Jerry Coyne. Peter Boghossian. Richard Dawkins. Various others. I call them the Dudebros because they act like white privilege is awesome, pontificate infallibly like the Pope, and don’t understand any of the things they complain about. They are the Archie Bunkers of the 21st century. Progressives can also be wrong about things. These facts are not incompatible. But landing on the truth requires working harder. And the Dudebros just don’t.
Today, two examples will illustrate…
The Coyne of the Realm
In Eating “Ethnic Food” Has Now Become “Cultural Appropriation”, Jerry Coyne wrote a whole snearing article against Rachel Kuo who made a detailed argument for more cultural sensitivity when we enjoy or adapt foreign cuisines. Failing sixth grade reading comprehension, his entire article assumes her premise was that this is bad and we must never do it. He missed, I guess, the sentence, “Enjoying food from another culture is perfectly fine.” Oh, and, “If you love a dish and think it’s delicious, great! If you’re searching for a place that serves a particular dish, also great!” And, “I’m not against trying and cooking food outside your own culture.” Her words. Seriously. Read those sentences. Read his article. Tweet me a photo of your facepalm.
Then read her whole article. Because Coyne is not very bright. He doesn’t get correct anything she says. He in fact stated no disagreement, I can tell, with any of the things she actually did say:
- Don’t treat Asian et al. cuisines any differently than European et al. cuisines. The one is no more “exotic” than the other.
- Don’t reduce cultures to their foods. “All Japanese people love sushi” is not all that different from “All black people love fried chicken.” And there is more to being Japanese than cuisine.
- Recognize that there is as much cultural diversity within a foreign cuisine category (e.g. “Chinese food” actually means a shitload of often-evolving regional cuisines) as there is in domestic cuisine (e.g. “American food” is actually a grab bag of such wildly diverse realities as “Southern cuisine” and “Hawaiian cuisine” and “Russo-American cuisine” and a shitload of other regional cuisines).
- Don’t assume your Korean friend knows all about the best Vietnamese restaurants. She isn’t an expert in “Asia.” She’s Korean. Then generalize that particular sentiment to all analogs. Don’t be that guy.
- Don’t make fun of other people’s “weird food.” Your food is no less weird than theirs is. Figure that out.
- Don’t treat sampling other cuisines as being “brave.” That’s being a total Dudebro. As Kuo says, “It’s disconcerting to eat with folks who are going to giggle about ingredients and make comments like, ‘Oh my god, this is so weird! This is gross!’ and run back to tell all their other friends about trying it and how ‘awesome’ that experience was.” Don’t make people feel like “they’re culture is abnormal and doesn’t quite belong in this world.” In other words, don’t be a douche. (Unless, perhaps, the culture itself is proud of a dish being disgusting, and fully expects you to react accordingly.)
- Don’t just ignorantly consume other culture’s foods and use their ideas. Try to actually know stuff about the history behind what you are consuming and borrowing. In other words, treat the cultures you are benefiting from with some actual respect (you don’t have to be Anthony Bourdain in Parts Unknown, but there are lessons to be had from that). Also acknowledge where the credit goes. Don’t erase the cultures you are taking from.
- Don’t let your enjoying other cuisines become an excuse to remain ignorant of the problems actually being faced by their affiliated societies right now. Don’t, for example, just go buy strawberries, and just not give a shit or even know about the unjust exploitation of migrant labor you are benefiting from (particularly if you are a voter: because then you actually could be doing something about it). Oh, and, maybe be the kind of guy who knows the strawberry industry in the U.S. used to be largely Japanese. Until we stole it from them, when, you know, that thing happened.
- Be sensitive to any harm you may be causing. You might not be able to do anything about it, but don’t be clueless. The wild fad for quinoa, for example, has both helped and hurt Bolivia, and we want to support the economic lift that making quinoa a cash crop instead of a subsistence crop is creating there, but the pace of the shift has been so fast that the widely impoverished population there hasn’t been able to keep up in replacing it with a nutritionally adequate and affordable staple, resulting in food insecurity. Basically, because of rich Americans, Bolivians can’t afford to eat their own food. We should at least be aware of that.
That’s it. That’s all she argued. She didn’t argue any of the things Coyne went on a frenzied rant about. Instead her message was fundamentally a humanist one:
- How are we affecting the world with our choices?
That is a basic principle of world citizenship. It is a fundamental outcome of empathy for other human beings. And it requires recognizing that you aren’t the center of the universe.
Instead, Coyne sees bugbears and hobgoblins, and goes on a snarky foam-at-the-mouth indignant white panic rant about a completely different article, the one his bigoted mind betrayed him into thinking she wrote. Evident throughout is his cowering, sweat-dripping fear, er, I mean, outraged harumphing indignance, at an Asian woman (worse even, a feminist!) telling his white male self to be more sensitive, empathetic, and educated about foreign cultures and the way we treat them.
What Is Cultural Appropriation
(And Why Does White Privilege Blind You to It?)
Coyne’s ridiculousness in not getting any of her actual points, and imagining she said completely different things, is typical of reactionary and conservative mythmaking. Kuo points out several ways in which people act insensitively in how they use and enjoy food, and gives really good, humanist advice on how to use and enjoy food without doing that, and Coyne goes into outrage mode, he only hears that his White Male Privilege is under attack, and rather than calm down and deal rationally with what is actually being said, he invents silly conspiracy theories about how Crazy Asian Hippies Want To Take Away His Shrimp Fried Rice (and “Woe to us all, what madness has come upon the world!?”). And then acts like he is totally arrogantly right about everything. The only thing missing from his diatribe is the phrase “Tut tut!”
But in fact, Coyne got everything she said wrong. He didn’t correctly apprehend her general thesis (despite her repeating it half a dozen times), which would fail him on any SAT reading comprehension test. He didn’t correctly apprehend any of the points she made in support of that thesis. He didn’t correctly apprehend any of her advice for how to avoid those pitfalls and be a better person when you eat foreign and fusion cuisine. In other words, he learned absolutely nothing. This is almost the defining characteristic of the modern conservative. I know Coyne is “politically” a liberal. But intellectually, he’s not a liberal. He’s a reactionary.
