Cultural Appropriation

Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays and Rugby is my favorite sport. Naturally I love when the two come together and I have Rugger Thanksgiving with my teammates. We eat a lot and sometimes there is some tackling. It's awesome.

Ruggers like themes to their parties where they can dress up. The Candy Land and Redneck themes have been my favorite so far. In the FB invite for this year's Rugger Thanksgiving, the theme of Pilgrim and Indians was first proposed.

I wasn't going to touch that with a 10 foot pole.

The comments started, which was great. My old rugby team was a smart group of people, but they would have run with this theme without thought. This rugby team is comprised of activists of various forms: gender, LGBTQ, immigrants, animals...you name it.

I didn't want to dress like an "Indian" 1) I do have Cherokee ancestors, but was never active in the tribe (according to my aunt, I could be my great-great grandmother's much paler twin sister..i don't see it) 2) It's just ridiculous how cartoonish people make Native Americans to be.

Thanks to my fellow teammates who voiced their opinion against the idea of dressing up as Indians, the theme has been changed to "Ugly Christmas Sweaters". I am on the lookout for an ugly Hanukkah Sweater to be more inclusive of other religions.

I just sent an email to the high school from where I graduated. They have a new mascot costume...we're the Mohawks. The costume is a bit offensive. It's cartoonish and it's not even accurately representing the Mohawk Tribe. It's just a stereotypical "Indian" costume with a Cleveland Indians type face.



Discussion is open for more examples of cultural appropriation and your attitude towards these examples. Also, what experiences have you had with c.a.?

 

I got an email today from the administration at my alma mater, specifically a girl I went to high school with, and she basically said it's an old costume and we're too poor to buy a new one.

I don't think it's an appropriate icon to represent the community. Maybe it is since the darkest person at that school would be someone who took a few too many trips to the tanning salon. They aren't exactly "worldly" people in that community.

 

Maybe use a vodka bottle?

Should my Irish blood boil at the way America celebrate St. Patrick's Day?

 

ZOMG... pictures, FFS. That's so blatantly racist that it has to be true.

 

My HS team name was the Vikings with a similarly cartoonish mascot. Should scandinavian folks be offended?

 

I wouldn't know where to draw the line. I suppose the same could go for Spartan mascots.

I don't know if I'm overreacting. The costume has been bothering me for awhile and then having a conversation with a friend who is a person of color about Cultural Appropriation and how bothered she is by it made me take some sort of action. I think because Native Americans are REAL people, why the need for such a cartoonish head? I'd be pissed if one of those white kids painted themselves more brown too to be an "Indian".

 

One that I see a lot on websites like etsy and Tumblr is the use of "gypsy". Technically, that's a really offensive term for Romani people, and it's used as a tag do describe anything slightly Bohemian, and there's constantly an uproar about it that I gaze at from the sidelines.

 

Well, now I know for sure where you went to high school.. I am a Cougar.

Before my family moved when I was in 5th grade, I was in the Lakota school district. I remember a lot of the fallout over mascot names when the district decided to split the high school into East and West, as many of the suggested names were considered offensive by Native Americans in the community. I can't remember what some of the suggestions were (I was young), but they decided on the Thunderhawks and the Firebirds.

There was also major news when I was young regarding Miami University's mascot.. They were originally the Redskins and had a Native American as a mascot, but chose to change the name to RedHawks and the mascot to a bird image. The change happened while I was in middle school, I think, and a lot of the more conservative adults in the community put up a big fuss about it.

 

My brothers and I all went to Miami. My oldest brother was a Redskin and I was a Redhawk. It seems way more offensive being called a Redskin, so I get why they changed it. The Miami is named after the Miami tribe some how...even though I think they're in Oklahoma, not Ohio.

 

The Miami were originally in Ohio and Indiana. That's why the names Miami and Maumee pop up all over the state.

 

In regards to the high school mascot, it can't be THAT old. We graduated 14 years ago (yeek), and I never remember seeing it. In fact, I remember somewhere around our sophomore year, there was a big push to rename the high school mascot the "Hawks"--which is why the mural of the hawk was painted in the cafeteria. I guess they just threw that whole thing out? Hmm.
--- merged: Nov 21, 2013 at 3:34 PM ---
Oh---and actually on the main thread subject here:

I never really thought that much about it until I attended a lecture my first year of college (at Miami! Ha!) The woman speaking was talking about how she went to a basketball game and the mascot was in full battle dress, and wearing a long headdress that would only belong to a great warrior according to tribal customs. She was appalled that, not only was the mascot running around and doing silly mascot things in the costume, he was also letting the feathers of the headdress drag on the ground.

