the final six years of his life.
Ackerman referred to the bungalow as his “Acker-Mini-Mansion,” in reference to the “Ackermansion,” his former home on Glendower Avenue in the Hollywood Hills.
(11) GEAR. Vox Day is thinking of doing some Dread Ilk merchandise. Here are the initial ideas.
I’m interested in knowing which designs are of most interest to the Ilk. So, here are a few random ideas; let me know which would be of the most interest to you, assuming that the designs are well-executed. Or if you have any other ideas, feel free to throw them out.
- Evil Legion of Evil (member’s edition)
- Evil Legion of Evil (Red Meat cartoon)
- Vile Faceless Minion
- Dread Ilk
- Rabid Puppies 2015
- Rabid Puppies 2016
- Vox Day Che
- Just Say N20 (Psykosonik lyrics on back)
- Spacebunny (cartoon logo)
- Supreme Dark Lord (Altar of Hate mask logo)
- SJWAL cover
- Cuckservative cover with 1790 law quote
- That Red Dot On Your Chest Means My Daddy Is Watching
- Castalia House logo “Restoring Science Fiction Since 2014”
- There Will Be War
- The Missionaries
(12) GAME SHOW. Steven H Silver is back with another stfnal Jeopardy! question:
A daily double in Awards. She bet $2400 and got it right on a total guess.
I’m sure all you Filers would have cashed that in.
(13) THE HONOR OF THE THING. John Scalzi confessed on Twitter:
Someone on Facebook is asking pals if she should name a new gecko after me or Douglas Adams and I've never felt more competitive in my life.
— John Scalzi (@scalzi) September 14, 2016
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Steven H Silver, and Chip Hitchcock for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
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Also, KFC is the obligatory Christmas dinner.
@Vasha: I remember when “Jewish” was one of the tick boxes for “ethnic identity”. Now we’re subsumed into “white” (and I don’t like it; society segregated me, called me all kinds of names, excluded me, accused me of killing their god – removing one box from the list does not erase that).
Some “cultural appropriation” is simply local spin, is it not? During the pogroms, (apparently) thousands of Jewish children were hidden in pickle barrels. During WWII, most of them were hidden in attics or basements, my guess being that most Danish or French households were lacking in pickles…..
Isn’t it also celebrated on Christmas Eve in Japan? I’m mainly going by some JRPGs I’ve played over the years. There always seems to be a cake involved with white icing and strawberries.
Years ago, I read an article in Giant Robot magazine that mentioned how the street musicians in China (before the boom years) would often play Christmas music if they saw what appeared to be American tourists.
@Greg Hullender
Race is a cultural construct, because the clustering of colors into “races” is a cultural construct. There is no biologically meaningful definition of “race” in humans: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23684745
The quote the abstract (somewhat dense writing, but rather lucid, in my opinion):
@Robert Adam Gilmour
http://images.gawker.com/18k1b9daqid0gjpg/c_fit,fl_progressive,q_80,w_636.jpg
I do think Japan is doing something right with Christmas.
@ RedWombat
One of the northern California sites used by the local SCA is on a sheep ranch that also keeps emus. (I believe, in part, to discourage predators of sheep.) Before letting the medievalists in to set up pavilions and whatnot, they herd the sheep, emus, and assorted other livestock out of the area we use. One year, one emu was determined to stick around for the fun. Evidently when an emu doesn’t want to leave an area, it isn’t worth the trouble to make them.
So periodically all weekend, there would be things like:
swordfight
swordfight
swordfight
swordfight
*pause*
emu
swordfight
swordfight
swordfight
In the evening, the emu decided the perfect place to bed down for the night was on one of the comfy kneeling cushions in front of the thrones. There are photos.
This reminds me of a hilariously naive post over at The Mary Sue where someone suggested that American viewers should start boycotting anime on Crunchyroll that included fanservice to convince the Japanese to stop using it.
(Japanese animation companies are producing anime for their own market and don’t give a flying fuck at a rolling doughnutcat about the opinions of US consumers.)
Darren Garrison:
I can’t find that in the text. There is a text about not sending your money to those you don’t think deserve it, but that’s another thing.