For example, contrary to what Coyne thinks she said, Kuo says it’s great, for example, to ask your Taiwanese friend if they know good Taiwanese restaurants, and she said she loves doing that for her friends (she herself is Taiwanese). What annoys her is her friends assuming she knows as much about all Asian food whatever. Coyne, notably, completely failed to even notice this was her point. Likewise, that there is no such thing as “authentic Chinese food,” any more than there is “authentic American food.”
Can Coyne disagree? No. Can he really disagree with the conclusion that it is foolish and insulting to not know this? To act like your Korean girlfriend must surely know all about Chinese food? To think there is such a thing as “authentic” “Chinese” food? Because not only is “Chinese food” actually a conglomerate of many different cuisines just like “American food” is, and always evolving as well, but Chinese food is also an American food. As Kuo says, “Food culture has traveled and flowed in messy and complicated ways across the globe.” Her point is that we should respect that. Her argument is that “the idea of the ‘authentic’ food experience is separated from reality. It also freezes a culture in a particular place in time,” and neither is logical behavior. And Coyne is supposed to be all about being logical. So what Kuo actually said was: Just enjoy the damn food, don’t fetishize it. Her point flew right past Coyne’s head.
This is embarrassing coming from a professor, whom we expect to be grading papers on reading comprehension. Can Coyne not even read at the sixth grade level? I’m sure he can. But a reactionary mind lost in a bath of white privilege apparently will retrograde his mental capability whenever confronting challenges to his comfort zone. Suddenly he becomes the mental equal of Rush Limbaugh.
Kuo defined “cultural appropriation” correctly “as when members of a dominant culture adopt parts of another culture from people that they’ve also systematically oppressed” and then “start[s] to fetishize or commercialize it” or “hoard access” to it. Apart from that last bit (just borrowing isn’t it; there has to be something harmful happening), I have highlighted the key words here. Neither Coyne, nor Dawkins (nor Boghossian, or any other Atheist Dudebro) has paid attention to those key words. They think “cultural appropriation” means any and all cultural diffusion or adaptation. No, you dumbasses. That’s not what anyone is talking about. Listen to what people are saying. Because when you don’t, you just look like doddering old fools who don’t understand the world anymore.
Only a dominant culture can “appropriate” another culture, and only a systematically oppressed culture can “be appropriated.” Because what’s bad about it only stems from that specific power relationship. You can’t understand cultural appropriation without understanding the role that power dynamic plays in producing the effects that people are finding problematic. You also, of course, can’t understand cultural appropriation if you don’t actually listen to what people are saying is problematic about it.
Kuo linked to an authority at Hipster Appropriations on the cultural appropriation of foods, which I can tell Coyne did not read (white man can’t be bothered, his ignorant rage too important for research). Yet it lays it all out very clearly:
So let’s begin with what I don’t think constitutes cultural appropriation of food, to get some of the angsty stuff out of the way. I don’t believe it is cultural appropriation to:
- eat food from another culture
- to learn how to cook food from another culture
- to modify recipes from another culture for your own enjoyment
- to eat at restaurants, authentic or otherwise, that serve food from another culture
- to enjoy learning about another culture thru the traditional and/or modern foods of that culture
Instead, cultural appropriation does any or all of these things (at a minimum):
- Despoliation (intentional or not)
- Fetishization (stereotyping, othering, etc.)
- Theft (claiming a thing as your own, erasing the inventors)
Despoliation can be direct, as in actually entering a country and walking off with its statues and historical heritage. Or it can be indirect. For example, due to the enormous wealth differential created by the power imbalance between a dominant and a dominated culture, a component of a culture can start to become inaccessible even to its originators. As the Hipster Appropriations article says, cultural appropriation includes “making it difficult for those of the culture from which it stems to gain access to” a part of their own culture. Quinoa, for example. Which I already dealt with above. But they illustrate what this would be like by reversing the POV and having the same thing happen to apples in America. Incidentally, reversing POV like that (what I have called “forced perspective” reasoning) is a crucial skill for critical thinking, essential to understanding all discourse about social justice whatever (I discussed this before in the context of feminism). Coyne, Dawkins, Boghossian: They really need to learn this skill. Badly. (Although I think Boghossian might be a lost cause.)
Fetishization can manifest in all manner of unempathetic or historically ignorant insensitivity. Kuo’s points provide many examples. In recent news is the practice of white folk dressing up like Native Americans or wearing blackface, both of which are extremely insensitive, displaying an ignorance of the horrific history these practices mock, an ignorance that is itself a manifestation of white privilege: Native Americans and African Americans don’t have the privilege of forgetting the genocidal brutalization we subjected their ancestors to, and the long history of racism embodied in such mimicry of what “they” “look” like. This does not mean we can’t ever dress as historical persons in those groups. It simply must be done sensitively and seriously, and not ignorantly or frivolously. To understand the distinctions and why it matters, see my comment analyzing the difference between appropriating a culture, and honoring a culture by representing one of its heroes to the public.
Theft means in the intellectual property sense, not in the physical object sense. Cultural appropriation as stealing means borrowing some idea from an oppressed culture, and then pretending or thinking the dominant culture created it, or simply erasing the role of the originators. In other words, not giving credit where credit is due. Stealing the credit. Or simply eliminating the credit. The history of Rock & Roll, for example, famously exhibits components of this. I’m sorry white people, but Elvis was not really the King. Racism resulted in white people being credited with inventing everything, and the black artists who actually did, gradually came to be sidelined and eventually forgotten. That’s sad. And we should not be proud of it. Nor should we want to repeat the behavior.
