james_nicoll

You say that, but I don't think most people would be able to keep it up for long. Part of the experiment is to put yourself in the place, not of the Great US of A, but of a ‘lesser’ nationality. You don't have the luxury of confidence that you know who you are, so you can ignore them. They are redefining who you are. Their ignorant apprehensions do affect you, in how you are treated in the street, in what treatment you get from authorities, police, shopkeepers, when they know you are American, then they stop treating you as you, and start treating you as this caricature of you. And you know that you can't ignore it, and you can't fix it, and even your best friend will have these weird ideas about what you do at home, and, and, and.

Some people can just ignore it, sure. The Jews have had to do so for millennia. But still, sometimes those misapprehensions go beyond wrong into vicious: the Blood Libel, for instance. And it doesn't matter what you say, because it is common knowledge.

Or think of Native Americans. They know who they are, they know what Lakota/Navajo/Cherokee/etc do, because it's what they do. And still, they have people greeting them with “How”, and asking after the reservation, and telling them about their own culture based on a movie they saw, have government authorities and media commentators judge them as sufficiently “indian” or not. There's not much most of them can do but stoically bear it, but don't you think the grinding monotony of ignorance would piss you off? And then some idiot starts up “Native Circles”, of disaffected middle class white kids wearing feathers, and garb from a dozen different tribes, and stilted cowboy-and-indian talk, and religious rituals from all over the continent, and then claim to be “initiated shamen” and to understand the Indian experience, and give interviews to the local paper on your behalf, wouldn't that piss you off?


It's not that it would change you, it's the disconnect between what you are, and what others think you are, and what others think you think you are...

And your culture will out when you're no longer submersed in it. When you are confronted by a different culture every day, that's when you start to figure out what your own culture actually is. When everyone has the same accent, no-one has an accent.

*Shrug* That doesn't seem at all related to the subject. Here you're saying "How would you feel if you were isolated and totally on your own in an alien world, and in the bargain you had no ability to act except based on whatever their perceptions of you are.". I was talking about how I would feel about people -- not related to me -- taking whatever you think my culture is.

While the first ENCOMPASSES the second, they are not at all the same thing.

Not no ability to act, but whatever actions you take (or don't take) are constrained by others' (more or less correct) beliefs about who you are.

I meant the second point in the context of the first, which is after all, the position of those who get most upset about Cultural Appropriation. If I didn't get that point across better, then that's my fault.

From my PoV, my annoyance at the cultural appropriation in that case would be somewhere between minimal and nonexistent. It'd be the powerlessness, etc., of which the fact that they couldn't tell Doc Smith from Doc Holliday would be hardly registering. I'd only have the luxury for that kind of complaining if I was a *lot* more comfortable, I think... and once I was a lot more comfortable, I wouldn't be particularly bothered by it.