@Jack Lint:
My wife is an EMU alumn. When she was there, the ‘mascot’ was a Huron indian (with full support of the remaining Huron at the time).
When a new president arrived in the 90s, they took one look at the mascot an immediately changed it to a Eagle without discussion. Many arguments, much gnashing of teeth and beating of breast later, nothing has changed. Many of my wife’s graduating class refuse to give money to EMU over this issue.
Their football team, however, is often referred to as “the Fighting Flightless”.
@Heather, I’ve been fighting an unpleasant headache all day, and your emu account sent me into one of those bouts of deep rising laughter that really provide relief. Thanks. 🙂
Even more Cultural Appropriation!!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKFuXETZUsI
Personally, I want to see some cultural appropriation of the Cooks Islands. Because they have a naked chick riding a Great White Shark while beaning it with a coconut. While peeing on it. How is that not one of the most well-known myths in the world?
http://www.panix.com/~clay/currency/Cook-Islands.html
Too late to edit, but an incidental link found while googling for good photos of the Cook Island banknotes. I love me some currency art. In my (very minor) collecting experience, I’ve found that some of the smallest or poorest countries have some of the most attractive banknotes. (Some of the favorites in my collection come from Cambodia.)
http://www.instantshift.com/2014/12/01/beautiful-country-currency/
I feel like we’re heading towards a Rod Hull bit…
@Darren Garrison:
Not surprising. For some small countries, selling their banknotes, coins, or stamps to collectors provides a fair chunk of the national budget. Spending some effort to make them pretty has good RoI.
Thank you Vasha and Steve Davidson for your perspectives. I appreciated reading them.
I got an email from Jonathan Coulton this afternoon featuring some information I think would be of interest to the File:
I am officially excited!
Emus make excellent watchdogs. Whereas dogs can be blandished, emus will reliably kick up a fuss. Even when it’s their regular people coming home at the usual time.
ETA: or so I’ve been told.
Darren Garrison: naked chick
Seriously, dude? Seriously? *facepalm*
Entertainment Weekly gave some bandwidth to the Hugo Awards.
Even more Cultural Appropriation!!!
I think you’ve got a problem of definition here, Darren. Cultural appropriation is a subset of cross-cultural borrowing, not a synonym for it. It’s the subset that means “borrowing with racial prejudice”. Cultural appropriation is blackface minstrel shows and Mickey Rooney’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s yellowface, “sexy squaw” Halloween costumes and the belief that Miley Cyrus twerking is “cool” while the black people who invented it are “just ghetto”, and the people who think they’ve done a great and not-at-all-ignorant job representing authentic Asian cultures with a book full of petite submissive geisha-like women making their grandmother’s Authentic Chinese sweet-and-sour pork. Cultural appropriation is making a minstrel show out of another culture, and it’s a strange thing to come out in favor of, quite frankly.
I think that while there’s obviously a lot of nebulous and confusing (and confused) misuse of the term “cultural appropriation”, there’s a genuine phenomenon there that deserves to be discussed. Usually it involves thoughtless appropriation of the symbols of a culture without care or consideration of its meaning (fashion designers incorporating religious iconography into their clothing because it “looks cool” without thinking about the meaning of those symbols or how that meaning might clash with the intended use of the outfit) or plagiarism on a culture-wide scale (white performers “inventing” and profiting from rock and roll while the black pioneers of the art form die in poverty and obscurity).
Obviously, fringe elements will slap the term out there meaning “anything I don’t like that involves use of other culture’s symbols”, but that’s true of anything. Reasonable discourse on the issue generally comes to the conclusion that if done with respect and care, using the symbols of another culture is not the same thing as cultural appropriation. I gotta say, I find it a little disappointing that most of the discussion here has been to find the fringiest and most extreme examples and attempt to use them to discredit the entire concept.