This does not mean all accusations of cultural appropriation are equal, or even correct. Some I’m sure are silly or frivolous or even indefensible. But there being stupid claims of a thing does not mean there are not sound claims of that thing. As I’m constantly pointing out in my study of the historicity of Jesus: that all kinds of stupid, unsourced nonsense gets said about Mithras and Horus, does not mean there aren’t genuine predecessors of the dying-and-rising savior god mytheme that Jesus was modeled on (such as Osiris, Zalmoxis, Romulus, and Inanna). Learn how to distinguish the wheat from the chaff. But doing that requires understanding what we are talking about and why it is a problem.
The Dawkins Goof
Dawkins illustrated this failure to grasp any of this when, again in an ignorant and emotional reaction to the discussion of cultural appropriation in the news, he circulated a stupid meme that he mistakenly thought was clever, but that in fact only showed how out of touch he is. (Again.) The basic idea he endorsed was that, since cultural appropriation means borrowing (it doesn’t), and all borrowing between cultures is the same (it isn’t), therefore anyone who uses any product of Western culture is engaging in “cultural appropriation.” Facepalm.
What I’ve already said: Not all borrowing is appropriative. Only borrowing by a dominating culture from a dominated culture is. And even then, we in dominant societies can still borrow from dominated cultures without being appropriative. Kuo’s entire article was about how in fact to do that—a fact that went completely over Coyne’s head. So Dawkins’ meme makes no sense. It only shows how ignorant he is of the very concept he is ineptly trying to mock.
Look. I get it. Once back in college a discussion was had of having a library case display multiculturalism and someone joked that American culture could be represented in it by a McDonald’s coke and fries, and I quipped that no, the light bulb illuminating the case and the electricity running through it will do well enough. It can be annoying to hear it suggested that your culture isn’t the awesome source of everything awesome. But they weren’t wrong. We gave the world the American mass market corporation, which has crept across the earth like a fungus. And that does make me cringe. Sorry, world. But neither was I wrong. We did give the world electricity and the light bulb. Which is awesome. But not everything awesome came from us. And not everything that came from us is awesome. (I really do apologize for the KKK. Our bad. … Oh, right, and the genocide thing.)
Rebecca Watson published a rebuttal to this silly meme in A Thorough Debunking of Dawkins’ Racist Retweet. She missed the broader observation that I just made: that actually, this shows Dawkins doesn’t even know what cultural appropriation is. She instead went after the particulars of the included items on his list of “awesome things” that people have to thank Western culture for. Though she accepted his framing (a common mistake in debate), and thus missed some real zingers she could have lobbed at him, like ahem, how many of the things Dawkins credits to Western civilization were built on algebra. Or that even our number system comes from India.
On the particulars Watson is only wrong about a few things (e.g., the computer was invented in Greece over a thousand years before Muslims adapted it, probably from Greek treatises now lost; and no, Abbas Ibn Firnas did not invent the airplane, or even flight; and the ancient Greeks wrote novels long before the Japanese did, although myth is nearly the same as fiction, and in that paradigm the first epic novels we know of came from Iraq). And some of her points are subtle. For example, that Dawkins accepted the inclusion of tomatoes, corn, and chocolate on the list of appropriations from the West is hilarious, because his doing that, is itself an example of Western cultural appropriation: he just erased the actual non-European cultures of the Americas we took those from. He thinks they are Western! It’s all the worse that his privilege of forgetting that fact is owed to the genocide of the original cultivators of those foods. Watson does call attention to that, without explicitly stating the irony that Dawkins just inadvertently exemplified actual cultural appropriation with his own retweeted list.
And overall, Watson’s right. The list he endorsed contains silly tautologies (like “Western architecture came only from the West”) and factual errors (in no way were pants a Western invention) and some true points of merit (the airplane). But the list is also weirdly arbitrary. Why is apple pie a more impressive gift to the world than sushi? In all, though, we could fix it up, and remove all the ignorant mistakes and dumb tautologies and random weird shit, all the stuff that makes him look facepalmingly foolish, and come up with a sound variant of what the list was attempting to get at: that Western intellectual achievements (science, democracy) and industry (railroads, machineguns) rapidly surpassed and overcame the rest of the world, in fact allowed us to dominate and oppress and fuck over most of it (Dawkins surely of all people ought to have recalled that thing called the British Empire). We literally robbed them of people and material resources, ruined their governments, and destabilized their political borders.
For Dawkins now to boast of all the awesome things this allowed us to accomplish is really fucking insensitive. He could do, again, with a strong dose of trying to see what his doing this looks like, from the perspective of the people living in the quagmire left by the other end of that crooked stick. What his culture did to Africa, India, the Middle East, much of Asia, is precisely why they couldn’t catch up or keep pace with us in scientific and industrial advances. (The Native American civilizations, potential and actual, we simply wiped out.)
They did some dumb shit, too (though so did we; remember the Middle Ages?). But we had a huge edge. We could have used that to help them. We could have treated them fairly and justly and respectfully. We could have taught them, and acted with, humanist values (and probably learned some from them as well). We could have shared with them and cooperated with them. We could have given them full and equal access to that democracy thing Dawkins agrees is so great as to be included on the list. But we didn’t. And they’re still pretty sore about that.
And so would you be, dear Richard Dawkins, had the tables been turned.
Conclusion
White guys like this don’t get that they become the butt of their own joke when they act this way. Their complete blindness to their ignorance, and to their emotional, reactionary irrationality (which they humorously claim is “being rational”), is itself exactly what we mean by white privilege, a concept they ironically mock, in the very act of displaying it for all and sundry. There is a reason why we have no end of evidence to document White Fragility and the Thin Skins and Male Tears [in] The Tragedy of White Atheism. There is a reason why they get so emotionally panicked and hysterical merely at being criticized. Too many white guys just can’t handle being told they don’t know shit and are acting like assholes. They go all emotional batshit when that happens, and become dumber than a third grader, losing the ability to comprehend basic facts and sentences, or to follow a single logical train of thought. They fail to listen. They fail to learn. They fail to understand, either themselves or the world they live in.
