# Cultural Appropriation in role-playing games (draft)



## Grumpy RPG Reviews (Sep 9, 2015)

After time away I am writing new episodes for my video-podcast series on RPG reviews and issues. Here is a draft of the script for the next episode, which will probably be somewhat controversial. 

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(Trigger warnings for; racism, religious persecution, sexism, genocide, slavery and related issues)

Greetings from a place of unexpected discomfort or possibly just social consternation.

This week we discuss cultural appropriation in role-playing games.

To paraphrase a column on cultural appropriation by Maisha Z. Johnson that appeared at the Everyday Feminism site;

“A deep understanding of cultural appropriation refers to a particular power dynamic in which members of a dominant culture take elements from a culture of people who have been systematically oppressed by that dominant group.”

Johnson also states;

“It’s also not the same as assimilation, when marginalized people adopt elements of the dominant culture in order to survive conditions that make life more of a struggle if they don’t."

Johnson asserts cultural appropriation trivializes violent historical oppression, it lets people show facile interest in a culture while remaining prejudiced against its actual people and spreads mass lies about the marginalized, among other problems.

The name of the Washington Red Skins is cultural appropriation, as are college black face parties and most of the music by Katty Perry. They are a sports team employing the pejorative name and warrior symbolism of a Native American tribe, college s acting like s and a rich white woman pop-musician assuming the musical traditions of minority groups. All without so much as a thank you.

To digress for a moment, communication always attempts to accomplish something, be it laying out an agenda for a business, a statement of emotion, persuasion to a new philosophy, to entertain at least one person or something similar. All “dialogue” – whatever their format – is about something and dialogue is frequently home to a conflict between the participants, in terms the form of the communication, the emotions employed, who is paying attention to what and so forth. Music is designed to elicit an emotional response, business meetings pursue profit and most conversations serve at a bare minimum as an effort to glen useful information if not an effort by one person to coerce another person into doing something. There is no such thing as “just talking” because all communication is about something and much of it is a contest of wills. The phrase “just talking” is meaningless; both denying the nature and purpose of communication and serving as a moral dodge, a phrase employed by people in an effort to avoid accountability for their message and means of communication. Asserting “you’re just talking” is like saying gravity may suddenly shut off.

The writing, art, design and composition of RPGs is a dialogue, is designed to communicate something, usually someone’s idea of a good time.

Cultural appropriation is hate speech. Cultural appropriation is hate speech against an ethnic minority group, spoken in the language of that ethnic minority. Cultural appropriation is done by gormless people who employ phrases like “just talking” when called on their bad behavior.

Cultural appropriation is a problem in role-playing games and even as racism and sexism is arguably getting better, if only incrementally, cultural appropriation is not improving in any meaningful way.

There two ways to go about representation, direct translation of a real people and culture and the pastiche, even if both may lead to some variant of blackface play.

According to Mirriam-Webster Dictionary, a pastiche is something – such as a piece of writing or music – that imitates the style of someone or something else. For example, Stephen King’s short story “Jerusalem’s Lot” is a pastiche of H.P. Lovecraft’s works, only better. Stephen Sondhheim has composed many tunes that function as pastiches of music originally composed in the 1920s and 1930s. A pastiche does not make the original a subject of ridicule, which would be a satire.

Direct translation of a real people and culture is exactly what it sounds like – an attempt to fictionalize a real world people, their culture and frequently their religion. Examples include White Wolf’s books that asserted the Rom people possessed actual magical powers and that Mexico City and Transylvania were home to most of the puerile evil in the world – which has an interesting subtext about the people living in Transylvania and Mexico City.

Aesthetic, according to Mirriam-Webster, is a set of principals underlying and guiding the work of a particular artist or movement and here – in terms RPGs – it refers to how cultural minorities, regions and the like might have a particular artistic style that may quickly be understood upon sight.

For example, a character from Piazo may wield a saber and wear a particular set of robes, so the audience understands she possesses a pseudo- Arabian Nights aesthetic. This is to say, she looks like Arabian… in a vaguely pop-culture manner, meaning she does not have to know the pillars of Islam.

By comparison, any attempt at a direct representation of the Middle East and people of the Muslim faith should get that type of thing correct. Too often RPGs fail in this type of effort. Instead, they become efforts at just creating a pastiche, at just ripping off aesthetic, while pretending to be something more for the purposes of a game.

Both ultimately serve as examples of cultural appropriation, and while one may be worse than the other, that does not excuse the lesser. Class C Felonies might be more severe crimes than Class A Misdemeanors, but that does not excuse the misdemeanors.

RPG examples of settings functioning as at least pastiches include;
·         Mazteca from TSR for Meso-America,
·         Al-Qadim from TSR for Persia, the Middle East and North Africa,
·         Nyambe from Atlas Games for Africa,
·         Kara-Tur from TSR for East Asia,
·         Rokugan from  Alderac Entertainment Group also for East Asia,
·         Osirion in Pathfinder and from Piazo for ancient Egypt,
·         Galt in Pathfinder and from Piazo for Revolutionary France,
·         Chelix in Pathfinder and from Piazo for Colonial or Post-Reconquista Spain,
·         Katapesh in Pathfinder and from Piazo for North Africa,
·         Qadira in Pathfinder and from Piazo for Persia,
·         Ganakagok, from an independent publisher, for Artic peoples,

Examples of real world settings and even real world peoples, employed for role-playing games include;
·         The Ravnos vampires from White Wolf Games for the Rom or Gypsies to use to more widely recognized term, though it is a pejorative,
·         The Giovanni vampires from White Wolf Games for the Italians,
·         The Followers of Set vampires from White Wolf Games for Egyptians,
·         The Assamite vampires from White Wolf Games for Muslims,
·         Masque of the Red Death from TSR and its representation of many places, including Eastern Europe,
·         White Wolf and its representations of Mexico City and Eastern Europe as home to most of the puerile evil in the universe,
·         The Dreamspeaker mages from White Wolf games for all the indigenous aboriginal magical forms ever as a single cohesive and coherent tradition,
·         The Akashic Brotherhood mages from White Wolf games for most of the Eastern Asian martials arts and philosophical traditions ever as  a single cohesive and coherent tradition,
·         The Euthanitos mages from White Wolf as a group of mages from southern Asian who more or less worship death and frequently act as serial killers,
·         The Uktena and the Windego from White Wolf as Native America werewolves
·         Gypsies, from White Wolf, which was a book about how the Rom people possesses actual magic,
·         Going Native Warpath, from an independent publisher, which makes a mélange of most of the Native American and Pacific Islander peoples,
·         Far West, also from an independent publisher, for most of the Chinese people and cultures while erasing Native Americans,

There are more than those listed here but this column is not just a list of these things and so we shall move on.

Morally and ethically, intent counts for less than we might wish. Only God knows someone’s actual intent and he does not exist – the rest of us have to cope with the person’s excuses and mealy-mouthed assertions about the best of intentions.

We deal with a contemporary world out of our control produced by ante-contemporary people whose actions if performed today would be considered morally insane and functional adults never get to pretend we do not live day-to-day eye-ball deep in this legacy. That legacy includes express slavery, genocide and cultural genocide and a grab bag of lesser horrors.

This will never go away any more than gravity will go away.

When called upon to justify racism and slavery, at various times people asserted that Africans were undeveloped and unprepared for civilization and need slavery to domesticate them properly. Likewise, people with the power stripped Native Americans of their heritage, culture and language in an attempt to “civilize” them. While the appearance of minorities in RPG does not approach anything like the level of horrors of genocide, slavery and cultural annihilation, minority people understandably may view any bit of RPG material through a historical lens that includes of horrors of genocide, slavery and cultural annihilation… and entitled whites mealy mouthing stuff about the best of intentions.

This is exacerbated by decades – at least – of media representation of minorities, their cultures and religions that provide grossly distorted depictions of everything “other” as a kind of proverbial comfort food for privileged white people.

Randa Jarrar in a column written in 2014 for Salon asserts that when western women, white women, engage in belly dancing they are engaging in cultural appropriation. They don costumes and employing something from outside their culture – belly dancing, or Raqs Sharqi – for their own amusement. In this, they have stripped the dance of its original intent and make a self-satisfied game of pretending to be something they are not.

“Many white women who presently practice belly dance are continuing this century-old tradition of appropriation, whether they are willing to view their practice this way or not.”

This has been going on for a century or more, however, that long history does not make it morally acceptable for bored white women to wear the trappings of a minority, particularly when they can walk away at anytime while actual women in the Arab world cannot walk away from how society views them, their society and their religion.

Time does not make such practices acceptable.

According to Nayyirah Waheed, in his essay “Cultural Consent is Not a Strange Concept,” modern Western society and its history over the last few centuries “has convinced us that no peoples have agency over their individual expressions of life. That this is a free market, that peoples’ cultures are created for sale, and everyone is free to take what they want, when, how, with no thought to the violence this causes.”

Waheed is correct. At the same time a business in the Western world makes a buck off sexy version of the hib-jab for Halloween, exhibiting abiding disrespect for the faith of Islam, it also makes sexy versions of nun’s habits for Halloween, exhibiting the same contempt for Catholicism as it does for Islam and Native Americans for the matter, all for the same juvenile sexual reasons. The point being, in modern Western Civilization, no one is special, no wounds are worth consideration and everyone and everything exists to be exploited and discarded.

Waheed also asserts that “no,” or refusal is not limited to an individual, but “…peoples also have a right to say no. …we have to check our privilege.”

Waheed – and RPG blogger Christopher Chinn, aka Bankeui – also discuss cultural consent, or that members of one cultural should be consulted by members of another culture, should grant permission for the use of some aspects of their culture in a certain context. This is not a bad idea, but it falls apart – at least somewhat – in application.

Who do we seek permission from when and how we may use something from another culture? How many members of that culture are required to grant permission? What ratio of consenting voices, as compared to objecting voices, is required to proceed on such an effort?

This might seem like snide quibbling, but it is not and this is going somewhere.

In 2014 Monte Cook Games released a product, intended to be a romp, titled “the Strange.” The Strange of the title referred to the phenomena of a series of small, alternate Earths or dimensions – each with a particular theme, such as Roman World, Science Fiction World and so on. One such world, the Thunder Plains, in a section composed by Bruce Cordell, focused on the upper mid-west plains the Native Americans there prior to colonial contact.

Cordell asserts he possessed the best of intentions, is related to Native Americans and that he consulted with Native Americans he knew about the product, that he researched the real background before composing the Thunder Plains.

However, there was sufficient backlash from Native Americans, who blogged about their issues with the product and how it represented them. Some Native Americans created a petition against the product and at first Monte Cook Games attempted to avoid the issue, though eventually they would reach out and make a compromise to work with Native Americans on the issue.

Cordell is likely quite sincere in his statements that he meant well, that he attempted to research the subject matter and consulted with Native Americans… and this proved to be insufficient for a number of reasons.

While Cordell and everyone else at Monte Cook Games is making a sincere effort to correct the errors and do a good job now, it would have been better for all parties if they had made such an effort in the first place. The fact they thought and probably still think that they had all along amounts to little.

A term employed in feminist and minority critiques of all kinds of media is agency. According to Mirriam-Webster Dictionary, agency is the capacity, condition or state of exerting power. It is about the capacity of a character, or characters, to make decisions and pursue those decisions. Stories where a white dude becomes a part of some “minority” group is not about the agency of those people. The Last Samurai is not about the agency of the traditional Japanese samurai – it is about the agency of Cruise’s character fulfilling some Japanophile power fantasy. The same is true of Dances with Wolves and Kevin Coster.

Players and game masters running games set in a minority culture, be it a pastiche or a direct translation, are not actually granting that culture or its people agency. They are fulfilling a power fantasy, complete with otherising, the appeal of the exotic and quite probably brown-face or a variant of brown face play.

Representation does in fact matter but white people have historically failed to adequately represent anyone but white people. Why should white people be granted an infinite series of mulligans to screw-ups allowing then try again? Why should the minorities accept this as a non-negotiable fact of life, like gravity?

This is not to encourage or condone erasure – the disappearance of minorities from gaming, either as players or as characters. However, perhaps such work is best left in the hands of people from the cultures represented. For example, the game Ehdrigor draws heavily from Native American cultures, its themes and motifs. It is also written and composed by Allan Turner, a black Indian and the setting is probably not something a non-Indian could have composed.

If someone is pursuing writing about real world minority cultures, then there are bare minimum factors of which they need to be aware and which they should pursue. First, the intentions of the writers, artists and other creators involved are at best invisible and at worst irrelevant. Seek out as many people from the culture you are attempting to represent and get their permission for the endeavor, be patient, be willing to walk away from the project if it is not working out – the minorities owe the majority nothing, except at best obeying the letter of the law. Also, as you did in when working math in school, show your work. Set aside space in the publication to discuss the goals and process of the publication.

If you are uncomfortable with the idea, then do no go there, do not do the deed – write the game or play the character – in the first place. Walking away from something which makes you uncomfortable is your right.

Sometimes it can feel like we are morally and ethically standing on a sandy beach and the waves are eroding the foundation out from under us, meaning we move or fall. The technical term for this is life and your choices are only noteworthy if you get them wrong and fall down.

Consider Wil Wheaton’s Law; Don’t be an dick. You are not the only person who gets to determine if you are being a dick and your supposed intent counts for little. The people you are speaking to, for and about have more of the final word about you being a dick than you do.

Sometimes good fences make for good neighbors not so much because it keeps them out of your yard but because it keeps you out of theirs.