As far as cultural appropriation in Japan goes, one of my very favorite examples is Babymetal, which manages to completely misunderstand what “metal” means, while still ending up thoroughly awesome. 🙂
As far as the general concept goes, I tend to think it’s a lot more complicated than either side is usually willing to admit. I read an interesting article recently by a young woman whose parents came to America from India. She was surprised to realize that her parents were overjoyed to see white people using Indian symbolism, and furthermore to realize that their joy came from the same place as her anger: a response to the prejudice they’d experienced from being associated with another culture. What she saw as a shallow misinterpretation, her parents saw as the beginnings of acceptance. And of course, there are elements of truth to both views.
And of course, there’s always Japan, where cultural appropriation has been a significant part of their culture for centuries. Is it appropriate for me, as an outsider to their culture, to call them out on it?
My tentative conclusion, subject to change, is that, as with comedy, we have to be careful about punching down, but that otherwise, cultural appropriation can be difficult to distinguish from cultural cross-fertilization, which is, IMO, a good thing. All of which means that we have to judge on a case-by-case basis, instead of saying “it’s always bad” or “it’s just overreaction!”
@ Amoxtli: That’s your definition of cultural appropriations (and a reasonable thing to object to) but its not the definition given in the scroll.
@GSLamb
My high school’s teams were the Indians, (and I think they still are). I’ve always thought it was too bad the school was named after Montville the political entity, rather than Mohegan, the local district: the Mohegan Sun casino was built a few miles from the school once the tribe got some of their treaty rights back. And we definitely knew which Indians the teams were named after.
Though I sometimes wonder whether Chief Harold Tantaquidgeon would be amused or appalled by having a casino on the site of his family’s farm. I suspect, amused — the casino contains a cultural museum built around the collection he accumulated and curated.
@Steve Davidson: yeah, there’s a bit of erasure to invisibility that sometimes makes me uneasy.
@Matthew Johnson, wonderful!
@Amoxtli, well said.
It’s not about the sombrero per se, but about the contempt behind it. It’s also about misuse and disrespect, exoticization, and sometimes outright theft. And it’s primarily an issue when one or more people from a dominant culture do this to a relatively less privileged culture, and especially to an oppressed culture.
Speaking of anime, Neon Genesis Evangelion appropriates a ton of religious iconography from Christianity and Judaism, and those are just the ones I was aware of at the time.
That’s your definition of cultural appropriations (and a reasonable thing to object to) but its not the definition given in the scroll.
Any cherry-picked definition used to support an argument (including mine) should be taken up with a little more scrutiny than simple face value. Does Larry Correia’s choice of definition match other academic and colloquial definitions, or did he pick it in order to mock it? Does mine match other academic and colloquial definitions, or did I pick it to score a cheap rhetorical point against Darren? (You can decide either way, but I just had a peek, so I’ll note for the research-lazy that blackface and racial-stereotype Halloween costumes as cultural appropriation come heavily sourced with academic publications in the Wikipedia article discussing it, along with a lot of redface examples.)
To base what one knows about cultural appropriation on what one post selectively quoted in a Scroll selectively quoted in turn does not make for the most solid foundation for an argument on whether cultural appropriation is a-okay.
@microtherion and Hampus
Did you actually read the article? 🙂 It starts by making a definition of “race” as meaning “subspecies” and then “proves” that humans only have one race. I suppose that’s useful to show to racists who insist otherwise, but it hardly proves that skin color is not inherited.
The trouble with saying things like “race/gender are cultural constructs” is that to 99% of the English-speaking world, it sounds like you’re trying to claim that skin-color isn’t inherited (or even fixed) and that sexual characteristics are likewise fluid. Those claims, of course, are absurd. Making statements that confuse listeners is a bad idea in general, but choosing ones that leave the impression that you’ve lost your mind is, in my view, a bad mistake.
So, yes, I think I do understand what people were trying to accomplish with those expressions. And I think it’s a really, really bad idea to repeat them. In any context.
@ Bruce Baugh
I am delighted that I and the emu could serve.
@Xtifr
Well the UK metal community have appropriated Babymetal right back again if the turnout for them at Download is anything to go by, regardless of the rain.
It may come as a surprise to most people that race is a social construct, but it also happens to be as close to historical fact as is possible to be. We have all the documentation we need to chart its development, and have done so. If you have a suggested alternate phrasing, then by all means let’s hear it. And, indeed, let’s see you try to convince the academy to adopt your preferred term.