Because they don’t see the world from anyone’s perspective but their own. They consequently can’t see what they look like to everyone else. And in result, they think everyone else is crazy when they tell them they are acting like an ass. “Check your privilege” means: step outside of that bubble, and try to see the world, and yourself, from everyone else’s perspective. You might be wildly astonished at how everything changes. And you might find yourself ashamed. But you can fix that. You can become a better person, informed and conscious. You just have to listen. Pay attention. And think.
For those of you who don’t understand the emotion of exasperation in my discourse, it is all at the Atheist Dudebros. We don’t need them. We could be paying so much more attention to other leaders in our movement. But alas, these guys still are who the media looks to as representing us. And who too many of us spend too much time defending instead of forgetting. So my annoyance in this article reflects how I and many of the rest of us feel (so make sure you understand that before you try tone policing). This shit has gone on too long, and happened too many times now.
Atheist Dudebros. We are tired of being embarrassed by you. Please do better. Or just retire from all media. You can play with kittens and tend a garden.
And then, for the ultimate irony that is forever lost on them, they complain about us “looking for offence” being “unable to handle criticism”, “unable of rational discourse” and “letting our emotions rule us”.
You can’t make that shit up..
Great post! It’s been clear to me (and I suspect to many others) for some time that far too many of the “New Atheists” (as they have been called) are mired in some kind of 1950s style regressive tendency, and it’s been supported by some very shady characters (I call them the Brownshirts – I hope the reference hasn’t been lost to the collective memory) who are more than willing to use questionable tactics in attempts to punish any who criticize. I don’t fully understand it, but it cannot be good when religious folks seem more progressive than atheists when it comes to issues of cultural sensitivity and sexism. It’s become almost a joke how misogynistic the “New Atheists” are, but any mention of it results in a huge backlash from the Brownshirt Brigade.
I sympathize with your overall point, but I disagree with it in key parts.
Similarly, there was an article recently about saving atheism from the New Atheists, which made a general point that they have regressed from our original pre-9/11 liberalism into a war mongering, immigrant fearing quasi-conservativism. He’s right, but I disagree with where he takes some of his argument, and I find he completely drops the ball in proposing a solution.
In your case, for example, if you switched misogynistic with sexist, you’d be closer to correct. Though there are atheists who are misogynistic (Thunderf00t; Molyneux), the big names are really just sexists. They don’t despise or aim to diminish women, for instance, they just blindly hold beliefs and support behaviors that are prejudiced against women. And crucially, they aren’t aware of this, even when it’s pointed out to them they are incredulous. That’s a less evil though perhaps more pernicious problem.
But after some tweaks like that, you are not wrong.
ok, I’ll bite.
I don’t know much about molyneux, but I’m not sure Thunderf00t is misogynistic. He sure can be accused of being misogynistic, and the titles of his videos don’t help (eg: ‘how feminism poisons everything’) but in the videos I’ve watched he is not attacking feminism in the sense of equal rights for women, but radical feminism which tries to shoehorn jargon and agitprop into everything it discusses. There I can’t really argue with him.
anyways, i could be wrong here, I haven’t really watched too many of his videos. So what have you seen of his that makes you think he’s misogynistic?
That’s a sham. Thunderf00t is attacking mainstream feminists with bogus claims of “radical” feminism (he doesn’t understand that that actually doesn’t mean what he thinks it means; what he actually means is extremist feminism or something, which none of his targets adhere to; but trying to educate him in the history of feminism is a lost cause). He defends the harassment of women generally, including (in consequence) the guys who joked about raping a teenage girl on her own thread.
Thunderf00t is an infamous profiteer on victimizing women (story here). He is all around a really horrible person, a borderline criminal, and a liar (documented here and here). And he is definitely against all feminism, not just some fictional extreme version of it (details here). He is also, IMO, a doxxer who has engaged in fraud and racketeering (writing fraudulent customer reviews and organizing others to do so in order to bankrupt a business to suppress the free speech rights of a woman…basically identical to a mafia burning a business down to shut up someone who slighted their boss). More examples of his awful views and bad arguments here and here. More evidence here, here, here, and here.
He’s basically the closest thing the atheist movement has to a Bond villain.
Good post. It is so incredibly weird to me that people claim to oppose feminism, while at the same time claiming to be in favor of gender equality. I guess the same thing is going on with cultural appropriation. It’s such a waste of time. People like that just leave me confused…
I got one slight comment. I think it is very important to distinguish between talking about what is going on within a culture, and what actual people do or did. ‘We’ (everyone in western culture) did not do anything in the middle ages, they (the middle agers) did. Don’t feel ashamed (or proud) for what other people you do not know or meet did. But certainly be aware of what these people (in your culture) did or are doing and do not misrepresent history. And if your culture is building upon that bad history don’t pretend it did not happen and claim the bad parts as your own as well.
That’s a good point.
Although…
There is a sense in which we can, if done properly, share pride and shame about our culture, knowing that we are the products and beneficiaries of what our cultural (not necessarily genetic) ancestors did, and that we are carriers of the culture that did those things (and thus partake of some of its virtues and flaws, insofar as they haven’t filtered out completely over time). And we should want to preserve and maintain the virtues of our culture, just as we should want to purge and eliminate the flaws of our culture. Pride and shame serve the function of motivating this. Whereas avoiding shame, for example, can become a way to not face the reality of what happened and thus avoid policing it happening again or the flaws in our culture that facilitated it. Avoiding pride can have the opposite effect (of avoiding recognizing and working to preserve our culture’s virtues).
Of course, most things in a culture are neither virtues nor flaws, just fashions and mechanisms that change over time. Although one can then have pride in preserving such a tradition. Sometimes that’s innocuous, or even fun (no different from fandom in the Geek arena). Other times it becomes a problem. But that’s a whole other issue from appropriation, since that’s a dynamic to critically examine within a culture.
As to your first point, I agree. I do believe there is a sense in which reactionary mindsets chafe at the new vocabulary, and obsess over fringe manifestations of it that go too far, and use that, out of fear, as an excuse to ignore the actual mainstream manifestations of it and their merits. Because the latter requires admitting they are ignorant and insensitive and overly self-obsessed, and thus they need to change, and no one wants to admit that of themselves. So they rationalize ways they don’t have to.
