where I stand on the appropriation debate, in a nutshell

Disabled

As I mentioned the other day, there’s been another round on the Internet of the Great Cultural Appropriation Debate, regarding what it means for white writers (or writers of color, for that matter) to to include or not include characters of color in their stories, and all the difficulties thereof. (Depending on your location on the social map, your friends list may have consisted of nothing but this debate for the last several days, or you may have missed it entirely.)

I came to a realization because of all of this. On the one hand, if you write CoC, you may be accused of getting it wrong, of presuming to speak from a subject position you have no right to occupy, and various other sins. On the other hand, if you don’t write CoC, you may be accused of ethnocentrism, of contributing to their erasure from the discourse, and various other sins. Either way you go, you will offend somebody; there’s no “safe” path, much as we wish there were.

This has led many people to conclude, not without justification, that you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

In which case, I choose Door Number One: I would rather be damned for doing, than for not.

I would rather try (and get it wrong) than not try (and get it wrong). Because the former has at least some chance of getting it somewhat right, for some readers. It will also, in the manner of a lightning rod, attract more criticism — even folks who are aware of these things are more likely to be aware of, and vocally critical of, that which is executed badly than that which is not executed at all — but that’s no reason to give up.

0 Responses to “where I stand on the appropriation debate, in a nutshell”

  1. leatherdykeuk

    My MC for the last five years and 12,000,000 words is a (black) demon, and I’ve had no complaints from Hell at all.

  2. nojojojo

    I dunno. I’m of the opinion that “you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t” is a false dichotomy. Most writers aren’t damned either way — if they had good reasons for what they did and weren’t just following the dominant paradigm in a knee-jerk sort of way. If show awareness of the paradigm, and show that they’re thinking about it, and listen when others say “Hmmyeahbut this part here? Ur doin’ it wrong,” and show a commitment to improving… I think that’s enough for most readers. (At least it would be enough for me, and I think I’m a pretty typical reader.) There will always be criticism, can’t prevent that, but just because it’s race-related criticism doesn’t mean it’s an instant imbroglio. Any more than *any* criticism is an instant imbroglio.

    It’s when an author (or fan of that author) gets defensive and attacky rather than listeny that the imbrogling begins. Or when an author repeats the same mistakes over and over, showing no sign of or interest in improvement (c.f. OH JOHN RINGO NO, if you haven’t seen it; start at the bottom), they’re pretty much asking to be imbrogl’d.

    (I’m going to stop torturing the word “imbroglio” now. Sorry.)

    • Marie Brennan

      (At least it would be enough for me, and I think I’m a pretty typical reader.)

      The reason there’s truth in “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” is that any given reader will react in their own way, and no writer can ever satisfy all of them. A piece you (specific you) might say is getting it right might piss off another reader immensely; sometimes they very thing you would point to as proof that the author is getting it right is, in fact, the specific thing pissing that other reader off.

      The other difficulty is that what you cite as “enough for most readers” is a matter of dialogue — here, let me show you I’m trying, you show me where I’ve misstepped, I’ll show you I’m listening. I can’t have that dialogue with all of my readers, though; I can’t even have it with a fraction of them. There are tens of thousands of them, and they don’t all read my LJ. I will never know how many of them I’ve offended who never say anything about it, or say it somewhere I can’t hear. They don’t know what my good reasons were, and they might not agree with them if they did.

      Which is NOT NOT NOT an excuse for giving up on awareness of the paradigm, or for not listening when someone tells me I’m doing it wrong. But there is no reliable route to doing it right, no set of steps a writer can follow that will save them from the possibility of offending a reader, perhaps badly, perhaps with the exact same detail that was supposed to self-aware and critical of the problem. That’s what I was trying to get at.

      • nojojojo

        But there is no reliable route to doing it right, no set of steps a writer can follow that will save them from the possibility of offending a reader, perhaps badly, perhaps with the exact same detail that was supposed to self-aware and critical of the problem. That’s what I was trying to get at.

        Ah, gotcha. But we’re talking about creating people here, right? Assuming your characters are human — a big assumption in SF, I know — you’re trying to make sure that your characters are “done right”, i.e., realistically and not as caricatures. But there’s never been a reliable route to doing that, with any characterization. This is why the whole “damned if you do/don’t” lament always perplexes me; because it suggests that the writers involved are angsting far more about race (or gender, or whatever “controversial” element they like) than any other aspect of good character development.

        Sure, to a degree, they should, because the hazard of growing up in a society that encourages shorthand thinking about people of particular types — women, PoC, the poor, etc. — is that shorthand makes for poor characterization. You end up with caricatures, not characters. And part of that shorthand thinking includes the assumption that other cultures aren’t worth depicting in a respectful way. So just shed the shorthand thinking, and you’ll write better characters. This is really all the cultural appropriation argument is about.

        And I didn’t mean that you have to show it/explain it by means of an individual dialogue with all your readers. Sorry if I misspoke (typed) there. The best method is to show it through your work. If you’ve thought about these things, it’s visible.

        • Marie Brennan

          Well, but one of the starting sparks for the most recent imbroglio was Bear talking about writing CoCs as people first, in at attempt to avoid stereotyping. I forget her exact phrasing, and I forget the nuances of the two different spins put on it, but the negative one was that the “people first” defense erases the ways in which a given person in real life is situated as a particular kind of person, and assimilates their individuality to a (white, heteronormative, etc) “universality” of person-hood that isn’t universal at all. Or something to that effect.

          In other words, in an attempt to not Other or stereotype or shallowly-characterize a character, a writer may end up being accused of treating their characters as being “just like them,” dressed up in colored clothing.

  3. sora_blue

    A conversation a year ago led me to the same conclusion. Although, I do feel that political correctness is more of a concern in America than it is in Canada. Or at least more of a talking point.

    (I don’t think you’ve ever been privy to the fact that I was asked to provided biographical information–concerning how I had lived in Japan–to my agent, so she could include in the submission cover letters why I was “suited” to write the manuscript that is out on submission.)

Comments are closed.