History is a pyramid of skulls.

[Lorizael]

Objecting to people ripping off musical trends seems rather shortsighted and neurotic, since I doubt we'd have had Motown or funk, let alone rap, without Elvis and the Beatles clearing the way.

Since you mentioned SSC, here's what he had to say about it last year (also a good, but very long essay overall):

http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/04...-the-movement/

6. Cultural Appropriation: Thanks to some people who finally explained this to me in a way that made sense. When an item or artform becomes the rallying flag for a tribe, it can threaten the tribe if other people just want to use it as a normal item or artform.

Suppose that rappers start with pre-existing differences from everyone else. Poor, male, non-white minority, lots of experience living in violent places, maybe a certain philosophical outlook towards their condition. Then they get a rallying flag: rap music. They meet one another, like one another. The culture undergoes further development: the lionization of famous rappers, the development of a vocabulary of shared references. They get all of the benefits of being in a tribe like increased trust, social networking, and a sense of pride and identity.

Now suppose some rich white people get into rap. Maybe they get into rap for innocuous reasons: rap is cool, they like the sound of it. Fine. But they don’t share the pre-existing differences, and they can’t be easily assimilated into the tribe. Maybe they develop different conventions, and start saying that instead of being about the struggles of living in severe poverty, rap should be about Founding Fathers. Maybe they start saying the original rappers are bad, and they should stop talking about violence and *****es because that ruins rap’s reputation. Since rich white people tend to be be good at gaining power and influence, maybe their opinions are overrepresented at the Annual Rap Awards, and all of a sudden you can’t win a rap award unless your rap is about the Founding Fathers and doesn’t mention violence (except Founding-Father-related duels). All of a sudden if you try to start some kind of impromptu street rap-off, you’re no longer going to find a lot of people like you whom you instantly get along with and can form a high-trust community. You’re going to find half people like that, and half rich white people who strike you as annoying and are always complaining that your raps don’t feature any Founding Fathers at all. The rallying flag fails and the tribe is lost as a cohesive entity.

Back to you.

As for "you can't write about a group you don't personally belong to," to hell with that.

Again, I've never spoken of this as being about what people can or cannot do, whatever that may mean. But here's how I see this being framed in the writing circles I hover around. Maybe you wrote a spectacularly accurate and respectful SF version of Islam, but imagine a Dan Brown or Stephenie Meyer type writer--trashy and mindless, but readable and popular--who decides to write their next bestseller about minority culture X. They do a little bit of Wikipedia research, never engage with anyone who's actually a member of X, write the thing, and sell it to some Big Five editor who doesn't look much past the author's name. All the while, members of X also writing about their own culture find themselves shut out from mainstream success because their stories are too risky or don't have broad enough appeal.

So the question isn't, should we disallow Dan Brown/Stephenie Meyer from writing these books, but rather can we make choices that better serve and/or represent cultures whose voices have been silenced for a very long time?

Now, of course, being shut out from mainstream success because your story is too risky/doesn't have broad appeal (like, say, because you wrote a hefty epistolary novel that requires multiple appendices to get through ) isn't something that only happens to minorities, but it is compounded for them, and the publishing numbers are pretty clear about that.

[Elok]

Well, as to the first (the SA quote) how is that different from any other scenario where a "scene" changes? There was a period a few years back where, every few months or so, somebody would post a Leaving Forever thread because Apolyton wasn't the same place it was when they joined. And we all shrugged, because of course things change, communities don't stay the same, customs don't stay the same, can't step into the same river twice, etc. I assume that, if this happens in real life, they have the equivalent of a church schism, with "real" rappers forming a set of customs to denote that they aren't about Founding Fathers or whatever.

As for the second, it sounds like the problem isn't specific to minorities vs. majorities, but the general problem of poop floating to the top. That is, Dan Brown's "Tha Thug Life Conspiracy" doesn't prevent minority authors from publishing their own books because he's peed on their tree and now nobody else can write about minority experiences; he merely drowns them out by the disproportionate influence given to prolific pulp novelists who can stick to a saleable formula. Which isn't to say it isn't harder for minority writers to succeed--obviously, I wouldn't know personally, but it sounds plausible--but I don't think Dan Brown's treading on their turf actually increases their difficulty. If anything, I'd think it would make it slightly better, by potentially starting a trend of interest in stories about minorities. Plus the inevitable conversations started by people who love to hate Dan Brown and now have a new reason to hate him: "OMG did you see how he had people calling each other 'jive turkey'? What ****ing decade did he come from? Everybody knows real black people don't talk like that anymore! If they ever did, outside of blaxploitation films." "If anybody's looking for a realistic and well-researched novel about contemporary black experience, I wrote this book." Etc.