We could indeed talk about cultural appropriation, and feminism, without ever even using those words. When you just talk about the phenomenon, no one freaks out. But as soon as you label it, it becomes terrifying. Because then they can’t compartmentalize and bracket that away any more. I mentioned Bourdain’s show in the blog because I have actually encountered people who chafe at cultural appropriation discussions, yet admire how Bourdain respects the cultures that produce the foods he enjoys, and all his etiquette of that which often shows examples of doing the things Kuo recommends. They didn’t even notice that in this they were admiring everything Kuo was saying was admirable. They thus actually agree with her. But as soon as you point out the hypocrisy of admiring Bourdain but then behaving entirely contrary to everything you admire about his method in your own life, people lose their mind.
The jibe at the Middle Ages towards the end was a tad unnecessary. It fits in to a pattern of unthinking medieval-bashing distressingly common among modern atheist luminaries – one I have occasionally had cause to take Richard Dawkins himself to task over. The thought processes behind it are not a million miles from the ones you decry here – they were super religious during the Middle Ages, so clearly they must have been idiots and ignoramuses! They are the enemy of atheists and humanists! We’re sooooo much cleverer and smarter and more moral than them because of our Enlightenment humanist heritage! Clearly just the mere mention of the Middle Ages can stand without further explanation as a marker for all the “dumb shit” Western civilization has done. Because antiquity and the modern world are complex, nuanced and diverse historical periods showing both good and bad, but the Middle Ages? Nope! They can remain a ladybird book caricature of muddy peasants, violent superstition and witchcraft!
But all this plugs squarely into a world of self-aggrandising imperialistic othering propagated by generations of Renaissance, Enlightenment and Victorian rhetoric. We can feel so much better about ourselves because we model our Latin on Cicero’s, not the living Latin of the medieval courts! We’re so much better at science because we’re no longer tied slavishly to Aristotle (never mind that much of the scholastic project was to modify, expand and critique Aristotle’s recently recovered natural science texts)! Ancient is good and Modern is good and the bit in the middle is a sad diversion from what we should have been doing. A thousand years of darkness as Carl Sagan put it. Not unrelated to this ongoing cultural attempt to denigrate medieval progress and achievement is the fact that a lot of its proponents are Americans who don’t have a medieval heritage, or at least are proud to think they don’t. Another lot of its proponents are chauvinistic scientists, who want to cry exceptionalism for their discipline and pretend that since we “discovered” the Scientific Method we no longer have to worry about anything pre-modern at all, because it’s all silly nonsense and wrong, and now we’re perfectly objective and unaffected by cultural trends and prejudices, unlike those stupid medievals. It’s still the same old rhetoric of the Enlightenment, and getting rather stale and prohibitive by now.
As with cultural appropriation today, anything achieved in the Middle Ages tends to have its true value attributed either to antique precursors or modern inheritors. We talk of Aristotle and Euclid and Ptolemy and Galileo and Kepler when it comes to optics, we miss out Al-Kindi and Alhacen and Roger Bacon and Witelo of Silesia. We assume that secularism and humanism are the glories of the Romans and Renaissance city-states, ignoring the seminal impact of Augustine, Maimonides, John of Salisbury, Grosseteste and twelfth-century legalism on our conceptions of civil governance and the appropriate boundaries of church and state. We decry the crusades as barbarism but excuse the Punic Wars as realpolitik. Medieval relic cult is crazy and dangerous but modern celebrity paraphernalia on ebay is harmless nonsense.
Okay, so there aren’t actually any medieval people left who are being oppressed by this persistent trope, but it does do violence to our historical understanding of how we got here, and what we owe to whom. And it does help to entrench a knee-jerk attitude toward the value of other cultures and peoples that meshes seamlessly with similar prejudices towards extant peoples (“the Muslims are all living in the seventh century!”). It trains the mind in sneering, dismissive thinking about whole cultures and periods.
I’m not sure if you are joking.
But those interested in my actual take on the Middle Ages, see my sourced chapter on The Dark Ages (the worst part of the Middle Ages) in Christianity Is Not Great.
And the material online here and here.
The failure to return to democracy and principles of human rights, to revive actual empirical science (rather than conceptual armchair and trivial observational stuff), and the abandonment of nearly all the technological and civic advances of the ancient period, were dumb of us enough. Still not figuring out that we should give women equal rights, pretty damn dumb. The creation of peasants and the continuation of slavery, pretty dumb. Divine right of kings? Don’t get me started. But the Crusades and Inquisition and witch murdering and our murderous wilding against Jews and gays, dumb enough on their own. The Middle Ages? Pretty damned dumb. By any objective measure.
And that’s relevant, because some people will invariably say that oppressed cultures are partly at fault for their plight because of x, y, and z, when x, y, and z are in fact all things our culture did, too. And pots shouldn’t be calling kettles black, and expecting to have made a point.
(And note, cultural ancestors are not biological ancestors. We inherit a culture memetically, sometimes even by choice. Genetically, we can at most inherit a race. Cultural inheritance can correlate with genetic, through some form of racism policing purity, but actually has no required connection thereto.)
Having long sworn off reading Coyne or Dawkins I assumed, based on the title, that this post was going to talk about the Yoga Ban in Ottawa due to Cultural Appropriations concerns (that was neither a Ban nor due to Cultural Appropriations concerns… That one got the same White Tears flowing pretty steady last week on social media including the greater Atheosphere.
Excellent post. It’s amazing how defensive White People ™ get on the topic of Cultural Appropriation. As Coyne/Dawkins show, the most common response is to simply ignore what critics tell them, refuse to do any research or make any attempt to understand what CA actually is! , and then proceed to argue against the straw-definition that exists in their mind. In that way, it’s much like the willful ignorance of Anti-Feminists (and Anti-Anti-Racists too.) But I think you are right that all of these responses stem from the inability/refusal to try to step outside of their own perspective. Sadly, nobody can make a person take that step until they want to and it seems like tons of people are heavily invested in refusing to even consider outside perspectives (especially of marginalized groups.)
