{"id":9055,"date":"2009-11-04T16:39:59","date_gmt":"2009-11-04T23:39:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theangryblackwoman.com\/?p=1247"},"modified":"2009-11-04T16:39:59","modified_gmt":"2009-11-04T23:39:59","slug":"the-appropriateness-of-appropriation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=9055","title":{"rendered":"The Appropriateness of Appropriation"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"the-appropriateness-of-appropriation\"<\/span><\/p>\n

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In the wake of unusualmusic’s ever-so-fun linkspam<\/a>, let’s talk about cultural appropriation! Again.<\/a> (C’mon, you know you love it.)<\/p>\n

Or not. I’ve become aware in recent months of a growing movement in the creative world that I’m going to call, for lack of a better term, anti-appropriation. I’m seeing this mostly among fellow writers (probably because those are the circles I run in), some of whom are arguing that white writers should write only about white characters because they can never fully comprehend the experiences of PoC. But I’m seeing mutters about it in the filmosphere too, mostly in response to events like the amazingly racist casting of the Prince of Persia<\/a> and The Last Airbender<\/a> films, which take stories designed with PoC leads and replace them with white actors. (Except the villains.) There was some discussion along these lines in the comments of my last post on the Airbender film<\/a>, suggesting that since no appropriation is without problems, maybe white TV and film producers just shouldn’t appropriate PoC cultures — instead they should open up their field to let more PoC creators in. I hear similar talk in the gamesphere: get more black people into game design, anti-appropriation folks argue, and that will prevent debacles like Resident Evil 5.<\/a> We just can’t rely on white people (or Japanese people influenced by American culture, in the case of RE5) to do black people right. We have to take care of this ourselves.<\/p>\n

This kind of thinking sounds good until you examine it more closely and notice the underlying assumptions. Namely:<\/p>\n