[Elok]

Yeah, you are right that it has no religious significance to me and I bought it simply because I liked it as a work of art and as a momento of my time spent in South Eastern Europe. On that level I value it as it reminds me of pleasant memories plus it is a nice piece of art. I fully understand that people who are Eastern Orthodoxed in faith can and do appreciate such icons on a religious level well and think that is great. I am not being profane with it and simply hang it on the wall in my living room. It makes a nice conversation piece.

Hey, you're cool. What's it an icon of? Christ and Mary are the two most common.

[Dinner]

Mary with the infant Jesus.

[Elok]

You'll never see Mary without Jesus, by the by. It's a rule of iconography. There are three variants of the standard Theotokos icon; the most common "Hodegetria," "She who points the way," has her holding him in her left arm while pointing to him with her right. Less commonly, in "Our Lady of Tenderness," he has his cheek pressed up against hers. Then there's the one where she has her arms spread and he appears inside this blue mandala deal superimposed over her midsection. That's supposed to represent him in utero, I believe. "Our Lady of the Sign."

[Lorizael]

Well, as to the first (the SA quote) how is that different from any other scenario where a "scene" changes? There was a period a few years back where, every few months or so, somebody would post a Leaving Forever thread because Apolyton wasn't the same place it was when they joined. And we all shrugged, because of course things change, communities don't stay the same, customs don't stay the same, can't step into the same river twice, etc. I assume that, if this happens in real life, they have the equivalent of a church schism, with "real" rappers forming a set of customs to denote that they aren't about Founding Fathers or whatever.

You've come up with a couple examples of how cultural appropriation is just like some other phenomenon that also upsets people. Again, I'm not arguing that CA is some great evil we must eradicate from the world; it's just an understandable grievance historically persecuted people can have. We can be upset about things that are normal, pervasive, similar to other problems, and difficult or impossible to solve.

...but I don't think Dan Brown's treading on their turf actually increases their difficulty. If anything, I'd think it would make it slightly better, by potentially starting a trend of interest in stories about minorities.

As they say in philosophy, that's an empirical question.

[Elok]

I'm saying nobody gets upset about a scene changing except the people who liked the scene the first way, and we expect them to get over it. Why do we care when a scene changes iff the original starters were a minority group? So they're upset. Lots of people get upset about a lot of things. That doesn't make their grievance legitimate or reasonable.

If you have an example of clueless writing by famous authors plausibly hurting actual minority writers, by all means bring it out.

[Dinner]

Excellent points, Elok.

[Lorizael]

Why do we care when a scene changes iff the original starters were a minority group?

I'm actually pretty bothered by the fact that Apolyton is now a deserted wasteland. But more broadly, the destruction of communities is something we can legitimately care about. Linguists work to preserve languages spoken only by a handful of octogenarians. City planners and sociologists are concerned about gentrification. The dissolution of rural communities into giant suburban/urban centers gets a lot of attention. It's easy to say, "Times they are a changin'; the people affected just have to adapt." That is, it's easy to say until it happens to your community.

But more specifically as this applies to minority groups, they are disadvantaged and vulnerable in our society. So to me this sounds a lot like, "Why should we care about colds? Everybody gets them and gets over them." Which is true, unless you're very old or immunocompromised or what have you.

If you have an example of clueless writing by famous authors plausibly hurting actual minority writers, by all means bring it out.

An example shouldn't convince you. I mean this is probably a very difficult question to answer that would have to involve significant study and careful statistical analysis.

[Elok]

Let's distinguish between communities disappearing and communities simply changing. Poly is more or less disappearing, and I agree that's bad. But in the example you gave, rap didn't go away. It just became something new. The same way rock became something new (and arguably much more interesting) after white people got involved, and their changes in turn fed back into what black people were doing, etc. You can try to maintain subgroups within the group, or split away entirely if it's that vital to you, but it's not the same as annihilation. Old languages disappear because it became more convenient for children and grandchildren to speak new ones instead. Often this is because speaking a different language brings new opportunities. Should the young people instead remain in their old community, speaking their old language, following their old customs, and being poor for the sake of preserving an interesting curiosity for ethnographic study?