Thanks for writing about this stuff and making it so straight-forward.
Wow. Thank you for that link on the Yoga story. That’s an extremely useful perspective I was unaware of until now.
My general observations on that case I posted on Facebook (here).
Corrections warranted from your link’s info: we should be clear it was the Centre for Students with Disabilities (their class, their decision), not the university’s; and there were other factors in the decision (including the fact that, apparently, it wasn’t being well attended anyway).
You’re welcome. There’s also this FB post from the FEUO SFUO (organization that oversees the CSD, I assume.):
Dr. Carrier,
Bravo! Very well said. The examples of what is and is not cultural appropriation and the three pronged test (despoliation fetishization and theft) is very helpful and it’s great to have something like this from such an authoritative source.
This seems to be related to the equation racism = prejudice + (privilege + power). In the same way that mere prejudice cannot be racism without privilege/power, borrowing from a culture cannot be appropriation without the dominating/dominated aspect. At a fundamental level this is the difference between “punching up” and “punching down.” To fail to understand this is to fail to understand oppression and intersectionality really.
The atheist dudebros in general and the Dawkbros in particular have really missed the boat on these issues and they are embarrassing themselves and the atheist movement in the process.
The only qualification I would add to your apt pbservations is that I personally think it’s unhelpful to use the sociological definition of societal racism as if it must replace the colloquial definition of individual racism. We should acknowledge the existence and function of both.
The sociological definition is extremely helpful, and calls attention to an important aspect of institutionalized racism, how racism’s severity and effects derive from its placement within a particular social system. But it’s much too hard for the Dudebros to understand they are talking about a different thing when they talk about racism, a thing that also does exist, and so they get confused.
I’ve been the victim of racism: I was targeted with racial slurs and unequal treatment in a black neighborhood, and then literally physically assaulted by black men attacking me because I was white (and I know this because they said so, in vulgar and pejorative terms) and had to flee that neighborhood to save my life. The sociological definition does not recognize the existence of what happened to me. Yet there is no question I was singled out for mistreatment and violence for no other reason than my race. And that is racism. Arguably, the power axis did align that way, since in that neighborhood, I was not the one with the power, but that’s not how the sociological definition works exactly. So it’s unhelpful for capturing—and censuring—such scenarios.
On the other hand, calling someone out for being a white male lecturing a black or female audience on how they should be more submissive to white male power (but believing they are just giving them good advice on how not to be too loud or uppity or whatever), is not racism even in the individual sense I experienced (a famous Watson-Dawkins row over this illustrates the point). Nor are affirmative action procedures that ensure more minorities of comparable ability gain positions in some educational or professional role. Despite the attempts to call this reverse racism, in fact it is simply the effect of canceling out the existing racism. To perceive a minority’s acquisition of equal status as a loss of status to the majority, and thus as “racism”, is just as stupid as saying that jailing a kidnapper is also kidnapping. This does not mean all affirmative action procedures operate that way (they can be criticized on functional grounds; some methods are better and fairer than others). But it is an error to call any appeal to one’s race as racism. Sometimes it is correct that a white guy shouldn’t be lecturing a black woman on how to be a black woman, and saying so isn’t unfairly singling him out for his race, it’s pointing out the actual factual role his race is playing in that scenario (and in this case, especially in reference to the structural facts behind that, the very ones illustrated by the sociological definition of racism).
I only mention all that so that maybe, just maybe, any Dudebros reading this don’t think by saying (structural) racism against white people is impossible (in the present world order), that we are saying any racism against white people is impossible. Or conversely, by saying non-structural racism against white people is possible, that therefore we are saying “reverse racism” exists, much less that all claims of it are actually racism (when most are not).
I wrote about that on FtB a few months ago here.
I bring it up because there is an intermediate step – which I value but nonetheless find insufficient – and a farther step. The intermediate step is to imagine the context unchanged, but to see the effects the current context would have on another person. You still see the same things and think the same way, but you choose to look at those same dynamics for the effects on people who are different from you.
The farther step is to imagine the context changed so that you are no longer thinking like you, but using everything you’ve learned about other people to re-imagine a world in which their priorities are not only yours, but are culturally dominant. Now look at these dynamics again. It frequently becomes apparent that it is more than the effects that are problematic.
I admit it’s a tough row to hoe, but I think it’s actually necessary for us to engage with questions of social ethics in exactly this way.
Oh sweet. Thanks for that link and summary.
I think you expanded on my point beautifully, Richard ;). I think these issues are sometimes very very subtle, and I have trouble finding the right terminology to make my point (English is not my first language).
I think this is correlated as well with the observation that several ‘new atheists’ apparently agree and disagree with you at the same time. I’m not sure whether it is the cause or an effect. But it’s easier to brush off (or forget) the less than obvious racist or sexist (unconscious?) actions people or ‘cultures’ take, than to actually assess whether or not some actions actually are racist or sexist (obviously sometimes it is not hard to assess, but I’m not talking about those instances). Especially when the actions by themselves are not racist or sexist, but may or may not lead to racist or sexist acts.
It’s like the discussion with video games. Playing video games generally doesn’t hurt anyone, but it is claimed the violence in these games is cause for actual violence in reality. There are crowds yelling this is the case and there are crowds yelling this is not the case. But maybe, just maybe, the reality is more subtle and complex than that.
Well, I don’t know, although in the video games case, there isn’t any evidence of a causal correlation. There should be by now, given the enormous rise in, not just video games, but first person shooters specifically. If the cause had an effect, increasing the cause 1000 times should increase the effect 1000 times. That would have been observed by now. The same problem exists for the porn-causes-rape hypothesis: rape is actually more frequent in porn suppressed societies, and has actually gone down as porn availability has gone up.
But beyond that, yes, many cases are complex, not just in some truths being the case on either side of a debate, but in the fact that not everything is all-good and all-evil, there are infinite degrees in between. But that’s just a general truth of almost all things I think.
