There has been a lot of discussion lately here in Ōtepoti about something called “cultural appropriation”. It first came to my attention when a well-meaning friend starting objecting to our plan to have a “Gypsy Party” as part of a local festival, with Eastern European and Arabic influenced music, a performance by our local belly dancer troupe, and decoration to fit the theme.
I’ve been a vocal critic of racism since I started learning Te Reo Māori at high school, and started getting hassled for pronouncing Māori words and place names correctly. But I utterly reject these attempts to police other people’s personal expression. In a democratic society, people are free to dress however they want, regardless of how other people might choose to take offence.
I am disturbed by this trend towards treating culture as the “intellectual property” of one group of people, rather than recognising that culture has always been shared and fluid. It leads us down a dark path. For example, if its ok to should we be telling off Hawaiians for “appropriating” their signature instrument – the ukulele – from another culture.
Policing people’s self-expression is a distraction from the deep institutional racism in colonial societies like New Zealand. It conveniently shifts the blame for the marginalization of ethnic and cultural minorities away from the elites, and their states and corporations which reinforce political-economic racism every day in their policing, bureaucracy, and commodification, and onto ordinary people.
Worse, often on behalf of groups they’re not actually part of, which is patronising at best.
Obviously I support anti-harassment rules which prevent threatening behaviour, like people following someone around shouting at them. But like rules that forbid assault, these are about people’s behaviour and the effect it has on others, not about policing people’s opinions or their right to express them. As Noam Chomsky said about the prosecution of history professor Robert Faurisson for holocaust denial and anti-semitism, “It seems to me something of a scandal that it is even necessary to debate these issues two centuries after Voltaire defended the right of free expression for views he detested. It is a poor service to the memory of the victims of the holocaust to adopt a central doctrine of their murderers.”
In the 90s we used to talk about the dominance of US pop music on NZ radio as an example of “cultural imperialism”, but our solution was to lobby for media channels to do more to promote NZ music, not to have a go at people for wearing blue jeans and white t-shirts, or dressing like US hip-hops stars.
It may be upsetting for a Māori person attending a student party to see a group of people wearing piupui and blackface. But somehow I doubt it affects them as deeply as the state enforced domination of a nothern hemisphere calender over the rhythms of our southern hemisphere lives, through statutes like the Holidays Act (see ‘The Colonization of Time’ by Giordano Nanni for an academic discussion of the imposition of British concepts of time and date on indigenous people). Or employers who don’t understand why they need to take days worth of time off work to give service at marae when anyone they are related to dies. Or the way the pollution of land, waterways, and oceans, including by “conservation” measure like 1080 poisoning, limits their ability to gather natural resources for food and medicine, as guaranteed in Te Tiriti o Waitangi, forcing them to become dependent on earning money and buying commodities to provide for their needs.