In the meantime, refraining from making true statements because people will reflexively respond poorly to them is itself a bad mistake.
Ask not what scroll can do for emu, ask what emu can do for scroll.
I’ve now read the novella at the end of the new Toby Daye book, and it’s awesome. Mostly a character study of Arden Windermere as she faces an emotional crisis, and it also provides a lot more background information about her and her life before Toby found her and convinced her that she had a duty to her father’s Kingdom. Plus, she may have just found her equivalent of the Queen’s Own Herald.
3) I still use my LiveJournal as a journal, albeit mostly a business journal these days — a way to note down things I want to remember about a specific event so that I can go back and look them up again later. The Tag function is invaluable to me, and that’s part of what makes it way better than the same thing on paper, or just on my hard drive.
8) My personal definition of “cultural appropriation” is “borrowing all the cool-looking stuff from another culture without making the slightest effort to get it right”. J.K. Rowling’s treatment of Native American cultures in her recent release is a nadirical example. Hell, I know more about Native American culture than that, and most of what I know is probably somewhat less than accurate too — but that stuff was appallingly bad. “Inclusion” at that level of Wrong is almost worse than exclusion.
12) Even if you’re not a science fiction fan, that question is a gimme for anyone with a basic science education. Just reframe it as “the term used to designate an interstellar gas cloud,” and you don’t have to know anything at all about science fiction awards.
@ Kip: You think Google Maps is bad, don’t even look at MapQuest. Oy.
@ Ghost Bird: The way you express things makes a lot of sense to me.
@ junego: As an antidote to that, I suggest the Mageworlds series by Doyle and Macdonald. Rip-roaring space opera, with a superficially-similar but much less clunky plot, and from the sound of it much better characters. Best read in publication order rather than internal-timeline order; start with The Price of the Stars.
@ Steve D: Don’t bother trying to understand the so-called “War on Christmas”. It’s as pointless as the Puppy Crusade and at root stems from the same cause — one guy who wants money/recognition and a lot of gullible idiots who don’t know anything about history but get off on feeling persecuted.
@Greg Hullender: The thing is that traits like skin color, which we could measure fairly objectively in various ways, take on different meanings thanks to culture. Reading Ben Franklin on the swarthy Germans, and how they compare so unsatisfactorily to the white Anglo-Saxon stock, is enlightening. The whole “we weren’t seen as white, and now we are” isn’t a euphemism for “we didn’t used to be accepted as valid participants on equal footing, and now we are” – when you look at accounts of, say, Irish or Italian immigrants from the early 20th century, you find them genuinely described as not white. Their skins appear demonstrably, qualitatively darker to white observers, their facial features different, their posture and gait different.
Now, a lot of that is pure crap, or at least so the evidence suggests now. The average Irish or Italian immigrant of 1900 was not markedly more like an ape than their counterparts of 2016. But they looked that way to observers of the time who were in categories already established as white.
Which leads, of course, the unwelcome question, what do we now honestly believe we see that will be clearly nonsense to the audience of 2132?
[People who] get off on feeling persecuted.
The term I saw for that (on Sadly, No) was “Martyrbators.”
An important factor to remember is that in any given ethnic group, there is more variation within the group than there is average distance between groups.
Every group has a large amount of variation within.
That doesn’t change the fact that the average skin color in sub-Saharan Africa is much, much darker than the average even in southern Europe. Or that curly hair is very rare among the Chinese.
But the differences within groups are very great, and the “edges” are much larger than people usually acknowledge. And in the early 20th century, in the US, the Irish, the Italians, and the Greeks didn’t meet the then-current US definition of “white.” Not one worried about saying dago, and No Irish Need Apply signs were real.
And none of that changes the fact that cultures have their valued customs and traditions, and don’t want them treated with disrespect or appropriated for someone else’s profit. Whether or not race or ethnicity are biological reality or cultural constructs.
@Lis: Right on.
@ Steve D: Some of what gets decried as “hypersensitivity” is in fact the result of being (metaphorically) poked on the arm too many times.