Cultural appropriation seems to be an old, old problem. I’m a folk dancer, we do dances from other cultures. Try to find out where a dance like Kotchari came from. Many different ethnic groups will claim it, and discussions can get pretty nasty.
As Carrier explains, the problem is this reactionary attitude to articles that talk about appropriation. Dudebro may not agree with all the points made in the Rachel Kuo’s article, but the way he expresses his dislike is the problem. I personally loved Rachel’s article, and could identify with it on the basis of just variations in Indian cuisine. There are so many relevant points in it. A short one line gist would be something like this – “Eat any cuisine to your heart’s content. Just don’t be an asshole while doing so”.
But people like Dudebro instinctively go on the defensive. They see only the second part about not being an asshole and extrapolate that to the first part. They look at it as some kind of government imposed censorship, instead of a request to be civil. They completely ignore all the relevant points that show how one can participate in another culture without appropriating. The tips and methods that actually help you get a much better experience and understanding and helps everyone. But no, they simply don’t give two shits about that bit. And then bring in the usual dishonesty and paranoia about minorities demanding he stop eating non- American cuisine. And then return with this “reverse-appropriation argument”. That’s the fucking problem with any debate revolving around privilege and appropriation. The privileged think the same act will have the same consequences on both the privileged and the rest of society. And no amount of logic will drill through their ego.
Would it kill Dudebro to acknowledge the parts of Rachel’s article he finds legitimate? Are there none at all in his opinion? The very bedrock of an honest discussion requires acknowledgement of mistakes, creating a shared base on things agreed upon, and a willingness to be corrected. In other words, being honest. Which he seems to be incapable of.
Thanks for that comment. Good points all.
(And you made me laugh in commiseration more than once and that’s always restorative of morale.)
I think it’s pretty clear by now that the violent video games thing is a moral panic. There are a lot of not-so-careful studies being done, and there are a lot of news outlets more than willing to jump all over the worst of them and pretend correlation equals causation as a way to sell their spin on the issue.
As far as I’m concerned, the reality can be seen in the fact that, over the last 35 years, video gaming has increased exponentially, while violence has fallen, at least here in the US. If anything, at least in that aspect, modern culture is healthier than it was before the 1980s. In my view, video games are one of the things we’re actually doing okay with – who knows, maybe they allow angry violent types to get their aggression out in healthier ways.
Richard, if cultural appropriation is *only* a “dominant culture” adapting aspects of a “systematically-oppressed culture,” then what’s your take on the kids who protested this summer at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts’ event featuring Monet’s famous painting, La Japonaise, inviting people to try on kimono in front of the painting and take pictures? Putting aside the fact that the protesters weren’t Japanese (and have no moral authority to speak on behalf of Japanese-Americans or Japanese), Japan is anything but a “systematically-oppressed culture.” Japan was itself a colonial power, like Britain and France were, and oppressed and victimized their neighbors. Not to mention that the act of wearing kimono or yukata isn’t viewed as appropriative by the Japanese — where the form of dress has all but vanished, and the floundering artisans who make them are completely supportive of efforts to revive their popularity.
Kuo’ arguments aren’t intrinsically progressive by virtue of her simply making them, nor is Coyne intrinsically reactionary for not finding them persuasive. You barely touched upon Coyne’s response to Kuo’s argument about fusion foods — one of her most poorly laid-out arguments. Nor his take on the reasons why “ethnic” food is watered down for different audiences. His analysis of Kuo’s article was detached, calm, reasonable, whereas yours was FILLED with invective–especially ironic given your patent attempts to label him reactionary, insult his reading comprehension, and calling Dawkins’ response emotional–not to mention your attempt to dismiss him/them as “dudebros,” another emotional tactic.
Dawkins et. al aren’t failing to comprehend your arguments–you’re dishonestly presenting an inaccurate picture of the people who regularly make claims of appropriation. Willfully ignoring the actions of fellow activists, or pretending that their actions exist in a magical vacuum, and don’t apply to the broader context of people who advocate against “appropriation.” In other words, dishonesty.
You evidently missed my link to the Japanese internment.
And don’t know how discriminated against Asians are even in the UK.
You seem to be forgetting that the US and UK are not Japan.
Be that as it may, whether that particular protest had any merit is a wholly separate question. I found the matter trivial (hence, as I noted, not all such claims are equal, even when they have merit).
As a matter of obvious diplomacy, the museum should have consulted the Japanese consulate first, and either gotten their endorsement or heeded their request not to carry through. That’s what foreign cultural consulates are for.
Finally, that Coyne’s “analysis of Kuo’s article was detached, calm, reasonable” is full on bullshit. I am content that all non-delusional people who read it will concur. You are evidently just too far gone to be in contact with reality.
I would like to point out that I find the term “white” used to refer to pinkish people is deeply offensive. Please avoid its use.
Richard Carrier wrote:
Do you think the claims of video games promoting sexism are valid?
I’ve seen Anita Sarkeesian making many of that sort of claim without ever providing any evidence at all.
If I’m missing any instance of her actually backing up her claims I’d be glad to look at it, but from what I’ve seen she has all of the credibility of Oprah Winfrey or some goofy preacher claiming rock and roll incites criminality.
There are actually two very different claims in there:
(1) That many video games are sexist. That’s a wholly different question from whether they promote sexism in players. Merely being sexist is in and of itself a valid criticism of art. Moreover, you can study the sexism in a culture, by observing the sexism it injects into its art. Thus, sexism in video games is one more way of studying the sexism that is already in society (in general; or indeed in particular, as the game design and consumer communities are distinct sub-cultures well documented to be more sexist than the cultural baseline).
