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- Thread starter Martin Dust
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padraig (u.s.)
a monkey that will go ape
who decides what is harmless and what is not? you? if not, who? and in cases where it's not clear (i.e., between different minority groups) how is it determined which groups are more & less powerful in relation to each other? and thus when it's "usurping" and when it's a "survival technique"?
firstly, culture is fluid. and - for better or worse - increasingly fluid as the world becomes, as/re access to information at least, smaller. secondly, are you not speaking for minority groups here, e.g. usurping them?
obv there are examples that are accurate - the one I immediately thought of was Native Americans, who get a particularly raw deal when it comes to cultural expropriation & usurpation. I don't think your points are totally invalid - what's wrong is the sweeping generalizations & as Vim alludes to the oversimplification of what are in fact complex & dynamic "power relations". and your/whoever positioning as a gatekeeper of what is "authentic" and what isn't.
mistersloane
heavy heavy monster sound
Yeah! I always thought Eubank was really cool.
padraig (u.s.)
a monkey that will go ape
no one said that though. you & baboon keep setting up the most extreme strawmen & then saying "wait, but surely you're not defending that". I don't think anyone is defending anything specific so much as saying that the ideas of authenticity, identity, etc. are problematic and not easily defined. actually, it's an argument for context, not against.
Martin Dust
Techno Zen Master
Blimey!
White people shouldn't try to act (or speak) black.
No, that’s not what I’m trying to say at all. It should be obvious to anyone that’s there’s going to be a lot of blurring with regards to accents, characteristics, behaviours etc with regards to race in modern Britain. This is what I was getting at in mentioning changes to speech with regard to the yoot dem in my first post. If you don’t recognise stuff like that, you’ve got your head in the sand. I work with kids and I see an intense fascination with their own racial backgrounds, slang, their speech patterns etc – the context as Padraig says. What I was initially objecting to was the plucking of signifiers like accent/dialect outside of their context and employing them without that kind of sensitivity and awareness. This sounds to me what was going on re. the opening post. I might be totally wrong, obviously, but it reminded of other times I’ve encountered similar borrowings in my own life (that have really got on my tits).
Speech acts are public and that another’s objections/imitation of how one is speaking are part of the act, the other half of the equation. I interpreted what you wrote up thread as saying well, you can’t criticise or react then (even if its heartfelt), which seems absurd in the extreme.
See what you've started?
Martin Dust
Techno Zen Master
Correct and I did leave thinking What A Twat.
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
Same here. The man's just doing his own thing and I really respect that.
vimothy
yurp
But who could satisfy standards like that? I’m sure that I would find a middle class Oxford graduate talking patois hideously embarrassing were I to meet him. However, I wouldn’t want to generalise from that probable fact the rule that “borrowing the tropes of coolness from another race ultimately kind of racist”. I like those early Cream recordings, but I wouldn’t assume that Clapton was a racist because he played guitar like a black person. Even in order to say something like that in the specific, rather than the general, you would have to know a lot (obviously, I’m not talking about the linguistic short-hand we all employ in our day-to-day lives. As I said, I’m sure I would have found it embarrassing too). You would have to know that the person was borrowing these tropes in order to be cool, where appearing cool is understood in only the most mercenary and shallow way, and, reaching inside that affinity, understand that it rests on a one-to-one identity of said tropes with black people. Far too much knowledge to merely assume, in other words.
Putting an accent on is weird, and extremely common. We all do it all of the time. But this is a trivial fact—you can’t short-circuit these things and go straight to the generalisations: “imitation of the way other races act is racist”. I think the formulation of that proposition is more troubling than the act of imitation itself. If I pretend to be a woman, because I think women are cool (or anything), is that sexist? It might be, I suppose. But it depends on the specifics, at which point this is either going to get complicated or circular or both.
Finally, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t react to the way people speak or don’t speak. I work at a university, and I spend most of my day walking around sneering at the idiot teenagers. I wouldn’t have it any other way, but I try to be careful about leaping from a visceral feeling to abstract categories. I’m sure that they’re not all idiots; it just looks that way from where I’m standing. And where am I standing? There’s a kind of stupidity to the white Oxbridge rasta, but there’s also a kind of equivalence. Dreadlocks are probably okay, listening to reggae is probably okay, but the accent takes identification a bit too far for comfort—the accent is where I draw the line. Okay, not all the time, I still use it for comedic or ironic effect, but that’s because I “get” it, unlike the naive dupes who just feel affinity and go for it.
But this little bit of output gap, this space between ironic cool and occluded mimicry, this is no more or less arbitrary than anything else, no more or less constructed and held temporarily in place by social ties. My own accent: Is it authentic? More authentic than the white rasta’s? Than yours?
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
No, it doesn't make Clapton racist that he played the blues - it's the fact that he famously said Enoch Powell was right in his "rivers of blood" speech and called for 'wogs' to be thrown out of Britain that does that! Come on vim, were you going for deliberate irony there or what? 
On the subject of white rastas, I have to say I have an almost pathological prejudice against white people with dreadlocks.