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## Celebrim (Sep 9, 2015)

I find the term 'cultural appropriation' to be decidedly vague.  In general, cultures - if we can think of them as being something like memes - generally want to trade ideas with other cultures.  It's usually a fairly healthy activity for a culture to engage in, leading to greater depth and sophistication.  Strong claims that you ought to control how your culture is borrowed or utilized typically marginalizes your own culture unless it is ignored - which it usually is.  I'm inclined to think with a smirk about the French governments obsession with stopping the French people from appropriating words and ideas from other cultures, and really how little the English culture is offended when ideas are appropriated from it.  English culture is quite happy generally to colonize other cultures idea space and language, forming various sorts of pidgin languages and sprinkling itself into dialects as varied as Spanish, Arabic, and Mandarin Chinese.  

Likewise, English is a famously aggressive borrower of words from other languages, amassing a vocabulary of loan words several times larger than many other entire languages.  I suppose there might be some ignorant idiot out there that thinks English has too many foreign words in it, but if you robbed English of all the words it has borrowed from Latin, Greek, French, Spainish, Arabic, Japanese, and so forth, we'd quickly be reduced to the pathetic state of the French government and always having to invent new 'English' neologisms to keep our language 'pure' - inventions which half the time the French people ignore anyway and just say things like 'la blue jeans'.

I can't recall a single time I was afraid of my culture being appropriated, even when it wasn't done in a manner I particularly approved of - as for example the wholesale appropriation of the iconography of angels and devils into Japanese manga and anime.   I suppose we are to conclude that the Japanese are still being acted on and still without agency when they reinterpret western culture and ideas for their own purposes?   If so, then it's going to get really confusing determining with say First Nations Rock N Roll is empowering or just another sort of minstrel show.

And there is your 'trigger words', and were I really think this gets real.  'Cultural Appropriation' is a really terrible name for what is really wrong with the things that we ought to object to.  The problem wasn't that culture was getting appropriated.   To the extent that culture really was being appropriated, it was an entirely subversive thing guaranteed to taint the supposed cultural purity of the bigots that were trying to protect it.  The problem wasn't that culture was being appropriated.   The problem was that culture was being deliberately subverted and mocked, by a group that lacked the standing to subvert and mock back or sufficiently protect its own cultural legacy with economic and media power.   The problem wasn't that the larger culture was infatuated with the real culture of the minority, which is a rather good and powerful thing on the whole, greatly to the advantage of the minority.   The problem was that the larger culture wanted to impose a sham of the real culture on the minority as an act of oppression, making its lies and belittlement become a sort of reality or at least the illusion of reality.  

That was a terrible act.

But 'cultural appropriation' generally?   It's about as dangerous to anyone that wants to be a racial supremist as say interracial marriage.

Ultimately, this is one of those danged if you do, danged if you don't things.  If you do, then it's 'appropriation'.   If you don't, then you aren't promoting 'diversity'.  And mostly, when it is brought up, it really is about power plays.   It's about claiming to be a representative priesthood, with veto rights to censor whatever isn't liked.   And the obvious proof of that is that I don't have the right to say these things.   I have to link to some guy with the right birthright whose says the same darn things on youtube, so that the racist insults can be hurled at him by the priesthoods.


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## Grumpy RPG Reviews (Sep 9, 2015)

"I was reading a book (about interjections, oddly enough) yesterday which included the phrase “In these days of political correctness…” talking about no longer making jokes that denigrated people for their culture or for the colour of their skin. And I thought, “That’s not actually anything to do with ‘political correctness’. That’s just treating other people with respect.”

Which made me oddly happy. I started imagining a world in which we replaced the phrase “politically correct” wherever we could with “treating other people with respect”, and it made me smile. 

You should try it. It’s peculiarly enlightening.

I know what you’re thinking now. You’re thinking “Oh my god, that’s treating other people with respect gone mad!”
-Neil Gaiman


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## Celebrim (Sep 9, 2015)

Grumpy RPG Reviews said:


> You should try it. It’s peculiarly enlightening.




Same back at you.


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## billd91 (Sep 10, 2015)

Wow. Same post and pretty much the same follow-up post too as on the Paizo boards. While I can understand posting the original for broader response than he'd get on just one website, I'm wondering if the follow-up isn't just being a bit of a troll.


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## Umbran (Sep 10, 2015)

Do you welcome more picky feedback?

A "dialogue" is an *exchange* between two or more parties, a conversation back and forth.  The writing, art, design and composition of RPGs is a monologue - one party speaking to another (the reader, in this case).  Unless the person who buys the RPG then communicates to the authors and artists, and they then communicate back again, it isn't a dialogue.

I think referring to all cultural appropriation as hate speech at that early point of the piece is *risky*.  You are stepping up the emotional challenge there, instead of the intellectual challenge, and could lose large chunks of your audience to it.  Especially because you haven't laid the groundwork for it to be seen as accurate.  In law, hate speech is, "any speech, gesture or conduct, writing, or display which is forbidden because it may incite violence or prejudicial action against or by a protected individual or group, or because it disparages or intimidates a protected individual or group."

Katy Perry is not inciting violence or prejudicial action with her music, nor is she intimidating anyone, or disparaging.  She may be showing disrespect, but if we are going to the point of saying disrespect is hate speech... well, then there's a whole lot of hate speech on EN World sometimes.  To have that not come across as hyperbole, you need to show more reasoning there.  Not having a distinction between greedy thoughtlessness and hate is problematic.

It may be telling that (at least, as I understand it) the original term was "cultural _mis_appropriation" - which admits there are ways of accepting things from other cultures that are okay, and ways that aren't.  By dropping the "mis-", it implies there is *no* acceptable way for cultures to exchange, and I find that questionable, unrealistic, and again problematic.


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## Grumpy RPG Reviews (Sep 10, 2015)

Billd91, the Gaiman quote will go in the revised version of the column as I had forgotten about it until this afternoon.


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## Celebrim (Sep 10, 2015)

I am going to try to follow Umbran's inspiring example of tact and understanding.

Here is a video of a man who agrees with me on this issue probably 99% of the time.  We may quibble over a few tiny points, but based on his video essay, I think we are on the same page, and even where I disagree I do understand where he is coming from.   Fair warning, he uses strong language to make his point forcefully.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGgj9S8XO7k

Now, I don't believe as I do because this guy convinced me.  And I didn't get his permission to believe what I believe.   And he didn't ask my permission to come to his conclusions.  That would be I think we would agree, pretty ridiculous.   In fact, if he needed to ask my permission to believe what he believes, I think we'd agree that there was a serious problem here.   But that's not the situation that prevails.  Happily, we are allowed to come to our own conclusions.

So this is touched on in a lot of ways in the video, but one of the problems with asking a group for permission is that it's not at all clear who we would ask.  A lot of people where asking 'the1janitor' for his permission, but as he pointed out, he's no more entitled to where dreadlocks as an 'authentic' dreadlock wearer than the people asking his permission.  The very fact that he is seen as somehow an 'authentic' voice merely because of his skin color, and the mere fact that the majority society sees the minority group as having a uniform opinion is itself evidence of a destructive and condescending racism, as if an entire race of individuals was somehow stamped out of a single mold and so tribal in its essence that a few selected spokespersons could speak for the whole group.  This is 19th century stuff.

So who gets to decide who the authentic spokesperson is for a racial group?  Do minority racial groups hold elections and nominate cultural spokespersons who represent them?  Why does no one ever think this about white people - especially well, other white people?   And even if they did hold such elections (which I would note would be inherently racist institutions), why would anyone in that racial group feel he was necessarily being represented as if his primary identity was always the color of his skin as if everyone of the same color was just one uniform tribe with a uniform set of opinions?  Aren't people allowed to disagree?  Or do they need to get permission for that?

The biggest problem I have with your essay is that it violates one of the wisest rules for living anyone ever said to me, and that is (edited for EnWorld), "Don't 'complain' about something, unless you are going to do something about it."  Specifically, it's easy to be negative about things (and I should know), but if you are going to be negative and critical and call people - specific individuals like Bruce Cordell, Kevin Costner, Monte Cook, and Katy Perry and not just hypothetical persons - as well as entire groups of people "gormless" and purveyors of hate speech, you have to be able to offer up a reasonable remedy for people if they wish to repent of this sin they are doing.  Because you are really being unfair to people if you accuse them of being moral reprobates (the Hebrew word here would be 'Raca'), especially if you are going to say that their intentions don't matter and that they can be in this state of degeneracy even if they don't mean to be, if you don't offer them some way to become reconciled with the universe and straighten their lives up.

And you don't offer any coherent plan for that.  Your essay continually contradicts itself by offering up a conclusion, and then negating the value and the worth of that conclusion later.  So ultimately you are left with no standard that people can abide by to know what ethical behavior ought to be.  The only rule you ultimately offer is that you have to get permission.. from someone... not clearly specified.

 Because this whole plan to ask permission before you act and think is going to run up against several hard problems.  First, you are giving up your own agency in this.  Making your own judgment would be "hate speech" if it disagreed with one or more offended persons.  Second, you are going to be beholden to the person who is most outraged and to be frank most hateful.  And third, you are inevitably going to have contrasting opinions.  I mean sure, it's a great thing - and a wise thing - to go and ask advice of people who might have a different perspective and honestly listen to them and consider what they have to say, but that is a very different thing than asking permission.  When you seek advice, you are having a dialogue and things get communicated, and you can make your own informed decision.  But when you seek permission, you are just getting dictated to.  And who are you going to choose to be the rightful dictator?  Who really has the lawful authority here?  Who is legitimate? Who in other words is 'authentic'?

Who are you to decide that their voice and their opinion is more legitimate than someone else's, so that not only do you concede to be dictated to by them, but that everyone else must also be dictated to?  More to the point, who are they to decide?  

It comes down to this; we need to be treating people like we want to be treated.  We need to treat them with respect.  We need to try to not act like dicks.  And when we can't agree on what is respectful, because something always offends everyone, we have to just stay tolerant and keep on trying to treat people like we would want to be treated.  

When people disagree with particular strictures or theories of 'political correctness', often as not it is because they feel those theories advocate for treating people in disrespectful ways and not because they feel that they are just trying to be kind and respectful.


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## pickin_grinnin (Sep 10, 2015)

I spent many years in cultural anthropology grad school in the late 80s.  The whole "cultural appropriation" thing was just starting to gain some traction back then, and I remember having a lot of classroom discussions about it.  My ex-wife (we were married at the time) was a sociology graduate student, so I was familiar with the thinking on that subject within that discipline as well.  

The reality is that almost every human culture is largely made up of ideas, technologies, beliefs, rituals, etc. appropriated from other cultures, current and past.  The Romans did a ton of "appropriating" from the Greeks, for example, as is evident from the writings they left.  It isn't necessarily a bad or destructive thing.  When you start talking about "cultural appropriation" as a bad thing, you enter into a vast minefield of grey areas, exceptions, and more.    It is particularly problematic when the discussion originates with people who aren't members of the culture in question.  

It isn't unknown for there to be long arguments at universities, in periodicals, and (today) on online forums about particular issues that most members of the cultures in question don't really care about.  Academic fury (including things like "trigger warnings") often have little to do with life outside the circles that like to debate such things.

There are certain aspects to any culture or subculture that those involved will tend to view as important to their group identity.  There are even more aspects that most people in a culture under consideration don't really feel are part of what binds them together, or that are exclusive to them.  There are no hard-and-fast rules or black-and-white definitions when it comes to this topic.


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## Grumpy RPG Reviews (Sep 10, 2015)

I agree with a number of your points, but I need to make it more express in the column. Specifically I see it all as a snare, or maybe multiple snares, and there is no happy resolution.

Sometimes the only way to win is by not playing.


Celebrim said:


> I am going to try to follow Umbran's inspiring example of tact and understanding.
> ...


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## Grumpy RPG Reviews (Sep 10, 2015)

Oops, double post - I am doing this with a smartphone.


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## Grumpy RPG Reviews (Sep 10, 2015)

When the Greeks complained, the Romans crucified them. We are trying to do better.


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## delericho (Sep 10, 2015)

-- deleted --


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## Umbran (Sep 10, 2015)

A few other thoughts on accuracy...



Grumpy RPG Reviews said:


> ·         The Dreamspeaker mages from White Wolf games for all the indigenous aboriginal magical forms ever as a single cohesive and coherent tradition




This is not an accurate description of the Dreamspeakers - they are not "cohesive and coherent" as presented in the game.  They are presented as (at best) a loose agglomeration of diverse people banded together for mutual representation among more organized, cohesive and coherent power blocks.



> ·         The Euthanitos mages from White Wolf as a group of mages from southern Asian who more or less worship death and frequently act as serial killers,




"Euthanatos" is misspelled.  The tradition tends to explain its approach to magic using concepts from Indian religion, rather more specific than "southern Asia".




> According to Nayyirah Waheed, in his essay “Cultural Consent is Not a Strange Concept,” modern Western society and its history over the last few centuries “has convinced us that no peoples have agency over their individual expressions of life. That this is a free market, that peoples’ cultures are created for sale, and everyone is free to take what they want, when, how, with no thought to the violence this causes.”
> 
> Waheed is correct.




Waheed is misleading.  The focus on western culture carries the implication that this is really a characteristic of Western Culture. In this, he is incorrect, and likely (and ironically) engaging in a variation of the "noble savage" archetype - the Westerners, they're all bad, and the others, they're all good.