(2) If you believe communication can make people become Christians, atheists, racists, Republicans, Progressives, Libertarians … then you must agree it can make people more sexist (or even just hinder efforts to make them less so). Art is a form of communication. Particularly in social species that employ social learning and emulation to develop their attitudes and worldviews. The more you depict the world a certain way, the more someone can start to believe that’s the way the world is. Likewise, the more you reinforce assumptions already in the audience, the more strongly you can prevent those assumptions dissipating or being replaced. This is why marketing and propaganda work: art that is used to make people believe things, or reinforce prejudices they already have. And indeed, we well know, art is more effective at that than reasoning, because art plays on emotion and instinctive social learning, bypassing sound reasoning (that’s why abortion protesters love pictures of hacked up baby parts).
Merely engaging in simulated violence doesn’t have any connection to worldview beliefs. That’s why it doesn’t affect attitudes outside of play. But depicting the world in certain ways, esp. ways that reinforce and reward existing prejudices, can indeed affect how one thinks. Again, all marketing and propaganda is about doing exactly that. So, for example, a video game that teaches you to “kill all the darkies” in defense of white power, won’t make you more violent, but it might make you more racist.
(3) We actually have evidence of this, in the highly disproportionate way the gaming community engages in bigotry, discrimination, and harassment of women players and designers. That could be a reversed causation (the existing sexism in the gaming community—though why is that community so much more sexist than everyone else?—causing the expressions of sexism in games, per (1)) or it could be direct causation (sexism in games reinforces and teaches sexism in the gaming community, per (2)) or indeed it could be both.
That being the case does not warrant censorship, I should note. The political question there is no different than surrounds hate speech. Harassment (and threats or calls for violence etc.), police that. Vile speech that isn’t forced on anyone, must allow that. Although it can still be criticized as vile (and thus immoral). Because free speech goes both ways. And not everything that is morally necessary should be made legally necessary (a demarcation that is a basic requirement of politically stable social systems). So, admitting that marketing and propaganda (e.g. video games) influence human beliefs, and for the worse, does not have to create a cognitive threat to you over the unrelated fear of censorship. We don’t have to outlaw white supremacist video games for you to recognize they are morally vile, denounce them publicly, and not play them.
Rick; I was with you until #3!
I don’t want to pull a Nerd of R and ask you for evidence and do my research for me, but I’m interested if you think if Anita Sarkeesian has an evidence backed, scientific series of videos or is it based on less reliable sources.
Have there been vile and probably illegal speech leveled toward her?
Yes , even I have had a threatening message directed at me.
It happens. It was vile and immoral but they are just distractions.
Do you think Anita Sarkeesian has a valid premise to her video series?
Those sentences are incoherent in that order. So I don’t know what you are asking.
The widespread sexist harassment of Sarkeesian is well documented. As is such behavior in the gaming community as a whole (hence GamerGate is a thing). That has nothing to do with the law. It has to do with human decency. (Though actual threats against her person either are or should be illegal. As they should be against anyone.)
As to whether all of her particular arguments are sound, I really don’t care. If she is incorrect in her identifying of something in respect to the general valued goals of (1), (2), or (3), then she is simply incorrect. And that can be shown without harassing her or making sexist or racist remarks about her (the anti-Semitism against her is also pronounced, because a bunch of GamerGaters think she is Jewish; she is in fact Armenian).
Otherwise, art criticism doesn’t need science papers. You just point to the evidence and compare to show connections, influences, implications, and context. Just like history. The evidence is either clear or not. And that’s what debating the evidence can illustrate. If you want to interact critically with art criticism, all the power to you. That’s great. Just act professional about it, use honest and careful study and analysis, and don’t act like paranoid misogynistic GamerGate douchebags.
Richard: I’m not sure how much of Sarkeesian’s material you’re familiar with, but much of it goes well beyond art criticism and into the realm of pseudo(in my opinion) sociology/psychology, in particular her tropes series. For example:
or
Also, she has advertised her “tropes” series as a teaching tool in academic settings and it is my understanding that it has been used as such in such fields as gender studies.
She makes sweeping claims about causation with zero studies or hard evidence to back it up.
As far as harassment and threats go, I agree with you they are wrong, but the fact that people do it doesn’t mean all her critics are wrong. After all, the facts that bomb threats were phoned in to a pro gamergate event doesn’t make gamergate necessarily correct and feminists harassing MRAs and pulling fire alarms to disrupt MRAs giving speeches also doesn’t make feminism wrong.
This is my item (2). So is your second quote. That’s not “well beyond” anything I said. As for whether this was a correct point-2 conclusion is a separate matter that doesn’t concern my general point (again, the fact that a hypothesis is often true is different from whether it is confirmed in a particular case).
But either way, I need the video link and timestamp to discuss either quote further. Otherwise, these statements are too out of context to assess. So please provide the video link and timestamp for each of your quotes.
How is this anything different from what I said? This is (1) and (2).
That she proposes hypotheses, and discusses evidence supporting them, is not the same thing as saying they have been confirmed. Hence the importance of not quoting out of context.
First, this is a non sequitur. I said “As to whether all of her particular arguments are sound, I really don’t care. If she is incorrect in her identifying of something in respect to the general valued goals of (1), (2), or (3), then she is simply incorrect.” You aren’t saying anything different than I already did.
Second, you are making it worse with this. Protesting a public event with a fire alarm is equivalent to threatening to rape and kill people? I agree all forms of heckler’s veto are unethical. But it is no fucking way the same thing.
More to the point of things I actually did say:
Only one of those things demonstrates a group is disproportionately misogynistic. Guess which one. Hence my original point stands. There is something particularly diseased about the gaming community. There must be an explanation of that. It’s not a random accident. This doesn’t mean any particular hypothesis is correct. But it does mean we better start proposing and testing hypotheses. And anyone not doing that, is not really interested in knowing.
As for the bomb threat case: you might want to examine that case closer. There was disturbing, public, admitted, and widespread sexism in one of the two groups to be represented there. Guess which one. It wasn’t the feminists. And guess which side actually argued that the bomb threat should be ignored and not be allowed to nix the presentations? The feminists.
So you are citing examples that only confirm my very question does indeed need to be asked: “Why is the gaming community so much more sexist than everyone else?”
If you aren’t trying to answer that question, you aren’t doing anything helpful in that debate.