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Really good point.
On the subject of white rastas, I have to say I have an almost pathological prejudice against white people with dreadlocks.
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vimothy said:
Really good point.
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again, UNLESS YOU ARE GENTLEMAN.
don't know why you people keep side stepping this great example, which proves that if someone's affectation is REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY good and convincing, then it's ok and no one in their right mind would consider it embarrassing or stupid.
and what about someone like me to whom english was a second language? did it matter if i learned BBC english, Texan English, Ebonics, or Patois? would any of them be any more or less "authentic" than another?
Martin Dust
Techno Zen Master
Interesting point Zhao but in a sense it still makes me feel like they are mocking and such is the tradition in the UK when people "do" accents that are not their own.
vimothy
yurp
Bit worried that I may have started talking gibberish there for a minute. I've had a smoke now and I feel a lot better.
Fundamentally, my objections can all be boiled down to something very simple: there is no "authenticity" to anything anyway. You can't just reach out your hands as an uninvolved observer and grab hold of a stable identity and say that it represents the essential core of what it is to be black or white or poor or rich or male or female or... These are all in flux and always have been (patios itself being the result of a process of miscegenation) and we're in there with 'em.
I'm not making the argument, however, that these identities don't exist. Just because they are "social constructs", doesn't mean that they aren't real, that they don't have as much (more, even) agency than you or me.
But because there's no stable ground on which to stand, there's nowhere from which to police these identities, no way to own them and speak for them or of them. An Oxbridge rasta might make us feel uncomfortable, , but we have no measure that would allow us to know that "this thing is worse/more racist than the widespread appropriation of other cultures by us". Furthermore, this is I think the real issue of concern in the abstract. The white rasta is embarrassing in his naive overidentification--polite society knows how to play it cool and maintain distance (but it's a difference in degree, not in kind, and at times you do have to wonder whether the ironic inhabitant of other cultures is really more self-aware than the naive enthusiast, but that's for another time).
Fundamentally, my objections can all be boiled down to something very simple: there is no "authenticity" to anything anyway. You can't just reach out your hands as an uninvolved observer and grab hold of a stable identity and say that it represents the essential core of what it is to be black or white or poor or rich or male or female or... These are all in flux and always have been (patios itself being the result of a process of miscegenation) and we're in there with 'em.
I'm not making the argument, however, that these identities don't exist. Just because they are "social constructs", doesn't mean that they aren't real, that they don't have as much (more, even) agency than you or me.
But because there's no stable ground on which to stand, there's nowhere from which to police these identities, no way to own them and speak for them or of them. An Oxbridge rasta might make us feel uncomfortable, , but we have no measure that would allow us to know that "this thing is worse/more racist than the widespread appropriation of other cultures by us". Furthermore, this is I think the real issue of concern in the abstract. The white rasta is embarrassing in his naive overidentification--polite society knows how to play it cool and maintain distance (but it's a difference in degree, not in kind, and at times you do have to wonder whether the ironic inhabitant of other cultures is really more self-aware than the naive enthusiast, but that's for another time).
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Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
Well you probably learnt to talk like the people you were surrounded by as you were learning the language, just like any of us learning any language, including a first language. Of course you could have gone out of your way to learn to talk like a Texan rancher or a BBC newsreader or whatever, but given that you were living in California it would at least seem a bit odd. And you can insist that it's your right to talk however you wish (which it is, of course) but it would be very disingenuous of you to then make out like you were mystified or indignant if other people found it pretentious, offensive or ridiculous. Pretentious in the literal sense of pretending to be someone or something you're not, I mean.
It's the going-out-of-your-way to sound like people from a group you've never really had much contact with that people don't like, I think. So our hypothetical cod-Rasta Oxbridge graduate is in a very different camp from, say, a white kid growing up in a mixed neighbourhood with lots of black/Asian/Latino friends and classmates, or you growing up in California.
Again, I'm not saying it's terrible or racist or anything like that, just that there is a reason why in one kind of circumstance it can be viewed as 'appropriation' whereas in another it's just someone talking in the way that comes naturally to them because of the area where they grew up.
No, I'm sorry. White rastas are wrong and should be criminalised. You can trot out as many arguments to the contrary, produce as many sociological examples as you like. But Spiral Tribe / Back To The Planet fucked it up for all 'white rastas' in 1992 and there's no point of return, ever.
mixed_biscuits
_________________________
It's not the particular quality of that which is assumed that riles people, but that this borrowing is considered necessary in the first place - it's a diss to the prevailing culture and an inauthentic move.
Behaviour can be more or less authentic, if we take authentic to mean 'fitting to context (the context being, for example, past behaviour or the surrounding culture).
Behaviour can be more or less authentic, if we take authentic to mean 'fitting to context (the context being, for example, past behaviour or the surrounding culture).
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mixed_biscuits
_________________________
That's not to say that just because most people find inauthentic behaviour irritating doesn't make it bad - brave is the man who dares to be inauthentic, who fashions himself as he wishes, not as time and circumstance conspire!
(Seen?)
(Seen?)