Instead, throughout history, when cultures have met, they have borrowed from one another.  Sometimes the power was balanced, but often not.  Imperial China gives us excellent examples of cultural appropriations - we, who are somewhat ignorant, sometimes think of "China" as one place, one people, one culture.  Nothing could be farther from the truth - that seeming is due to the imposition and flagrant cultural appropriation of the various Imperial dynasties as they conquered areas of what is now a unified nation.  There are indeed few examples of cultures who have *not* engaged in such practices.  To suggest otherwise is a whitewash.  It is a *human* behavior, not a Western one.  



> Players and game masters running games set in a minority culture, be it a pastiche or a direct translation, are not actually granting that culture or its people agency.




You haven't established that we generally think we are granting agency, so that disabusing us of that notion is useful. Nor have you established that failing to grant agency in our play in our own homes is problematic.  The implication is that there's some badwrongfun in here, but it is applied via vague emotional appeal, rather than direct analysis of what behaviors in our play cause what harm, and to whom.

A white guy in Wisconsin sitting at a table of other Wisconsinites playing a samurai character is not granting agency to anyone, no.  But, he's not granting agency when he tries his hand at making a curry, either.  So what?  Is he not supposed to cook new foods that he didn't grow up eating?  Why not? 



> They are fulfilling a power fantasy...




Sorry for the sarcastic tone, but, *duh*!  We are pretending to be elves running around throwing fireballs, and barely-armored swordsmen that take down 50' long, fire-breathing dragons with nothing but a sword and mighty thews.  If there's a problem with power fantasy, we need to toss the entire hobby in the trash, including EN World and your video blogs about the hobby.




> Why should white people be granted an infinite series of mulligans to screw-ups allowing then try again? Why should the minorities accept this as a non-negotiable fact of life, like gravity?




Before you can reasonably ask that question, you need to accept that cultural borrowing is *human*.  Then, you can discuss the cases where following your normal human behaviors is okay, and when it isn't.  Any suggestion that takes the form, "You may *never* engage in this normal human behavior," is pretty much a non-starter, from a practical standpoint.


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## Bagpuss (Sep 10, 2015)

Grumpy RPG Reviews said:


> Cultural appropriation is hate speech.




Have to disagree with you there. Hate is an intense dislike. People that appropriate aspects of another culture don't do it because they hate them, to call it hate speech is unnecessarily inflammatory.


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## Alzrius (Sep 10, 2015)

Grumpy RPG Reviews said:


> For example, a character from Piazo may wield a saber and wear a particular set of robes, so the audience understands she possesses a pseudo- Arabian Nights aesthetic. This is to say, she looks like Arabian… in a vaguely pop-culture manner, meaning she does not have to know the pillars of Islam.
> 
> By comparison, any attempt at a direct representation of the Middle East and people of the Muslim faith should get that type of thing correct.




You seem to be completely unaware that there are Arabian people that aren't of the Islamic faith, such as the Yazidis. I think it's your article that's "vaguely pop-culture."


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## Celebrim (Sep 10, 2015)

Umbran said:


> Before you can reasonably ask that question, you need to accept that cultural borrowing is *human*.  Then, you can discuss the cases where following your normal human behaviors is okay, and when it isn't.  Any suggestion that takes the form, "You may *never* engage in this normal human behavior," is pretty much a non-starter, from a practical standpoint.




I think you can state this more strongly.  There are some human behaviors that appear pretty typical, an hence 'normal', that humans generally feel they ought not do however normal the behavior is - honesty is upheld as a virtue despite a general lack of evidence that honesty is more normal than lying.  So this criticism, while valid, isn't as powerful as it could be.

But under the own terms of the criticism, diverse influences and non-Western cultures are called out as good things (indeed, better things than the depraved Western culture).  So the problem is not merely that the essay, and the term it is discussing, states that you may never engage in the normal behavior of borrowing ideas that intrigue and excite you - ultimately suggesting that only non-westerners should be allowed to create from a palate of non-western ideas - but that at the same time the criticism suggests that westerners are to be damned for not drawing from these more diverse sources and that a setting can be condemned a being too Eurocentric.

While the original essay doesn't focus on it, the same critics are also highly critical of Western cultural assimilation of non-Western cultures and claim that this is a violent hegemony that oppresses them.  So for example, if a Japanese person where to appropriate the iconography of Western knights, devils, angels and so forth, and use it to create art, then this would be seen as being an evil perpetrated by 'the West'.  The Japanese person is in this theory denied agency, and is in fact manipulated by Western forces.  Where as, if an American person where to appropriate the iconography of Japanese samurai, oni, and kenku and use them in their art, in this theory the Japanese person still doesn't have agency and the westerner is still the active agent acting on the passive Japanese culture.   According to the theory, the only way the Japanese person can have agency is if the American explicitly goes to the person and grants them agency by asking their permission, because under this theory of 'cultural appropriation' it is ALWAYS the Westerner that is the active agent and ALWAYS the non-Westerner that is the passive agent that is acted upon. 

Now, not to put a too fine a point on it, but that's racism.  

I mean, the thing that really strikes me about this theory is how bloody self-centered it is.  I grew up outside of the United States, and the above theory doesn't remotely describe how cultural exchange works in the real world or how much benefit accrues to a people when their cultural trappings and heritage come to the attention of larger and more prosperous cultures.  The theory is just a dandied up version of 'White Man's Burden' and 'Noble Savage' theory masquerading as decency (as those theories have before), and it's insulting to real friends of mine and real people, and believe me, this is me being really restrained in holding back from saying what I want to say.

But in the face of that sort of hate speech as is in the OP, don't expect me to be silent.  Much as it claims that you can do hate speech without meaning it, so I also grant that the original poster wasn't meaning to be so condescending and hateful (to just about everyone), and unlike the essay I do think that the intention matters, but yeah, I'm not going to be meekly going, "Yeah, stop making Ska, Calypso, Jamaican Folk or Reggai influenced music unless you are a real Jamaican because it's really bad for my Jamaican musician friends for you to be like influenced by them."  (Plagiarism would be a different story, but we already have a term for plagiarism.  It's not like 'cultural appropriation' adds any clarity to that.)


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## Bagpuss (Sep 10, 2015)

If you want to see hateful speech, look at some of the responses to Monte Cook's well reasoned decision on Thunder Plains, because he didn't just bow out to the harassment and remove references altogether.

https://plus.google.com/+Montecookgames/posts/DhyFE67jFoZ


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## Umbran (Sep 10, 2015)

Alzrius said:


> You seem to be completely unaware that there are Arabian people that aren't of the Islamic faith, such as the Yazidis. I think it's your article that's "vaguely pop-culture."




And that there was a time before the Islamic faith's dominance in the area.  Most of our thoughts on Arabian style for RPG adventuring are based on "One Thousand and One Nights", much of which has pre-Islamic origins.


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## Umbran (Sep 10, 2015)

Celebrim said:


> I think you can state this more strongly.




Yes, I could.  I chose not to.  I am more critiquing the presentation of the piece - places where depictions are inaccurate, logic is flawed, phrasing is apt to have unfortunate results, and the like.  I'm aiming for constructive criticism, mostly to help Grumpy improve the piece, rather than to tear it up and reject it.


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## Celebrim (Sep 10, 2015)

Alzrius said:


> You seem to be completely unaware that there are Arabian people that aren't of the Islamic faith, such as the Yazidis. I think it's your article that's "vaguely pop-culture."




Or that the Islamic faith didn't come into being until the 7th century, and before that there were all sorts of religious traditions in the Middle East, some of which are still around.  Or that the tales from the Arabian Nights themselves in many ways resemble Beowulf, in that Beowulf is a story adapted during the middle of a culture in transition, and the story of Beowulf is a half-Christianized version of an older oral story from a pre-Christian culture and that likewise the Arabian Nights stories are compiled from stories collected all around the Indian Ocean basin and appropriated as partially converted Islamic literature.  And then those tales were then appropriated and compiled by non-Arabic peoples into new collections containing new tales and framing, so that there is no 'authentic' Tales of the Arabian Nights.  And those tales were appropriated back in and then out again and so forth, until no one knows or can unravel the full history of the text and state which culture actually owns which story, and which one is authentic and which one was a sort of 'minstrel show' itself trying to subtly demean or make pointed barbs toward or mock Arab and Islamic culture.  

The most famous stories of the cycle - Aladdin, Ali Baba, Sinbad - are in fact, if the French translator is to be believed, the product of a Marionite Christian oral story teller (if in fact the French 'translator' didn't just make them up).  This oral story teller got no credit for the European best seller, but then again the French guy Galland also was cheated out of his work, as editions appeared with his name on it that he got no money for.

And that's to not even get into the bigger problem that no living person in the Middle East could properly claim to be the authentic guardian of the culture that produced the Tales of the Arabian knights, any more than any living person in American could properly claim to be the authentic guardian of Beowulf, because the cultures that produce both stories no longer exist.  No one is a native speaker of Old English any more.  No one really comes from pre-Norman Conquest half-Christianized Anglo-Saxon Medieval Europe.   When you start claiming you personally own centuries old intellectual property out of some theory of communal intellectual property, you are advancing a theory of ownership that is based entirely on your feelings of kinship and not any reality of kinship much less reality of ownership.  You yourself took no part in creating the intellectual property, yet you want to claim that you are somehow owed veto over how it is used based on vague self-identification.  Your own culture probably buried the original culture that produced the art, yet somehow you claim you are entitled by some long right of blood to this art whose roots are actual alien to you.  I'm reminded of the black suburban New Hampshire woman who grew up entirely north of the Mason-Dixon that accused me of cultural appropriation because the 'cotton fields' were her cultural heritage, negligent of the fact that my own mother dragged 100lb sacks of cotton through the red mud of Arkansas a child to help keep the family from literally starving when my grandfather was infirmed.  Neither her nor I actually knew anything about the reality of picking cotton, but if proximity to poor sharecroppers is to be the test, I win hands down.

Anyone ever seen the credit card commercial where the family goes to Norway to explore their heritage, and it turns out they aren't Norwegian but Finns (or Swedes, or some such).  And then they have to divest themselves of their literal ownership of Norwegian cultural trappings, get out the credit card and buy a new cultural identity?  A good example of this would be my own life.  

For my whole childhood I was raised with the cultural heritage of a Scot.  I thought, childishly, that to some extent things about Scots were things about me, and conversely I was in some way entitled to being called Scottish by right of my birth.  I had a proud Scot heritage, from the Wallaces, Burns, and Reynolds in my ancestry.  Problem is, it was all based on a lie.  When my family traced back its ancestry, it turned out that we were descend from two brothers who immigrated to the United States back in the 18th century.  The brothers knew that in 18th century America, Irish people would have more limited opportunities that more privileged races like English and Scots, so they decided that they could pass themselves off as Scots.  The told everyone that they were Scots, and were accepted into high social circles where they married well and were successful businessmen.  They told their own wives they were Scots and not filthy Irishmen.  They definitely told their wives parents.  They told their children they were Scots.  And they told their children, and they told their children.  Their ancestors were still telling this to people to avoid anti-Irish discrimination in the mid-20th century, long after anyone remembered that it was a lie.  In fact, I'm positive that some of my ancestors probably would have never agreed to marry a filthy Irishman.  Irony, huh?

So what am I, a Scot or an Irish?  Does the question or its answer even have meaning?  Is either in this context even really 'a thing'?  And regardless of the ancestry, would my inheritance of the heritage give anyone else a veto power over being inspired by the culture, art, and history of either nation?   And what about growing up in Jamaica?  Does speaking Petwa, and eating patties, box drink, and spice buns for lunch make me Jamaican enough to appropriate the stories of my childhood without asking permission?


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## Celebrim (Sep 10, 2015)

Umbran said:


> Yes, I could.  I chose not to.  I am more critiquing the presentation of the piece - places where depictions are inaccurate, logic is flawed, phrasing is apt to have unfortunate results, and the like.  I'm aiming for constructive criticism, mostly to help Grumpy improve the piece, rather than to tear it up and reject it.




Ok, I can understand that.


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## Morrus (Sep 10, 2015)

I think it would be fun to see an actual Japanese or Chinese Western (as in, American style cowboys, hats and six-shooters and all). 

The 4-colour superhero genre seems like one which isn't as widely used worldwide as it might be, given its current popularity.


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## Umbran (Sep 10, 2015)

Umbran said:


> It may be telling that (at least, as I understand it) the original term was "cultural _mis_appropriation" - which admits there are ways of accepting things from other cultures that are okay, and ways that aren't.  By dropping the "mis-", it implies there is *no* acceptable way for cultures to exchange, and I find that questionable, unrealistic, and again problematic.




I am following up on my own post, because a potentially useful example came to mind, while I was eating lunch.  Specifically, my lunchbox.

I often bring my lunch to work, and when I do, it is almost always in a Bento box.  Bento is clearly of Japanese origin, and has been part of the culture for hundreds of years.  I am not of Asian, much less specifically Japanese, descent.  Clearly, I have adopted (or borrowed, or appropriated - which word applies?) it from another culinary tradition and culture.

So, with my lunchbox, I'm engaging in hate speech?  I find that difficult to understand.  I *like* my lunchbox.  I find it to be a clever, attractive (it is painted in a green wood/bamboo grain pattern), and convenient way to bring a modest-sized meal for one person, composed of several dishes, to work.  How can my appreciating a good idea from someone else, and putting it to regular use, be considered hateful? 

I did a bit of reading on Bento when I picked up the box, learned a bit of the kinds of foods commonly presented in this way, and why.  And I don't parade around, going, "Woo, lookit me, my lunch is all *Japanese*!  I'm a lunch ninja!" or anything stupid like that.  Sometimes I carry traditional foods (tamagoyaki is tasty), but sometimes it is leftover Indian food (my wife and I learned how to make our own paneer, because the stuff in our nearby markets is kinda nasty), or taco rice.  Or just leftovers.  My lunch is pretty multicultural, come to think of it.  Calling it hate speech seems.... excessive in the extreme.