This is something we Orthodox are going through right now. It's often called the "cradles vs. converts" fight. Orthodoxy used to be the exclusive preserve of ethnic diasporas: Greeks, Russians, Serbians, and other immigrant enclaves. They held services in their old language, maybe threw a festival and sold gyros and cabbage rolls every now and then to raise money, but otherwise kept to themselves and spoke poor English if they spoke it at all. But their kids and grandkids gradually Americanized, and got less and less interested in attending services they couldn't understand which were increasingly about preserving a culture they weren't a part of, so a lot of those old churches are dying out now. Meanwhile, people from traditional western Christian denominations--e.g., my mother--were discovering Orthodoxy, in part because of the same Americanizing phenomenon. They came for the gyros, stayed for the theology. But in order to be welcoming to Americans, in fact to become an American church, Orthodoxy is going to have to dissolve some of its old ethnic distinctions. There are different visions for how this will be accomplished, and to what extent the old ways will be displaced, but it's going to be painful for some people. But the alternative will be for the church to remain faithfully oriented to foreign cultures until the last septuagenarian believer dies.

There's also the matter of the double standard regularly applied here. If black people don't want whites taking over their stuff, that's valid and needs to be taken seriously. If, on the other hand, white people want to maintain their communal identity, they're being racist and xenophobic. Gentrification of poor black part of town by well-to-do whites, bad. Transformation of wealthy white neighborhood by poor immigrants, good. Why is the one set of concerns okay but not the other? Both involve undeniable cultural transformation. Is it purely because of the relative wealth? (I'm fine with either transformation)

As for examples, I'm not looking to be convinced by one example. I only want some evidence that the thing you describe can happen at all. It doesn't sound plausible.

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

To that next-to-last paragraph: because one side has far more of the money and power - if you're interested in fairness -as well as the larger truths- you have to take that into account, always. It's not a principal progressives tend to articulate very clearly, and one nurdz in general have a lot of trouble grasping and remembering at the right times, but it makes a lot of sense to me.

[Elok]

Okay. Why is that fair? Are cultural integrity (for lack of a better term) and wealth mutually exclusive, where it's okay to have one or the other but not both? That's strange, because wealth and power are basically the only way you can plausibly enforce cultural integrity (generally by means we consider dodgy, because nobody's comfortable with an actual law enforcing such things). In both cases, the people want the community to remain a certain way. The one group is powerful enough to make it stick; the other is not. Is it that it's okay to want cultural homogeneity, provided you can't actually get it?

[-Jrabbit]

I think a lot of what is being called "cultural appropriation" in the arts is code for "cultural capitalization."

Street-corner musicians, dancers, etc. come up with a new art form, then live in poverty as other artists "borrow" and expand on those forms. Many artists may not even realize it can be thought of as stealing; they just think of it as inspiration and run with it.

But if I was the originator and saw others getting rich off my ideas/creations, I'd be bitter, too.

The difference is, in the 50s and 60s, it literally took years for blues records to cross the Atlantic, inspire young Brits, and get turned into rock'n'roll. By the time it came back across the pond, years had passed and the connection to the blues and "race music" was blurred. The English Invasion bands got rich, and the originators of the art form didn't even have a publishing deal to prove they were deserving of royalties. They had, ironically, no voice.

Today, all that can happen in the course of a few weeks. But at least the Interwebs make it possible for the originators to have their voices be heard.

[Ben Kenobi]

I have a Byzantine icon myself as one of my wallpapers. Not sure where that argument is coming from. There are many famous Byzantine icons, and arguably, Byzantium has had an outsized impact on western culture to this day. The Code of Justinian still forms a substantial portion of the body of law in the western world.

As for cultural appropriation, I don't understand the argument. African-American culture really doesn't have much depth to it, and it's not the same as African culture. It has had considerable influence from American culture by and large. The Hispanics have a much better argument, but are people really upset about Americans taking on the best parts? If anything I think the Hispanic influence in America is far longer and far greater than the African American influence. Aside from a few white rappers what 'cultural appropriation' is happening? Stevie Wonder?

How many black architects, painters and writers are being studied in America and finding themselves being emulated?

[Ben Kenobi]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Catherine%27s_Monastery#/media/File:Encaustic_Virgin.jpg