Imagine that one of your co-workers has the habit of poking you on the arm as they walk by. Not hard, but it happens a lot and they always hit you in the same place. After a while, you’ve got a bruise there, and when they poke you it HURTS. So at some point you flinch away from the poke and ask them to stop. And then they, and everyone else around, get all upset with YOU. “Why are you being so hypersensitive? It was just one little poke! You need to grow a thicker skin! They didn’t mean anything nasty by it, that’s just the way they are. Can’t you be more tolerant?” … and all the way on thru the bingo card.
That poke in the arm is also an example of what’s called a “microaggression”. Sure, one by itself is no big deal — but the aggregate of having to live with a bunch of them, every single day, gets really, really old.
@ Greg: “Cultural appropriation” is a fine term to use for writing a story with elements from one culture or another and getting it all wrong. However, I think “cultural *misappropriation* would have been clearer.
I can see that, and I may ask my activist friends to provide input about the concept.
However, it *is* true that racial *discrimination* is a cultural construct. That is, we discriminate against cultures, not a skin colors.
Can’t buy this one. If it were true, then an upper-middle-class black businessman or professor or judge, wearing the accepted cultural garb of his class, would never be hassled by the cops for driving around his own neighborhood. And an upper-middle-class black businesswoman or professor or judge, again wearing the accepted cultural garb of her class, would never have the cops called on her for trying to purchase an expensive accessory using a credit card. In cases like this, it is very clear that skin color overrides every other possible cue.
Not to mention historical documents in which people of Irish, Polish, and/or Eastern European descent are specifically described as “not white”. Race IS a cultural construct, and it’s mutable over time and distance.
@ Vasha: One of our friends, also a convention dealer, is of Jewish descent and has black hair and olive-toned skin. He’s been pulled over more than once on his way to or from a con because he “looks Mexican”, and a Latino man driving a white cargo van is automatically suspected of being a drug dealer. So far he’s been lucky; the worst that’s happened to him was the asshole cop who threatened to pull out every box, dump them all out to search, and then leave him there to repack and reload them on the side of the road. That was some years back; today I have little doubt that it would have been more than just a threat.
I’m as Anglo as you can get buy I have dark harir, olive skin and heavy eyebrows. Sometimes when I go into Greek restaurants, the waiters will assume I’m Greek and sometimes they get offended when I tell them I’m not.
My Day had it worse. He has the same complexion, and when he was young he spent a lot of time in the sun. He got so dark that he had to endure a lot of anti-Aboriginal slurs – though on the plus side, thus made him a lot more sympathetic to Aboriginal than a lot of white Australians of his generation.
TL version, I’m very sympathetic to the proposition that race is a social construct.
@7: the article notes a particular question of dealing with ducks in the road. I can just imagine how they’d fail with Boston’s scads of non-migratory geese.
re “cultural appropriation”: what I’m hearing is that the issue is misrepresentation rather than simple use. Is that what the coiners of the term intended, and if so why did they not use a word that commonly means to take or allot (with no pejorative sense)? They’re both polysyllabic enough to be a mouthful; did they believe that any external representation was bound to be misrepresentation?
@Matthew Johnson: sweet.
@Jack Lint: Zippers were a brand of paprika stew?
Above should read ‘my dad’.
As for cultural appropriation, this is clearly a very complex issue that a lot of people both for and against the idea seem to want to reduce to a simple formula. Whatever else, I don’t think that’s going to happen.
Yeah. Go visit the Guards Museum to see more about this. (We were lucky as it was included in our London pass and near our hotel on our first day of sightseeing after the 2014 Worldcon.) They may wear ceremonial uniforms, but the guards regiments are not lightweights, and those are real modern guns they are carrying. Don’t mess with them.
Robert Adam Gilmour asked:
Hypercommercialized it even beyond what many Western countries have managed. Here is a sad reindeer to explain it all to you.
Anime Christmas is actually pretty close to Hollywood Christmas: themes of friendship, sharing, Special Moments, etc.
The fried chicken thing is the result of a deliberate marketing campaign by KFC in the 1970s, so that one’s on Americans.