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## Celebrim (Sep 10, 2015)

Ok, the tl;dr version of all my posts.

A person can see a legitimate problem, and come up with an absolutely ridiculous illegitimate 'solution' that actually is as bad as the problem. 

Hammering again and a again on the reality of the problem, in no way justifies the solution.  "But the problem is real!", doesn't mean that _this_ is the solution.

Nor is it the case that disagreement with the proposed solution in any way implies a lack of awareness with the problem.

If you are going to write an essay on 'cultural appropriation', you have to move beyond simply insulting everyone that doesn't agree by categorically placing them in the role of Evil Others, and repeating continually bad things that have happened.  You have to show that that the solution is workable and has a positive outcome.  In particular, you have to ask whether the elaborate theory you've constructed as a way to view the world has any added value, and is any more workable, than the more easily explained and hopefully less controversial theory that we ought to just treat each other with respect - particularly when a quick glance at socio-political theories shows that elaborate theories usually are ways to justify to yourself not treating others with respect.


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## Bedrockgames (Sep 10, 2015)

Umbran said:


> I am following up on my own post, because a potentially useful example came to mind, while I was eating lunch.  Specifically, my lunchbox.
> 
> I often bring my lunch to work, and when I do, it is almost always in a Bento box.  Bento is clearly of Japanese origin, and has been part of the culture for hundreds of years.  I am not of Asian, much less specifically Japanese, descent.  Clearly, I have adopted (or borrowed, or appropriated - which word applies?) it from another culinary tradition and culture.
> 
> ...




And I think when you start talking about RPGs, cultural borrowing is one of the big engines of setting building. There are better ways and worse ways to do it of course and as Celebrim's video points out borrowing isn't the same as insulting. I try to be sensitive in how I borrow, but this term Cultural Appropriation seems like one those things that everyone has a slightly different definition for and when I try to retroactively apply it to history you have to end up stripping out a lot of great things like rock music (which is appropriation of things like the blues). It often seems to be more about accuracy in depiction than sensitivity. I don't find it particularly helpful when I design. I do find the idea of 'being culturally sensitive" useful, not doing things that are insulting. But borrowing clothing or systems of government, combining different cultural elements, all seem pretty cool to me. 

In one of my games I borrowed a lot from Thai culture to create key parts of a fantasy world. I know a bit about Thai history culture but my aim wasn't accuracy, it was to take cool elements and use them to make new things. When I showed it to gamers in Thailand (via the internet, I didn't travel there to show them) they were really happy about it.


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## jimmifett (Sep 10, 2015)

I'd faux rage against "cultural appropriation", but too busy watching blinged out booty-shaking rap videos from descendants of african slaves while waiting for paid anime subscription to stream latest episodes across the globe from a country that had western business concepts forced upon it after national humiliation, while my woman is in kitchen preparing me riceballs and hot dogs made to look like cute octopi. I'm very diversified in my cultural assimilation.

/sarcasm

Yes this is satire, bc the whole concept of Cultural Appropriation is ridiculous to begin with IMO.

And booty-shaking videos are awesome, world needs more of them, tho could do without the rap itself.


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## Umbran (Sep 10, 2015)

Bedrockgames said:


> And I think when you start talking about RPGs, cultural borrowing is one of the big engines of setting building.




Yep.  It is also one of the big engines of the culinary world - I was using my lunch because it is logically similar to RPGs, but we here are unlikely to have major emotional attachments to my lunch, while our favorite game or setting may bring out defensiveness.  



And, "I was using my lunch because it is logically similar to RPGs" is a phrase that may never have been uttered on the planet before


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## Bagpuss (Sep 10, 2015)

Morrus said:


> I think it would be fun to see an actual Japanese or Chinese Western (as in, American style cowboys, hats and six-shooters and all).




You mean...

[video=youtube;9-TGaGa3QAc]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-TGaGa3QAc[/video]


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## Cristian Andreu (Sep 11, 2015)

There has to be a middle point between _"Gleefully stereotyping entire cultures out of hate and sense of superiority"_ and _"Not eating sushi unless Japanese"_.


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## Grumpy RPG Reviews (Sep 13, 2015)

I want to thank everyone for their comments, even the ones with which I disagree. I am revising the column, which unfortunately appears to be making it longer.


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## Umbran (Sep 14, 2015)

It is a complicated subject, possibly without one single correct approach to dealing with the issues.  Any thoughts that a good treatment of it would be *short* are probably to be left behind


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## Mistwell (Sep 14, 2015)

Grumpy RPG Reviews said:


> Only God knows someone’s actual intent and he does not exist – the rest of us have to cope with the person’s excuses and mealy-mouthed assertions about the best of intentions.




This part is offensive, and doesn't contribute anything meaningful to the piece.  It just comes off as needless snark at the expense of those who believe in God, and not even for a point that reinforces any theme of the article.


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## Bagpuss (Sep 14, 2015)

Agreed I'm an atheist but there is no need to rub it in believers faces all the time if it adds nothing to the conversation. Seems to be there deliberately to cause offense. Rather than most cultural appropriation, which apart from the most extreme cases isn't intended to cause offense.

A lot in the original post seems to just be trolling, deliberately looking to get a negative response. Rather than actually asking the audience to think and engage with the topic.


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## Umbran (Sep 14, 2015)

Bagpuss said:


> A lot in the original post seems to just be trolling, deliberately looking to get a negative response.




Well, he *does* sell himself as "grumpy".  Not exactly a descriptor that suggests positive slants on the topics.


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## Grumpy RPG Reviews (Sep 14, 2015)

I have an inherent cruel streak I try to keep on a short leash - I'm not even joking about that.
That said, I try to use "being provocative" as a tool and I don't view my video podcast series as comfort food.


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## Celebrim (Sep 14, 2015)

Mistwell said:


> This part is offensive, and doesn't contribute anything meaningful to the piece.  It just comes off as needless snark at the expense of those who believe in God, and not even for a point that reinforces any theme of the article.




Meh.  

The fact that its making a contentious point that isn't part of the theme of the article is the point.  It tribal signaling.  It's not so much primarily intended to cause offense as it is to garner the sympathy of the rest of the tribe.  "I'm an atheist, so if you are an atheist, then you'll agree with the rest of what I say as well."   Plenty of tribes define themselves primarily by who they aren't or who they oppose.   That's nothing weird.  

Announcing such a marker reminds me of the homeless people who when you actually look the in the eye always want to say first, "I'm a Christian." in the false assumption that I'd be more willing to help them because of it.  Essentially it's just pleading, "No really, I'm a good person.  I believe all the right things necessary to deserve your sympathy." 

It's like believers that put Ichthys on the back of their cars so that other members of their social tribe will know them.  Or it's like certain social groups that put so many bumper stickers on the back of their car you can no longer see the back of their car so that likeminded groups will recognize a fellow member of their creed: "Coexist" written in the symbols of religions that the person isn't member of, etc.  Or it's like a church that names itself, "Apostolic Pentecostal Full Gospel Holiness Missionary Baptist Church of God in Christ Jesus", just so that from the name alone you can check off the boxes no whether or not you are in the tribe.

If it is intended to be offensive, sort of "Flying Spaghetti Monster" or "Darwin Fish" style, it's predicated on a false assumption of what I find offensive.  It's a bit less than pleasant to think that someone dislikes you so much that they are trying to insult you, but the snark itself isn't offensive.  The only reason to point out the snark and how unhelpful it is to the theme, is if you want the essay to be more persuasive, which in full honesty I don't.

Besides, I detest victim based morality almost as much as I detest shame based morality.   I'm not victimized by original poster declaring he doesn't believe in God.   I am explicitly not demanding any authority figure protect me from the victimization I'm not actually experiencing.   And I'm explicitly calling for people to not passively aggressively attack ideas by cloaking themselves in the mantle of victimhood.   Agreeing that it is offensive and victimizing for the OP to declare God doesn't exist, would in fact be agreeing with the underlying principles of the essay and the world view it is trying to advance - namely, that we should be aggressively defending the conversational space from ideas that offend us (or others) even when it wasn't the intention to be offensive.


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## delericho (Sep 14, 2015)

Grumpy RPG Reviews said:


> That said, I try to use "being provocative" as a tool and I don't view my video podcast series as comfort food.




Which would be fair enough, except that, "Morally and ethically, intent counts for less than we might wish."


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## Mistwell (Sep 14, 2015)

Celebrim said:


> Meh.
> 
> The fact that its making a contentious point that isn't part of the theme of the article is the point.  It tribal signaling.  It's not so much primarily intended to cause offense as it is to garner the sympathy of the rest of the tribe.  "I'm an atheist, so if you are an atheist, then you'll agree with the rest of what I say as well."   Plenty of tribes define themselves primarily by who they aren't or who they oppose.   That's nothing weird.
> 
> ...




I agree with you entirely.  I am not personally offended.  I am just trying to speak his language - he speaks in terms of offensive regardless of intent, about how a reader feels about something written as opposed to what the communication is intended to communicate.  So OK, I understand his communication of that point, and apply it to this other thing he said, and find it clearly breaks the criteria he set forth.  I assume he wants to operate within the same rules he's applying to others.  

As for tribalism, your comment reminds me of this article.  An article I think is rather powerful and deeply on point.


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## Grumpy RPG Reviews (Sep 14, 2015)

...Touche.


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## Mallus (Sep 14, 2015)

Grumpy RPG Reviews said:


> That said, I try to use "being provocative" as a tool and I don't view my video podcast series as comfort food.



I appreciate a good provocation, but when you try to draw equivalencies between "blackface", the use of an ethnic slur as a major American sports team's name, the terribly mediocre pop music of Katy Perry, and later, the various uses of pastiche in RPG game supplements, you've left "provocative" behind and entered the realm of "I don't really understand racism and the experience of racism". 

I'm going to try to be constructive here, but forgive me if it goes astray (I've got a mean streak, too, in addition to a love of 1980s Prince). What I took away from your essay was that it's a work of well-meaning white ally (please correct me if that's mistaken) who, intent aside, was talking _for_ minorities rather than _to_ them. I found that provocative, though probably not in the way you meant. Less a call for mutual respect and more of a search for ways of ameliorating white guilt, which came with a heaping side of speaking about the experiences of marginalized groups, rather than asking them. A lecture, not a dialog. 

Can I ask how much experience you have gaming with non-white/non-majority culture people? Do you have some practice to go along with the (post-colonial, critical race-influenced) theory? 

I'm a lifelong, non-white American gamer. I've experienced ethnic slurs directed at me (though never as part of gamer culture). I've run games for majority non-white groups, heck, half the table talk in my high-school D&D campaign was in Farsi. Your post left me feeling misrepresented, not really represented at all, when nominally it was all about respecting people like me. 

Do you have any specific questions to ask about the experiences of non-white gamers? I can try to help out, lend my one voice. I'm sure there are other folks around here who can add theirs. 

As for a specific point, I'd like to address your concept of 'agency' w/r/t 'appropriating' other cultural elements. I can tell you flat-out, no white friend has taken away my agency by playing a samurai. To suggest that's even possible is frankly, insulting. You wouldn't question my playing a faux-English knight, why do you imply I'm somehow demeaned or lessened by someone playing an Asian-inspired character? This isn't theory for me. In one of my best campaigns, a white friend played the ever-honorable 'Kenji Yamamoto' for a span of 4 years. This wasn't hate speech. It wasn't an attack on my identity -- which, of course, begs the question that the identity of all non-white Americans is based around ethnicity. It was a Tuesday night among friends (and, perhaps more importantly, equals). 

Racism is complicated, and serious, and it discussions of it are not served well by critical frameworks that draw dubiously-constructed equivalencies between things with unique & specific cultural contexts. 

Sorry, this has gone on long enough and I've barely scratched the surface. There's the more intellectualized part of this where we can debate to what extent "culture" can be owned, licensed out, and/or given "consent" to use.  This commoditization of culture practices & their treatment as some sort of IP is problematic in and of itself. Then there's the whole "media consumption as political activism" --ie, "consumerist activism" -- and questions of what benefit that actually provides to marginalized groups. Oy vey this can go on and on.

Tl; dr, you're obviously concerned about this, so please, _ask_ how cultural appropriation is experienced by gamers, if at all. You might be surprised by the diversity of opinions you get. 

And, again, if you have personal experiences as a non-white gamer, forgive my terrible assumptions about you, and share from your perspective.


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## Bagpuss (Sep 16, 2015)

Celebrim said:


> The fact that its making a contentious point that isn't part of the theme of the article is the point.  It tribal signaling.  It's not so much primarily intended to cause offense as it is to garner the sympathy of the rest of the tribe.  "I'm an atheist, so if you are an atheist, then you'll agree with the rest of what I say as well."   Plenty of tribes define themselves primarily by who they aren't or who they oppose.   That's nothing weird.




Okay but it's a bit presumptuous, and still a bad technique. I'm an atheist and I pretty much disagree with a lot of what he said. It's fine that you don't take offense, the point is, it shouldn't be there it adds nothing to the point he's trying to make. I don't see the point in preaching to the choir if that was the intent, or offending others, it alienates them and detracts from the main argument. 

Stick to the point. If he wants to make an article about atheism and how that relates to gaming go ahead, but this is meant about cultural appropriation.


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## Bagpuss (Sep 16, 2015)

Grumpy RPG Reviews said:


> That said, I try to use "being provocative" as a tool and I don't view my video podcast series as comfort food.