It was definitely an eye-opening lecture.

 

Yeah...there's no way that thing is as old as she says.

I'm sure the mascot does silly dances too. I'm glad in that aspect that it's not an actual portrayal of a Native American.

 

I'll just leave this here.


LINK

 

Anything to do with political correctness and American Indians is a clusterfuck right from the start for one simple reason: "White people" are getting caught in the middle. Just look at the name American Indian alone. The most recent census data I could find shows a 50% preference for American Indian, 37% preference for Native American, and the remainder for other/no preference. Right off the bat you're caught between a little under 40% prefering Native American, on the other hand the plurality of American Indians prefers American Indian and even officially said as much at the United Nations Conference on Indians in the Americas. You can either offend a plurality/majority of American Indians, or you can offend a slightly smaller portion of them and get eviscerated by a lot of white social justice crusaders for being "racist". There's no winning that.

The same thing goes for the football team. You've got protestors like Amanda Blackhorse, and you've got other American Indians like retired Chief Robert "Two Eagles" Green who's publicly stated he'd be offended if they DID change the name. Despite how this is often portrayed in the media this is very much not the Minority vs Whitey fight it's being made out to be. Either you go against all of the American Indians supporting the team, or you go against the American Indians protesting it. It's an untenable position.


As far as Cultural Appropriation in general goes... speaking as one of the smallest and most vulnerable minority cultures in history cultural appropriation sounds exactly like 50's era concerns over "miscegenation" but from the opposite perspective; It's segregation justified as being "for our own good" which is patently offensive. I mean think about it, how insulting is it to someone's culture to say that it's so weak that it can't survive some fashion crossover or cuisine exchange? My culture is thousands of years old and has survived every generation in history attempting to annihilate us. WASPs eating matza ball soup and calling each other schmucks isn't going to hurt it any more than basing your entire justice system on it did.

The idea of cultural appropriation as having some kind of harmful voodoo doll like effect on a non-western non-white culture is as ridiculous as it is backwards and offensive, it smacks of the age old idea of the white man's burden. Things that are actually harmful like racial caricatures or the desecration/disrespect of religiously significant artifacts or practices aren't cultural appropriation they're just plain old ignorance and racism. Katy Perry buying a hat in china because it's hot and sunny or wearing a dress or Selena Gomez wearing bindi that are sold in stick-on multipacks as a fashion accessory in one of the world's nuclear powers are not going to hurt anybody's culture.

Like a lot of things it started as a well-intentioned idea about serious offenses, but imho it's a lost cause at this point buried under an avalanche of neosegregationist BS.

If you go by the average standard I've seen the hanukkah sweater would be cultural appropriation as well, although like I said I don't buy it. Personally I think you all lost an opportunity there. One of the great ironies about the Florida State Seminoles getting sanctioned at one point over this mess was that they've long had the direct endorsement of the Florida Seminoles, whose tribe leaders are even involved in crowning the Chief and Princess of homecoming. What sets them apart is that Osceola and Renegade are completely historically accurate, down to Renegade being ridden bareback. You could have kept the theme and had people actually research and accurately portray historical figures or cultures.

 

I just say "Indian" or at most "American Indian"
You are not going to bear "Native American" leave my mouth anymore than an insistence that I be called "German American" because I am over half german from both parent's bloodlines.

 

It makes sense to be wary of cultural appropriation. I imagine that for many marginalized groups, cultural appropriation is just one more tick mark on the scratched up wall documenting slights perpetrated by dominant culture. With respect to Native American mascots, there is a certain irony in white people defending the use of Native American imagery in that many of these people don't actually give two shits about honoring NA treaties and many of their ancestors actively sought to completely eliminate all vestiges of NA culture from the US. You want to honor NAs by buying shirts with parodic condensations of their culture while getting drunk and watching unpaid college athletes run around and crash into each other? Wow. Such honor.

Using NA imagery for sports teams is contextually really gross. There is no honor in recognizing the people you genocided by using caricatures of them to represent athletic teams. Like, what if Germany's national football team was named "The Semites" and their logo was a picture of some hook-nosed dude with long curly sideburns? That would be fucking dumb and disrespectful, regardless of whether some Jews were cool with it.

Generally, cultural appropriation tone deaf and requires a certain amount of gung-ho, fuck-off, entitled insensitivity (something which Americans are super good at).

 

Aaaand here we go, outraged white guy #1 who just knows so much better than them poor dumb injuns that actually like the mascots. The White Man's Burden is alive and well, it's just taken an even more paternalistic and patronizing tone than before.

 

I think you're confused.