Dawn Incognito said:
Oh, anime has tons of awkward, poorly informed, sometimes cringe-inducing depictions of Western religions and beliefs. (OTOH, it doesn’t begin to approach the combined tonnage of awkward, poorly informed, sometimes cringe-inducing depictions of Mystic Eastern Religions in Western media.)
The problem with statements about social constructs isn’t that they aren’t true. I teach them in sex ed classes myself, where one of the promises we make is that we won’t lie to kids. (Or adults.) The problem is that they aren’t understood, aren’t easily understandable, and aren’t easily explained.
Kids you can teach them to. They don’t have so much they know that isn’t so. But fully grown adults? If you can catch one with goodwill and a level of openness and spend a lot of time with them one-on-one, then maybe you can get the idea across. But these aren’t obvious or simple ideas, mostly.
Doug Muder had something to say about this in his invaluable Weekly Sift: Instead of Dumbing Down.
@me re #7: so I’ve just caught up with today’s paper (dashed out early to spend time clambering around the middle reaches of a hemlock grove at the other end of Mass.) and find that Boston will be the site of “a program focused on the future of urban transportation” — including autonomous vehicles, say “officials”. (NB: the link will probably disappear behind a firewall in a few hours; my apologies, but I haven’t figured out how to get around this site’s attempt to wring every penny out of the web.)
@Xtifr:
My tentative conclusion, subject to change, is that, as with comedy, we have to be careful about punching down, but that otherwise, cultural appropriation can be difficult to distinguish from cultural cross-fertilization, which is, IMO, a good thing. All of which means that we have to judge on a case-by-case basis, instead of saying “it’s always bad” or “it’s just overreaction!”
I’m generally inclined to agree. There is a huge messy middle where there aren’t a lot of black-and-white lines to draw, where you do your research and do your best. Sometimes you do your research and do your best, and you get something great, like City of Stairs or Guy Gavriel Kay’s Under Heaven. Sometimes you do your research and do your best, and you get JK Rowling’s skinwalkers fiasco. And then outside of SFF, you’ve got, say, Alexander McCall Smith, where you can make a case either way, and each side would have some good points. Which just comes with having work out there for criticism. Some people aren’t going to like what you did, and they may not be any more wrong than the people who loved it. Like you say, there is often an element of truth to both interpretations.
(I’m noticing my positive examples are both second-world fantasy, and I’m reminded that when Ken Liu’s Grace of Kings came out, he gave an interview about the world-building, where he said that he chose to set it in a second-world setting rather than in China because he was concerned about cultural appropriation. He didn’t think he was close enough to the culture to get it right. It didn’t stop him from writing a book with heavy cultural cross-fertilization.)
@Emu Fans: My favorite emu fact is a fact about the old game Rogue: One of the “monsters” you fight is an Emu.
@Paul Weimer: I read B&N’s SFF blog but sometimes fall behind, so thanks for linking to your MJ-12: Inception review. It was on my mental list to read more about, partially because I kinda stumbled on getting the impression it was basically “Hiroshima = superpowers.” But after reading your review, I’m definitely intrigued!
@Arifel: You’re listening to one of my favorite series (“The Dark Is Rising”). 🙂 I hope you’re enjoying it!
@Darren Garrison: It seems like a lot of colorful but not necessarily beautiful currency, but #11 has a beautiful dragon, and that’s all that matters! 😀
@Greg Hullender
Indeed I did.
If one wants to assert that “race” has a biological meaning, rather than just a cultural one, it’s necessary to give a biological definition of “race”. The article gives some possible definitions, and shows that by those definitions, humans are NOT among the species having “races”. It would seem to me that if you insist on race being a biologically meaningful concept for humans, you would have to supply a working biological definition of “race”.
And I’m puzzled why you would imply that the article claims that. It merely claims that skin color does not a race make.
The meaning of said skin color is not fixed. Besides, it’s not like the physical skin color is utterly immutable. Some people tan. Light conditions matter. cf the notorious O.J. Simpson covers: http://hoaxes.org/photo_database/image/darkened_mug_shot/