What sort of tool? You mean like clickbait? Because as a tool for winning people over to your point of view it is counter productive.


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## delericho (Sep 16, 2015)

Bagpuss said:


> If he wants to make an article about atheism and how that relates to gaming go ahead...




Yes, please do. I would be very interested to read that column - given the role of religion in, especially, fantasy settings, it's interesting to consider how that intersects with an increasingly-secular society.


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## Umbran (Sep 16, 2015)

Grumpy RPG Reviews said:


> That said, I try to use "being provocative" as a tool and I don't view my video podcast series as comfort food.




Being provocative is overrated.  Very overrated.  As in, it isn't actually a very good communication tool at all.  It is applicable in some very limited circumstances, but not many.

I mean, think of it this way.  Being provocative, meaning, acting in such a way as to provoke.  How is this different from, "being a troll," and why would we think would have substantially different results than trolling?  

Being provocative is good for riling people up.  If they already agree with you, you'll tend to fill them with a passion of agreement.  If they don't agree (including being neutral), you'll tend to fill them up with a passion against you and your point.  So, being provocative *is* comfort food - for those who already agree with you!  But, overall, being provocative is polarizing - it is a tool that generates conflict, rather than consensus.  What it doesn't do is make people think through their positions, or consider them critically.  It makes them passionate, an that's not a state in which they are thinking well at all.

So, basically, if you are trying to create an argument, you're going to succeed.  If you are trying to create a reasoned discussion, however, it may not be the appropriate choice.


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## Bedrockgames (Sep 16, 2015)

I don't mind people being provocative. But I have to wonder if that is even what is going on here. To me, this post reads as being pretty sincere. I believe the writer believes what he is saying (if he is invoking the idea of Hate Speech just to be provocative and doesn't actually believe Cultural Appropriation constitutes Hate Speech then I stand corrected). It isn't the provocativeness of the post that troubles me. I've read a lot of click bait articles that say something wild to provoke, then clarify their position. It is becoming a boring tactic, but I don't mind it. I am more bothered by the notion that he seems to think we are all engaged in hate crimes by enjoying pastiche settings or fantasy worlds that borrow cultural elements. Sure, maybe there are some folks out there using pastiches and other fantasy settings in that way, I don't think that is how the bulk of people who play Forgotten Realms are doing so as an act of Hate Speech or bigotry. Mostly people are just looking for cool aspects of history to bring into their game and to blend with other aspects to create something new and exciting. I make a distinction between that and say engaging in cruel and mean stereotypes or painting a culture as this awful thing.


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## Umbran (Sep 16, 2015)

Celebrim said:


> If it is intended to be offensive, sort of "Flying Spaghetti Monster" or "Darwin Fish" style, it's predicated on a false assumption of what I find offensive.




Well, he wasn't writing to *you*, Celebrim in specific, was he?  His work has an expected audience.  If he's trying to be provocative, his success should be measured not on whether he provokes *you*, but whether he provokes many, or provokes his target audience, in general.


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## Grumpy RPG Reviews (Sep 16, 2015)

I'm at the office just now, so I'll have to write more later. But for the moment let me simply say I did not write the column to piss off Celebrim.


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## Celebrim (Sep 16, 2015)

Umbran said:


> Well, he wasn't writing to *you*, Celebrim in specific, was he?  His work has an expected audience.  If he's trying to be provocative, his success should be measured not on whether he provokes *you*, but whether he provokes many, or provokes his target audience, in general.




As you say, being provocative is very overrated.  Should his success be measured on whether he provokes someone, or whether he provokes many, or rather on what he provokes them to do?

Besides which, I said offensive and not provocative.

But were it intended to be provocative to a particular 'target audience', I think it would have largely missed its mark, not only with myself, but the 'target audience'.  And were it aimed as an artless missile against a target audience, that audience containing me as a member, it would have been aimed at me.  When such missiles are launched, "To Whom they May Concern", it's still aimed at me regardless of its lack of specificity.   

But, as I said, the target of the statement was an in group and not an out group.  As such, I don't think it was intended to provoke his in group.


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## Umbran (Sep 16, 2015)

Celebrim said:


> As you say, being provocative is very overrated.  Should his success be measured on whether he provokes someone, or whether he provokes many, or rather on what he provokes them to do?




He said, "I try to use "being provocative" as a tool,"  Since he didn't state the goal of using the tool, so for now, judging success on what he provoked them to do is not in reach.



> Besides which, I said offensive and not provocative.




*He* said provocative.  I think his assertion of his intent overrides your assertion of his intent.  



> But were it intended to be provocative to a particular 'target audience', I think it would have largely missed its mark, not only with myself, but the 'target audience'.




Assuming you know what that audience is, the people he is really trying to reach, which may not be the same as the people to whom it is distributed....


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## Celebrim (Sep 16, 2015)

Umbran said:


> He said, "I try to use "being provocative" as a tool,"  Since he didn't state the goal of using the tool, so for now, judging success on what he provoked them to do is not in reach.




Certainly it is.  I can judge for myself whether he is successful according to my own standards.  I'm not obligated to use his standards.  I am interested in hearing exactly what he wants to provoke in people, and I hope it isn't something as stupid as "thought", and I'm interested in whether he feels he is successful.  But none of that prevents me from judging whether the post is a success.



> *He* said provocative.  I think his assertion of his intent overrides your assertion of his intent.




No it doesn't.  While I don't go as far as the essay does, I think there is merit in believing that a person is not always conscious of their own intent.  I'm not required to believe that other people are always rational, deliberative, and know their own mind.

But more to the point, I never have argued that his purpose was to be offensive.  The quote you've latched onto out of context was largely rhetorical in scope, in that I was saying that though I did not believe it was his intention to be offensive, if it had have been his intention he would have missed his mark.  Likewise, I went on to say that though I did not believe it was his intention to be offensive, had it in fact been his intention to be offensive or even if indeed I had been offended, I would have not regarded the speech as inappropriate.



> Assuming you know what that audience is, the people he is really trying to reach, which may not be the same as the people to whom it is distributed....




Oh for crying out loud.  Do you even know what a rhetorical is? 

When something begins with, "But were it intended to be...", it doesn't concede that it is factual.  It is a rhetorical device.  It is a statement clearly labeled as a hypothetical.  In this case I'm not conceding the claim that the aside about the non-existence of God was primarily or even at all intended to be provocative.  I am only saying that if the statement about the non-existence of God were intended to be provocative, it is pretty easy to infer which audience it would have been intended to be provocative to.  Are you actually quibbling with that point?  That question is not rhetorical.

I think it is reasonable to assume that for the entire post the intended audience is what he declared it to be explicitly: "I am writing new episodes for my video-podcast series on RPG reviews and issues".  And I think it's reasonable to assume from the content that the overall audience of the essay is, "People who play RPGs".  And in any event, it hardly matters since whom the audience of the whole essay is doesn't complicate the matter of whom the comment about the non-existence of God would be directed to if in fact it was the case that it was either intended to be provocative or give offense - which again I don't actually concede.  And my assumption that he wasn't intending the comment to be provocative or offensive is backed up with the additional evidence that the OP writes: "But for the moment let me simply say I did not write the column to piss off Celebrim."

Yay!  Agreement.


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## Umbran (Sep 16, 2015)

Celebrim said:


> Certainly it is.  I can judge for myself whether he is successful according to my own standards.




You can do that, I suppose.  But you risk the equivalent of saying, "That was the worst 100m dash I've ever seen," when the athlete was running a marathon.  



> Oh for crying out loud.  Do you even know what a rhetorical is?




Yes.  But your statement was equivalent to saying that he missed the target, no matter what the target was.  That ceases to be a rhetorical case, and is instead a rather direct statement on the practicals of his writing.


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## Grumpy RPG Reviews (Sep 17, 2015)

I have revised the column, however technical issues of my computer and with my internet connection today prevented me from posting the revision. Hopefully I can have it up tomorrow. I'm doing posting this message from my smartphone, which does not have a column on it.


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## Grumpy RPG Reviews (Sep 17, 2015)

*Cultural Appropriation in Role-Playing Games (Revised)*

(Trigger warnings for; racism, religious persecution, sexism, genocide, slavery and related issues)

Greetings from a place of unexpected discomfort or possibly just social consternation. 

This column will discuss cultural appropriation in role-playing games. 

This column will not discuss every implication of cultural appropriation, the work and legacy of Edward Said, the ability of people from different backgrounds to speak and understand one another, a thorough examination of racism, post colonial critical theory and related subjects. Those factors are worth exploring but this discussion focuses on cultural appropriation in role-playing games, not a college set of semester long classes. Nor is it intended to make anyone comfortable. 

Back to the subject at hand, to paraphrase a column on cultural appropriation by Maisha Z. Johnson  that appeared at the Everyday Feminism site; 

“A deep understanding of cultural appropriation refers to a particular power dynamic in which members of a dominant culture take elements from a culture of people who have been systematically oppressed by that dominant group.”  

Johnson also states;

“It’s also not the same as assimilation, when marginalized people adopt elements of the dominant culture in order to survive conditions that make life more of a struggle if they don’t.” 

Johnson asserts cultural appropriation trivializes violent historical oppression, allows people to demonstrate facile interest in a culture while remaining prejudiced against its actual people and spreads mass lies about the marginalized, among other problems. 

The name of the Washington Red Skins is cultural appropriation , as are college black face parties and  most of the music by Katty Perry . All are forms of entertainment, the sports team employing the pejorative name and warrior symbolism of a Native American tribe, college s acting like s and a rich white woman pop-musician assuming the musical traditions of minority groups. All without so much as a thank you. 

To digress for a moment, communication always attempts to accomplish something, be it laying out an agenda for a business, a statement of emotion, persuasion to a new philosophy, to entertain at least one person or something similar. All “dialogue” – whatever the format – is about something and dialogue is frequently home to a conflict between the participants, in terms the form of the communication, the emotions employed, who is paying attention to what and so forth. Music is designed to elicit an emotional response, business meetings pursue profit and most conversations serve at a bare minimum as an effort to glen useful information if not an effort by one person to coerce another person into doing something. There is no such thing as “just talking” because all communication is about something and much of it is a contest of wills. The phrase “just talking” is meaningless; both denying the nature and purpose of communication and serving as a moral dodge, a phrase employed by people in an effort to avoid accountability for their message and means of communication. Asserting “you’re just talking” is like saying gravity may suddenly shut off. 

The writing, art, design and composition of RPGs is usually a monologue, as it is designed to communicate something, usually someone’s idea of a good time. In its execution – when employed at a game table – it is a dialogue between the participants, the game master and the players. As all of it plays out on the internet, it is defiantly a dialogue. 

Cultural appropriation can be a kind of hate speech . Cultural appropriation can be a kind of speech against an ethnic minority group, spoken in the language of that ethnic minority. Cultural appropriation is done by gormless  people who employ phrases like “just talking” when called on their bad behavior. The fact that fans of the Seattle football team, attendees at college blackface parties and Katy Perry are not actively encouraging racial violence is essentially incidental – they wallowing in their privilege and taking something that is not theirs to take for their own amusement. 

Cultural appropriation is a problem in role-playing games and even as racism and sexism is arguably getting better, if only incrementally, cultural appropriation is not improving in any meaningful way. 

Jonathan Korman , at his Miniver Cheevy blog, wrote a column on the subject of cultural appropriation in gaming. In this column, he stated; “We need to find a way to enjoy the media we like without hurting other people and marginalised (sic) groups.” This is a sentiment with which most people can agree, hopefully. 

There two ways to go about representation, direct translation of a real people and culture and the pastiche, even if both may lead to some variant of blackface play . 

According to Mirriam-Webster Dictionary, a pastiche is something – such as a piece of writing or music – that imitates the style of someone or something else. For example, Stephen King’s short story “Jerusalem’s Lot ” is a pastiche of H.P. Lovecraft’s works, only better. Stephen Sondhheim has composed many tunes that function as pastiches of music originally composed in the 1920s and 1930s. A pastiche does not make the original a subject of ridicule, which would be a satire. 

Direct translation of a real people and culture is exactly what it sounds like – an attempt to fictionalize a real world people, their culture and frequently their religion. Examples include White Wolf’s regional source books, which provide details for places such as New York City, Hong Kong and Berlin. 

Aesthetic, according to Mirriam-Webster, is a set of principals underlying and guiding the work of a particular artist or movement and here – in terms RPGs – it refers to how cultural minorities, regions and the like might have a particular overall style quickly identified upon sight. 

For example, a character from Piazo may wield a saber and wear a particular set of robes , so the audience understands she possesses a pseudo- Arabian Nights aesthetic. This is to say, she appears Arabian… in a vaguely pop-culture manner , meaning she does not have to know the pillars of Islam . Also, while there are non-Muslim Arabic peoples – such as the Yazedi – such people so rarely appear in pop culture that the pseudo-Arab is usually also a pseudo-Muslim.

By comparison, any attempt at a direct representation of the Middle East and people of the Muslim faith should get pillars of Islam correct. Too often RPGs fail in this type of effort. Instead, they become efforts at just creating a pastiche, at just ripping off an aesthetic, while pretending to be something more for the purposes of a game. 

Both ultimately serve as examples of cultural appropriation, and while one may be worse than the other, that does not excuse the lesser. Class C Felonies might be more severe crimes than Class A Misdemeanors, but that does not excuse the misdemeanors. 

RPG examples of settings functioning as at least pastiches include;
•    Mazteca from TSR for Meso-America,
•    Al-Qadim from TSR for Persia, the Middle East and North Africa,
•    Nyambe from Atlas Games for Africa,
•    Kara-Tur from TSR for East Asia,
•    Rokugan from  Alderac Entertainment Group also for East Asia,
•    Osirion in Pathfinder and from Piazo for ancient Egypt,
•    Galt in Pathfinder and from Piazo for Revolutionary France,
•    Chelix in Pathfinder and from Piazo for Colonial or Post-Reconquista Spain,
•    Katapesh in Pathfinder and from Piazo for North Africa,
•    Qadira in Pathfinder and from Piazo for Persia,
•    Ganakagok, from an independent publisher, for Artic peoples,

Examples of real world settings and even real world peoples, employed for role-playing games include;
•    The Ravnos vampires from White Wolf Games for the Rom or Gypsies to use to more widely recognized term, though it is a pejorative,
•    The Giovanni vampires from White Wolf Games for the Italians,
•    The Followers of Set vampires from White Wolf Games for Egyptians,
•    The Assamite vampires from White Wolf Games for Muslims,
•    Masque of the Red Death from TSR and its representation of many places, including Eastern Europe,
•    White Wolf and its representations of Mexico City and Eastern Europe as home to most of the puerile evil in the universe,
•    The Dreamspeaker mages from White Wolf games for all the indigenous aboriginal magical forms ever and in their original incarnation this group formed a single cohesive and coherent tradition, 
•    The Akashic Brotherhood mages from White Wolf games for most of the Eastern Asian martials arts and philosophical traditions ever as  a single cohesive and coherent tradition, 
•    The Euthanatos mages from White Wolf as a group of mages from southern Asian who more or less worship death and frequently act as serial killers,
•    The Uktena and the Windego from White Wolf as Native America werewolves
•    Gypsies, from White Wolf, which was a book about how the Rom people possesses actual magic,
•    Going Native Warpath, from an independent publisher, which makes a mélange of most of the Native American and Pacific Islander peoples, 
•    Far West, also from an independent publisher, for most of the Chinese people and cultures while erasing Native Americans,

There are more than those listed here but this column is not just a list of these things and so we shall move on. 

Taylor Swift referred to twirking – a form of dance generally exclusive to African American cultures – in her video “Shake it Off.” Swift herself did not engage in twirking, but appeared to consider it as something inaccessible to her, something witnessed and considered but not something in which she might participate.

However, even so the inclusion of twirking in the video offended people. 

Amy Zimmerman , in a column for the Daily Beast, writes “While Swift’s interpretation of black culture was doubtlessly meant as a celebratory homage, it comes off as lazy and reductive at best, and racist at worst.”

Morally and ethically, intent counts for less than we might wish. Only God knows someone’s actual intent and he does not exist – the rest of us have to cope with the person’s excuses and mealy-mouthed assertions about the best of intentions. 

We deal with a contemporary world out of our control produced by ante-contemporary people  whose actions if performed today would be considered morally insane and functional adults never get to pretend we do not live day-to-day eye-ball deep in this legacy. This legacy includes express slavery, genocide and cultural genocide and a grab bag of lesser horrors. 

This will never go away any more than gravity  will go away. 

When called upon to justify racism and slavery, at various times people asserted that Africans were undeveloped and unprepared for civilization and required slavery to domesticate them properly.  Likewise, people with the power stripped Native Americans of their heritage, culture and language in an attempt to “civilize”  them. While the appearance of minorities in RPG does not approach anything like the level of horrors of genocide, slavery and cultural annihilation, minority people understandably may view any bit of RPG material through a historical lens that includes of horrors of genocide, slavery and cultural annihilation… and entitled whites mealy mouthing stuff about the best of intentions. 

This is exacerbated by decades – at least – of media representation of minorities, their cultures and religions that provide grossly distorted depictions of everything “other” as a kind of proverbial comfort food for privileged white people.   

Randa Jarrar  in a column written in 2014 for Salon asserts that when western women, white women, engage in belly dancing they are engaging in cultural appropriation. They don costumes and employing something from outside their culture – belly dancing, or Raqs Sharqi – for their own amusement. In this, they strip the dance of its original intent and make a self-satisfied game of pretending to be something they are not. 

“Many white women who presently practice belly dance are continuing this century-old tradition of appropriation, whether they are willing to view their practice this way or not.”

This has been going on for a century or more, however, that long history does not make it morally acceptable for bored white women to wear the trappings of a minority, particularly when they can walk away at anytime while actual women in the Arab world cannot walk away from how society views them, their society and their religion. 

Time does not make such practices acceptable. 

According to Nayyirah Waheed , in his essay “Cultural Consent is Not a Strange Concept,” modern Western society and its history over the last few centuries “has convinced us that no peoples have agency over their individual expressions of life. That this is a free market, that peoples’ cultures are created for sale, and everyone is free to take what they want, when, how, with no thought to the violence this causes.”

Waheed is correct. At the same time a business in the Western world makes a buck off sexy version of the hib-jab for Halloween, exhibiting abiding disrespect for the faith of Islam, it also makes sexy versions of nun’s habits for Halloween, exhibiting the same contempt for Catholicism as it does for Islam and Native Americans for the matter, all for the same juvenile sexual reasons. The point being, in modern Western Civilization, no one is special, no wounds are worth consideration and everyone and everything exists to be exploited and discarded. 

Waheed also asserts that “no,” or refusal is not limited to an individual, but “…peoples also have a right to say no. …we have to check our privilege.”

Waheed – and RPG blogger Christopher Chinn, aka Bankeui – also discuss cultural consent, or that members of one cultural should be consulted by members of another culture, that they should gain permission for the use of some aspects of their culture in a certain context. This is not a bad idea, but it falls apart – at least somewhat – in application. 

Who do we seek permission from when and how we may use something from another culture? How many members of that culture are required to grant permission? What ratio of consenting voices, as compared to objecting voices, is required to proceed on such an effort?

This might seem like snide quibbling, but it is not and this is going somewhere.

In 2014 Monte Cook Games released a product, intended to be a romp, titled “the Strange.” The Strange of the title referred to the phenomena of a series of small, alternate Earths or dimensions – each with a particular theme, such as Roman World, Science Fiction World and so on. One such world, the Thunder Plains, in a section composed by Bruce Cordell, focused on the upper mid-west plains the Native Americans there prior to colonial contact. 

Cordell asserts he possessed the best of intentions, is related to Native Americans and that he consulted with Native Americans he knew about the product, that he researched the real background before composing the Thunder Plains. 

However, there was sufficient backlash from Native Americans, who blogged about their issues with the product and how it represented them.  Some Native Americans created a petition against the product and at first Monte Cook Games attempted to avoid the issue, though eventually they would reach out and make a compromise to work with Native Americans on the issue. The columns by Morning Star Angeline and others are the Tumblr blog the Last Real Indians should be read before employing the Strange setting. 

Angeline  asserts that it is lazy and offensive to steal from a race’s actual culture only to “redefine” the words used to suite your agenda and that Monte Cook Games cannot claim to have created a fantasy when they included so many aspects of a culture that actually exist and actually have meaning. She also states that employing inaccurate use of Native American imagery, regardless of intent, does not honor the Native American peoples but elicits negative thoughts and feelings about them. 

Cordell is likely quite sincere in his statements that he meant well, that he attempted to research the subject matter and consulted with Native Americans… and this proved to be insufficient for a number of reasons. 

While Cordell and everyone else at Monte Cook Games is making a sincere effort to correct the errors and do a good job now, it would have been better for all parties if they had made such an effort in the first place. The fact they thought and probably still think that they had all along amounts to little. 

To refer again to Korman’s column on the issue; “Sometimes awareness of the problems with things we enjoy does not constitute a strong enough response. Sometimes we have not just ‘problematic’ culture but minstrelsy, in which a people and a culture become twisted into cartoon parodies of themselves, and I think we have to reject that completely.”  

A term employed in feminist and minority critiques of all kinds of media is agency. According to the Mirriam-Webster Dictionary, agency is the capacity, condition or state of exerting power. It is about the capacity of a character, or characters, to make decisions and pursue those decisions. Stories where a white dude becomes a part of some “minority” group is not about the agency of those people. The Last Samurai is not about the agency of the traditional Japanese samurai – it is about the agency of Cruise’s character fulfilling some Japanophile power fantasy. The same is true of Dances with Wolves and Kevin Coster. 

So, to head off potential excuse making in advance…. players and game masters running games set in a minority culture, be it a pastiche or a direct translation, are neither granting that culture or its people agency or paying respect to those people – no more than fans of the Washington D.C. football team are respecting Native Americans or granting them agency. They are only fulfilling a power fantasy, complete with otherising, pursuing the appeal of the exotic and quite probably brown-face or a variant of brown face play. That such play does not strip minorities of agency is incidental. 

Representation does in fact matter but white people have historically failed to represent anyone but white people. Why should white people be granted an infinite series of mulligan’s for screw-ups allowing them to try again? Why should the minorities accept this as a non-negotiable fact, like gravity? 

Sometimes it can feel like we are morally and ethically standing on a sandy beach and the waves are eroding the foundation out from under us, meaning we move or fall. The technical term for this is life and your choices are only noteworthy if you get them wrong and fall down. 

In many ways, this is a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation. None of the options available are good, some are simply worse than others. Sometimes things do not really get better and pursuing your appetites hurts people. 

In conclusion, here are several points;

First, this is not to encourage or condone erasure – the disappearance of minorities from gaming, either as players or as characters. However, perhaps such work is best in the hands of people from the cultures represented. For example, the game Ehdrigor draws heavily from Native American cultures, its themes and motifs. It is also written and composed by Allan Turner, a Black Indian and the setting is probably not something a non-Indian could have composed. 

Second, if someone is pursuing writing about real world minority cultures – as direct translation or even as pastiche – then there are bare minimum factors of which they need to be aware and which they should pursue. The intentions of the writers, artists and other creators involved are at best invisible and at worst irrelevant. Seek out as many people from the culture you are attempting to represent and get their permission for the endeavor, be patient, be willing to walk away from the project if it is not working out – the minorities owe the majority nothing, except obeying the letter of the law. Also, as you did in when working math in school, show your work. Set aside space in the publication to discuss the goals and process of the publication. This is something Derrick Clifton  asserts in his column of cultural appropriation in a column for the Daily Dot. 

Third, if you are uncomfortable with the idea, then do not go there, do not do the deed – write the game or play the character – in the first place. Walking away from something that makes you uncomfortable is your right. Even if you do choose to avoid games guilty of cultural appropriation, this does not limit anyone to gaming in pseudo-western Europe. For example, Numenera – by Monte Cook Games as it happens – and Vornheim by Zak Sabbath are deep and interesting settings worth exploring which do not rip anyone off or exploit any cultures.

This all said, it also comes down to a matter of etiquette, or manners. Cultural appropriation will never be a matter of law and there is no gaming Gestapo to enforce any style of play. It is purely a matter of personal choice.

Consider Wil Wheaton’s Law; Don’t be a dick. You are not the only person who gets to determine if you are being a dick and your supposed intent counts for little. The people you are speaking to, for and about have more of the final word about you being a dick than you do. 

Sometimes good fences make for good neighbors not so much because it keeps them out of your yard but because it keeps you out of theirs.


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## Bedrockgames (Sep 17, 2015)

Grumpy RPG Reviews said:


> Sometimes good fences make for good neighbors not so much because it keeps them out of your yard but because it keeps you out of theirs.




This is why I think focus on cultural appropriation is such an issue. I think building fences and treating culture as IP, just seems like highly misguided notions to me. Things that would divide people more than anything else. Like I said before, being respectful of other cultures, not engaging in cruel stereotypes, is something I think we ought to strive for. I work toward this all the time in the stuff I design (and like to think I've been improving more as time goes by). But cultural appropriation concerns seem more about creating barriers between cultures, resulting in a chilling lack of mixture or interaction. I think this approach would ultimately result in a world where the blues never became rock N roll and where Umbran never gets to take a Bento box to work. I also think that the first step toward understanding another culture frequently begins with clumsy and inaccurate handling of cultural features. I know a lot of my initial interest in the middle east was inspired at first by early encounters with things like Al Qadim. Later, I ended up studying Arabic and middle east history in college. Still no expert but my understanding now is far greater than what it was when I was running Al Qadim. 

Also I think we have to be careful about cultural accuracy because it has a weird effect of objectifying the culture itself. I am working on a wuxia game and one of the things you see when you watch movies from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and elsewhere is that these are living genres, that they often borrow as much from our culture as we borrow from theirs. They also borrow from surrounding cultures. So if you make a game set in ancient China and limit it to a "purely Chinese" culture from that time that is historically accurate, you end up leaving out a lot of the innovations that have come to it by way of directors like Tsui Hark and King Hu. Sometimes they also develop their own inaccurate shorthand for the past in films. Accuracy just doesn't seem a good measure of harm or lack of harm. I think we are much better off thinking in terms of whether something cruelly stereotypes or is clearly insensitive, than in terms of appropriation.


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## Mallus (Sep 17, 2015)

Grumpy RPG Reviews said:


> Angeline  asserts that it is lazy and offensive to steal from a race’s actual culture only to “redefine” the words used to suite your agenda and that Monte Cook Games cannot claim to have created a fantasy when they included so many aspects of a culture that actually exist and actually have meaning. She also states that employing inaccurate use of Native American imagery, regardless of intent, does not honor the Native American peoples but elicits negative thoughts and feelings about them.



Do you think Hideako Anno's _Neon Genesis Evangelion_ elicits negative thoughts and feelings about Christians and Jews? Why or why not?


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## Bawylie (Sep 17, 2015)

Why no trigger warning for attacks on peoples' faiths? Are faiths not part of culture? Is denial of someone's culture hate speech? Is that better or worse than appropriation? 

Wheaton's Law is misattributed, I think. Proper credit to Jesus, at least. Ghandi. MLKjr.


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## Grumpy RPG Reviews (Sep 17, 2015)

Mallus said:


> Do you think Hideako Anno's _Neon Genesis Evangelion_ elicits negative thoughts and feelings about Christians and Jews? Why or why not?




I've not seen Neon Genesis Evangelion, I no longer consider myself a Christian and I cannot speak for the Jews. So... I don't know.


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## Grumpy RPG Reviews (Sep 17, 2015)

Bedrockgames said:


> ...if he is invoking the idea of Hate Speech just to be provocative and doesn't actually believe Cultural Appropriation constitutes Hate Speech then I stand corrected...




I am not certain how else to refer to actions such as college black face parties and the antics of the Red Skin fans.


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## Mistwell (Sep 18, 2015)

I see you left in, "Only God knows someone’s actual intent and he does not exist – the rest of us have to cope with the person’s excuses and mealy-mouthed assertions about the best of intentions. " Though it remains entirely unhelpful to demonstrate your point and alienates part of your potential audience for zero benefit.


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## Celebrim (Sep 18, 2015)

Is that the revised version?

Because I'm having a hard time noticing significant differences in wording or tone.


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## Bedrockgames (Sep 18, 2015)

Grumpy RPG Reviews said:


> I am not certain how else to refer to actions such as college black face parties and the antics of the Red Skin fans.




Even if that is the case, Cultural Appropriation is a much broader term than just those kinds of things though. You are using it in your own essay to lump in all manner of cultural borrowing, not just things like black face and using racial slurs for team names. This is why I am making a distinction between invoking racially insensitive stereotypes and being racially/culturally insensitive versus cultural appropriation. The latter is this vague and highly academic thing that folds so much into itself (everything from borrowing musical styles to clothing, to borrowing culture with the aim of ridiculing the source) that I think it is confusing and just chills attempts to have genuine exchange. Whereas the former focuses on all the bad things that can arrive from appropriation without throwing out the baby with the bath water. I want to live in a world where people can borrow music, clothing styles, functional technology and other things from one another. It would be great if that were done in a sensitive fashion.


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## Grumpy RPG Reviews (Sep 18, 2015)

Mistwell said:


> I see you left in, "Only God knows someone’s actual intent and he does not exist – the rest of us have to cope with the person’s excuses and mealy-mouthed assertions about the best of intentions. "




Yes, yes I did.



Celebrim said:


> Is that the revised version?.




Yes, yes it is.


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## Kichwas (Sep 18, 2015)

Going to quote some things out of order here...


Grumpy RPG Reviews said:


> A term employed in feminist and minority critiques of all kinds of media is agency. According to Mirriam-Webster Dictionary, agency is the capacity, condition or state of exerting power. It is about the capacity of a character, or characters, to make decisions and pursue those decisions.
> 
> Players and game masters running games set in a minority culture, be it a pastiche or a direct translation, are not actually granting that culture or its people agency. They are fulfilling a power fantasy, complete with otherising, the appeal of the exotic and quite probably brown-face or a variant of brown face play.
> 
> ...




I'm one of those minority gamers who is more or less now an ex-gamer. I left this hobby roughly 10 years ago after some incidents with a couple of gaming groups and some rather rough conversations in a number of online forums all convinced me that the place was just too unfriendly to minorities. I keep popping back in from time to time to see if anything has changed because, like a lot of you - as a child of the 70s RPGs were the spark that lit the fire in my mind and got me active on so many things... And for a few years they were also the only space where I was around white people and not scared of them or feeling I had to talk in code...

While I see some hopeful signs, reading some current topics I also see the same kind of backlash I was reading a year ago in regards to women. The angry gamer ranting at the world being multicultural, it seems, is still out there. But I'm hoping its not as prevalent and some internet blogs can imply.


Quoting out of order:


Grumpy RPG Reviews said:


> Randa Jarrar in a column written in 2014 for Salon asserts
> ...
> “Many white women who presently practice belly dance are continuing this century-old tradition of appropriation, whether they are willing to view their practice this way or not.”
> 
> This has been going on for a century or more, however, that long history does not make it morally acceptable for bored white women to wear the trappings of a minority



and:


Grumpy RPG Reviews said:


> After time away I am writing new episodes for my video-podcast series on RPG reviews and issues. Here is a draft of the script for the next episode, which will probably be somewhat controversial.
> 
> 
> The name of the Washington Red Skins is cultural appropriation, as are college black face parties and most of the music by Katty Perry. They are a sports team employing the pejorative name and warrior symbolism of a Native American tribe, college s acting like s and a rich white woman pop-musician assuming the musical traditions of minority groups. All without so much as a thank you.




I'm a little uncomfortable with what seems to be the idea that anyone "not of the right race / background" who moves into a space is appropriating. That is NOT always the case. It is not so "black and white" as that. And it is even possible to "appropriate" from one's own race... Let me give examples from the 'scene' I now inhabit.

It is not always appropriation when one "crossed the culture and racial lines". And sometimes it IS appropriation when one acts within what the outside sees as their own race.

Three musicians of recent times come to mind here. I'm guessing many here won't know them by name, so I'll explain them. They just happen to be three I've been pondering recently, and some of them come from the Rastafari world that I've landed in in the decade since I left RPG gaming.

Eminim, Jah Sun, and Snoop Dog.
Only one of those who is regularly accused of appropriation is Snoop, in his facade as Snoop Lion. Eminim not only raps, he exists in the "ghetto persona" the "white world" (for lack of a better term) thinks of as rap (as opposed to Artists like KRS-One, Arrested Development, and Mystic - demonstrating that rap/hip-hop is not a "ghetto thing"). But its real for him - he is speaking to his culture and his existence - at least as it was before he made it big. And everyone can see it.

Now I'm guessing almost none of you have ever heard of Jah Sun. He's a Northern California white dude who basically has the "ethnic features of an RPG-Gamer stereotype - a bearded pale white guy with a little too much belly on him". And you will find him all over Rastafarian Reggae music these days because he's a genuine convert to the faith and is regularly featured alongside radically religious Rastas.

So then we get to Snoop Dog/Lion - who if one judges by appearances seems the "legit article", but before he even made it off the island Rastas were calling him out as a fake... Accusing a black man, of appropriating black culture, from the very groups that created the very music culture that is his real culture (Hip Hop / Rap was heavily influenced in its birth by Jamaican ex-pats. I forget the guy's name, but one of the first major behind-the-scenes figures was a former Reggae DJ who'd moved to the US) (This is very different from another African American who is seen as the real deal in Rasta circles: Tarrus Riley).

Oh and there's salvation for Katty Perry, should she choose it. Its called Alborosie... An Italian reggae-boy-band singer who vanished at the end of his teens and turned up some years laters working in the studios in Jamaica, with a LOT more hair, and a whole lot of religion. Katty Perry could take the life-steps to become the genuine article of the genre she sings from.

- Crossing over isn't appropriation if you are genuine and manage to convince your adopted group. It worked for the Biblical Paul. 
But people can smell an imposter, just ask Bunny Wailer about Snoop...
- I also hate calling this Crossing Over because Eminim didn't cross, he was born into that world, but just not the color 'the outside world' presumes is that world... But I don't know the "proper word" for what I'm trying to convey...

******
TLR version: Appropriation is when you take something for your own benefit without truly engaging it. Crossing-Over, which I lack a better word for (anyone got one?), is when you truly enlighten yourself on something, embrace it, and represent it so well those you got it from recognize you as brethren. Only the "smell test" of human intuition can really tell them apart if the appropriator is trying to hide it.
******




Grumpy RPG Reviews said:


> Morally and ethically, intent counts for less than we might wish. Only God knows someone’s actual intent and he does not exist – the rest of us have to cope with the person’s excuses and mealy-mouthed assertions about the best of intentions.




Actually I think the conveyance of intent is nearly everything. This is pretty much exactly why Snoop Dog was accused of appropriating, and Jah Sun has been accepted.

In the modern world there is a term, the 'nopology' - and this is exactly why Monte Cook Game's response to their fiasco in 2014 fell on deaf ears with those protesting it. The 'nopology' comes across to those it is sent to as "we are sorry you have issues"... or "I'm so sorry you're too stupid to be treated with respect." And this is all about "Conveyance of Intent" - not exactly just intent, but your ability to communicate that intent.
Monte Cook's 2014 response just had so many caveats mentioned in it, that it read like a nopology.

This is why we get told as children to just say you're sorry when you got punished for something... and it often gets followed up with "don't make excuses or talk back"... explaining your apology usually just digs a ditch under your feet...




Grumpy RPG Reviews said:


> If someone is pursuing writing about real world minority cultures, then there are bare minimum factors of which they need to be aware and which they should pursue. First, the intentions of the writers, artists and other creators involved are at best invisible and at worst irrelevant. Seek out as many people from the culture you are attempting to represent and get their permission for the endeavor, be patient, be willing to walk away from the project if it is not working out – the minorities owe the majority nothing, except at best obeying the letter of the law.




Research and gaining true insight yes. Hiring the "token brown staffer" so you can check the box on the form, no. If you are going to engage with a community, be very careful not to let your own voice talk over them.

It is really not as hard as it might first seem to 'cross that line' and 'get it' with multiculturalism. I live in the Bay Area, and I see people who are capable of handling and representing diversity all the time, themselves from all kinds of backgrounds. Sometimes the internet baffles me and I have to remind myself that around the world - most people are not yet living in a 'globalized' community.


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## Bagpuss (Sep 18, 2015)

Grumpy RPG Reviews said:


> I am not certain how else to refer to actions such as college black face parties and the antics of the Red Skin fans.




Okay but can you give an example of where cultural misappropriation has been used clearly as hate speech in any RPG?

And how does "black face" fall into cultural appropriation? People of colour don't black up as part of their culture, "black face" is just straight up racism.


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## delericho (Sep 18, 2015)

Bawylie said:


> Wheaton's Law is misattributed, I think. Proper credit to Jesus, at least. Ghandi. MLKjr.




I don't know about the other two, but I'm _reasonably_ sure Jesus didn't say "don't be a dick". Or, at least, his biographers didn't think it worth recording if he did.


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## Bagpuss (Sep 18, 2015)

Grumpy RPG Reviews said:


> “A deep understanding of cultural appropriation refers to a particular power dynamic in which members of a dominant culture take elements from a culture of people who have been systematically oppressed by that dominant group.”




This I don't agree with, it's like how feminist have tried to redefine racism and sexism, so it only works one way.

Racism, sexism and cultural appropriation are wrong no matter which direction it occurs in.

That being said, I think you have to be careful about calling it hate speech, as what you want to call appropriation might just as well be just part of cultural exchange, or just an interest in another culture.


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## Bagpuss (Sep 18, 2015)

Celebrim said:


> Is that the revised version?
> 
> Because I'm having a hard time noticing significant differences in wording or tone.




Yeah I copied both versions into word and ran the compare feature on it to spot the differences. Some are minor edits, some tone down the language a little (like "Cultural approriation is hate speech" becomes "can be a kind of"), one seems to change the meaning of the paragraph all together and doesn't make sense to me.

"Direct translation of a real people and culture is exactly what it sounds like – an attempt to fictionalize a real world people, their culture and frequently their religion. Examples include White Wolf’s [-]books that asserted the Rom people possessed actual magical powers and that Mexico City and Transylvania were home to most of the puerile evil in the world – which has an interesting subtext about the people living in Transylvania and Mexico City.[/-]*regional source books, which provide details for places such as New York City, Hong Kong and Chicago*."

*Bold *is added. Seems to completely change the meaning of the paragraph. Removing sorucebooks that probably are worth considering as cultural appropriation and replacing them with New York City and Chicago, which most people would think are about the dominant culture, but also Hong Kong? Not sure what that sentence is trying to say now.

Stuff about Taylor Swift has been added, and to be honest, I don't know why we are getting so many examples of other media in what is a topic meant to be about RPGs.


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## Bagpuss (Sep 18, 2015)

Grumpy RPG Reviews said:


> They are only fulfilling a power fantasy, complete with otherising, pursuing the appeal of the exotic and quite probably brown-face or a variant of brown face play.




I'm curious do you have a problem with gender-swapping in roleplaying? IE: Man plays a woman, or woman plays a man?

I mean half the fun of roleplaying is to play a character different from yourself, so why not an Japanese samurai or African-American woman?


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## Shasarak (Sep 18, 2015)

Celebrim said:


> For my whole childhood I was raised with the cultural heritage of a Scot.  I thought, childishly, that to some extent things about Scots were things about me, and conversely I was in some way entitled to being called Scottish by right of my birth.  I had a proud Scot heritage, from the Wallaces, Burns, and Reynolds in my ancestry.  Problem is, it was all based on a lie.  When my family traced back its ancestry, it turned out that we were descend from two brothers who immigrated to the United States back in the 18th century.  The brothers knew that in 18th century America, Irish people would have more limited opportunities that more privileged races like English and Scots, so they decided that they could pass themselves off as Scots.  The told everyone that they were Scots, and were accepted into high social circles where they married well and were successful businessmen.  They told their own wives they were Scots and not filthy Irishmen.  They definitely told their wives parents.  They told their children they were Scots.  And they told their children, and they told their children.  Their ancestors were still telling this to people to avoid anti-Irish discrimination in the mid-20th century, long after anyone remembered that it was a lie.  In fact, I'm positive that some of my ancestors probably would have never agreed to marry a filthy Irishman.  Irony, huh?
> 
> So what am I, a Scot or an Irish?  Does the question or its answer even have meaning?  Is either in this context even really 'a thing'?  And regardless of the ancestry, would my inheritance of the heritage give anyone else a veto power over being inspired by the culture, art, and history of either nation?   And what about growing up in Jamaica?  Does speaking Petwa, and eating patties, box drink, and spice buns for lunch make me Jamaican enough to appropriate the stories of my childhood without asking permission?




Well the good news is that a lot of Irish came from Scotland, so you still have a chance!


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## Celebrim (Sep 18, 2015)

Shasarak said:


> Well the good news is that a lot of Irish came from Scotland, so you still have a chance!




A chance at what?

It doesn't actually matter whether my 12th removed ancestor came from Scotland or not.  I no longer care, and it never mattered really anyway.  

I've never been there, and I've never actually met my 12th removed ancestor.  My actual heritage is my own life not some myth about my blood, and to the extent that I've inherited the heritage of my progenitors, it's only goes about two generations back and those persons themselves came from families where most everyone had been here at least 100 years.  Culture isn't inherited in your genetic code.  My actual ethnic identity doesn't depend on the ethnic identity of other people and my race is entirely a construct other people impose on me.  Even if my 12th removed ancestor was a Scot or the King of Scotland, the idea that this made me a Scot would still be a fantasy on my part or at best a shared fantasy other people bought into.  Indeed, I do really have Wallace and Burns ancestors with deep Scottish roots on maternal lines, but so what?  My actual real ethnic identity is American and distinctively so.  I celebrate Thanksgiving in November, and Independence day on the 4th of July.   My racial identity is meaningless, so I might as well say American as well, because it is not like German-French-Scot-Irish-Choctaw-Heinz 57 is a meaningful ethnic identity.   To the extent that I have any other ethnic identity, far and away the strongest isn't the Scotland I've never visited, but the Jamaica I actually lived in.

For my children, this notion of ethnic identity is even more meaningless, because my wife ancestors are Dutch-Swiss-English-Scots, so that makes my kids German-French-Scot-Irish-Choctaw-Dutch-Swiss-English and various other bits and pieces.  They aren't meaningfully anything but American, speaking none of the above languages and celebrating none of the traditions of any of those places, nations, or ethnic groups.  

My kids got this weird multicultural lesson they had to do explaining about how their heritage and they had to list the foreign country it came from.  They were baffled how to answer.  So I made up some crap for them.  I had them list France, which is true, because some of my ancestors were French Huguenots.  Then I had them list Mardi Gras as the French tradition we celebrate, which is also true.  

But if you've got a bit of history, you'll quickly see the contradiction.  It's all true, but it simplifies the story to the point of a deception.  Mardi Gras is a Catholic Holiday, and my Huguenot ancestors weren't Catholic (nor am I).  The truth is we don't celebrate King Cake because of our French heritage.  My grandmother is in fact Louisiana Cajun.  I did in fact grow up with Gumbo and Jambalaya that would shame any restaurant in the French Quarter.  But she's not French Cajun - she Scot Cajun from Scottish Louisiana immigrants (there are also Italian and German Cajuns).  Some of her siblings married French Cajun, but that just means I've got cousins named things like Gasteaux Amos, not that I am French Cajun if you mean in some fashion that my blood is flying a French flag of some sort.  That Cajun culture is not in fact French, or at least not European French, but distinctively creole and Anglo-French.  It is in other words an American culture, and no less American than say New England culture.

I told them that they ought to write American, but they'd probably get a poor grade if they did since it specifically demanded a foreign country.

And what's even more to the point, is that Grandma, being Methodist, didn't celebrate Mardi Gras either.  We don't celebrate Mardi Gras because our ancestors did.  So far as I can tell, ours is the first generation to do so.  We celebrate Mardi Gras because I got my degree from LSU.  It's got zero to do with me being 'French'.  I culturally appropriated King Cakes because I lived in Baton Rouge.  Laissez les bons temps rouler.  That's more cultural appropriation - English metaphor directly translated into French. 

But who has the authority to guard the culture and say I have stolen it because I'm not authentic enough?


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## Umbran (Sep 18, 2015)

Bagpuss said:


> Stuff about Taylor Swift has been added, and to be honest, I don't know why we are getting so many examples of other media in what is a topic meant to be about RPGs.




I think it is for the sake of analogy.


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## Grumpy RPG Reviews (Sep 18, 2015)

Bagpuss said:


> I'm curious do you have a problem with gender-swapping in roleplaying? IE: Man plays a woman, or woman plays a man?




I am uncomfortable when adolescent males play women, because they usually play them as crazy sluts. The running gag about this kind of thing in the _Gamers II_ is not far off the mark.


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## Grumpy RPG Reviews (Sep 18, 2015)

Umbran said:


> I think it is for the sake of analogy.




Yes, yes it is, because gaming is usually only discussed by gamers and gaming issues are only ever analysed or examined by gamers. Namely, there is a paucity of commentary or critical examination of the issues outside our circles. So, because there are few direct discussion of the issue I can site, I make relevant analogies when and where I can, to whit; Swift's mild use of twerking (in the video) was problematic and objectionable. By comparison, when and where do gamers and game creators do something they think is mild and acceptable, only to be very wrong?


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## Grumpy RPG Reviews (Sep 18, 2015)

Kichwas said:


> Research and gaining true insight yes. Hiring the "token brown staffer" so you can check the box on the form, no. If you are going to engage with a community, be very careful not to let your own voice talk over them.




I was suggesting the "token brown staffer" actually be the one to write or compose the material on a minority population, be it a direct translation or a pastiche. And then only for their own minority population, not for another minority population.


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## Bawylie (Sep 18, 2015)

delericho said:


> I don't know about the other two, but I'm _reasonably_ sure Jesus didn't say "don't be a dick". Or, at least, his biographers didn't think it worth recording if he did.




Oh, sure he did. "Love your neighbor as you love yourself," and plenty of parables and examples. He may not have outright said "Guys, look, that's dickish, and you really ought not," but his whole oeuvre was surely in the "Love one another as I have loved you" category. A step UP from "DBaD" if anything.


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## Grumpy RPG Reviews (Sep 18, 2015)

Bagpuss said:


> *Bold *is added. Seems to completely change the meaning of the paragraph. Removing sorucebooks that probably are worth considering as cultural appropriation and replacing them with New York City and Chicago, which most people would think are about the dominant culture, but also Hong Kong? Not sure what that sentence is trying to say now.




I was repeating myself too much in terms of comments on the Gypsies book, and I've modified it more replacing Chicago with Berlin, since the old Berlin book was such a hot mess.


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## delericho (Sep 18, 2015)

Bawylie said:


> Oh, sure he did. "Love your neighbor as you love yourself," and plenty of parables and examples. He may not have outright said "Guys, look, that's dickish, and you really ought not," but his whole oeuvre was surely in the "Love one another as I have loved you" category. A step UP from "DBaD" if anything.




It's only "Wheaton's Law" because he phrased it in that one usefully-quotable form. Other people saying much the same thing but in different words don't count.


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## Bawylie (Sep 18, 2015)

delericho said:


> It's only "Wheaton's Law" because he phrased it in that one usefully-quotable form. Other people saying much the same thing but in different words don't count.




I'd stack bible quotes against Wheaton quotes for usefully-quotable material anyday. Other people saying much the same words absolutely count. Particularly MLKjr, Ghandi, et al.


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## Shasarak (Sep 18, 2015)

Celebrim said:


> A chance at what?
> 
> It doesn't actually matter whether my 12th removed ancestor came from Scotland or not.  I no longer care, and it never mattered really anyway.




It is just that if he came from the Ulster region of Ireland (for example) then his family may very well have come the long way from Scotland to the USA via Ireland.  =;o)


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## Dire Bare (Sep 19, 2015)

Grumpy RPG Reviews said:


> I am uncomfortable when adolescent males play women, because they usually play them as crazy sluts. The running gag about this kind of thing in the _Gamers II_ is not far off the mark.




I teach middle school. There's a lot of things young adolescent males do that make me cringe, on a daily basis. Some of them learn and get better!

Males "appropriating" the female experience by playing characters of the opposite gender isn't the problem. It's young, inexperienced kids doing it poorly that is the problem. And that certainly points to some issues of sexism that hide inside our American culture to be sure. 

American culture has made some serious progress over the decades away from racism, sexism, and other ills, although of course we still have a long way to go. But "cultural appropriation", at least how the term is being used nowadays, isn't one of those remaining problems. It's a misused term and misunderstood phenomenon that seems to be the Left's version of "political correctness" on the Right. I usually roll my eyes when I hear either term, because more often than not the user doesn't know what the hell they are talking about.

Ah, Umbran, Celebim, you guys are so much better at this than I am. I find the OP highly off-base, but I'm finding the resulting conversation from you two very interesting and enlightening. So, ah, thanks Grumpy!


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## 1of3 (Sep 19, 2015)

I just read the discussion and it was very insightful. 

I think [MENTION=177]Umbran[/MENTION] is quite safe with his bento box. The problem with the term "culture" is that it has two seperate meanings. On the one hand is culture, that is the activities, practices and symbols a group usually engages in. Then there also those practices that are "holy" for the group. That usually includes religious elements, but also art and symbols that are not usually considered religion. If there is a Ministry for Culture, they will usually look after those things.

If you are using parts of small-c culture, you are usually save. And while bento boxes might be typical Japanese, they are probobably not thought of as Japanese Culture. You might even get away with using some parts of special Culture not your own. Outsiders employing special Culture can seem outrageous to group, if the ones employing those Cultural symbols are considered hostile and dangerous by the group.

There are even examples for hostile takeovers of enemies' symbols. Roman generals would pray to the gods of a besieged city to move to an even nicer temple in Rome. And Americans were known to eat Freedom Fries.

Of course, the line between small-c culture and special Culture is not clear cut, and things can move from side of the spectrum to the other.


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## Kichwas (Sep 19, 2015)

Bagpuss said:


> This I don't agree with, it's like how feminist have tried to redefine racism and sexism, so it only works one way.
> 
> Racism, sexism and cultural appropriation are wrong no matter which direction it occurs in.
> 
> That being said, I think you have to be careful about calling it hate speech, as what you want to call appropriation might just as well be just part of cultural exchange, or just an interest in another culture.




Power dynamics / agency. Let us imagine for a second that I hated whites and sat in my room ranting and raving about it all day long. Let us even imagine I did it on a street corner. And lets then imagine I went out and attacked someone(s).

Now... as a minority with little power in the system, in the institutions that shape the USA, no matter which of those three actions I did my impact would be small.

Now imagine I am the very legal and social system we exist in - not an individual, either Chicano/Mulatto as I am, or Caucasian - but the system and social norms. If as the system I disfavor a given race, they will end up in prisons more, or have less access to jobs and education. Their neighborhoods might even be cut off from transportation infrastructure and the ability to obtain such fundamentals as food... (look at "Urban Renewal" and how it was used to move black landowners into projects in the 50s, and place freeways through cities cutting off white and black neighborhoods with entrance ramps often only on the white side - drive through Oakland California and you can directly see this). Suddenly the impact of the rules and norms I have set down is massive. Institutional Bias is real and can have a lasting impact for many generations beyond the era in which it is 'technically in place'. Urban Renewal happened in the 1950s, and it still destroys the lives of black youths today in the 2010s without a single racist person who enacted it having to still even be on the planet. And that's just scratching the surface of Institutional bias. Look at any land deed in Northern California, and you will often find a section that says it is illegal to sell the land to Chinese (and other Asians). Even though many Asian Americans are financially well off today, and these sections of deeds have been declared unlawful since the 1960s by the Supreme Court... the impact of how they forced the creation of ethnically segregated neighborhoods is still felt.


Individual bias versus institutional bias. Anyone can be individually biased and it is bad no matter who.

But only the system can be institutionally biased - and that system is fundamentally structured to favor 'Wealthy, Caucasian, Males, Protestant, Anglo-Saxon' - in that order (50 years ago you could have flipped Caucasian and Anglo in priority - there was a time when being Irish, Italian or Jewish for example, was a very rough experience in the USA - Jewish Caucasians still get bias, and Caucasians of the Arab ethnicity are still given a raw deal). If you happen to have all five in that set, everything is set up in your favor. If you have some of them, you have privileges of varying degrees - and other people cannot do anything to equalize a situation where this comes into play.




Grumpy RPG Reviews said:


> I was suggesting the "token brown staffer" actually be the one to write or compose the material on a minority population, be it a direct translation or a pastiche. And then only for their own minority population, not for another minority population.




That's kind of a disturbing way to look at it. Does this mean that as a Chicano, I would be disqualified from writing a 'typical D&D module' because of its Euro-centric roots in a mythic medieval setting? That is just as "ethnic" as if I were to write a setting based on the Inca. And the fact that I am multi-racial and somewhat globalized - does that mean I am essentially bared from writing anything because no matter what I write, I am not truly a member of that group?

On another angle that is missed here... the problem isn't what you assign your "token brown staffer" to... the problem is that ANYONE is a token... I lived in Asia for a time and had quite a few expat friends of White American and White European nationality. They would all describe to me an alienating experience I knew quite well: being the token non-person in any situation there were in. Over there, they were the minority. They thought Asia was being unusual towards them, some few understood that they were experiencing the reality of suddenly being "brown".
- If you're getting some people just to fill in a box on your checklist, and then presuming they are the people for 'task X'... you are dehumanizing them, and yourself.

This is a problem I see all over the tech industry as well. You don't solve bias by bringing in token others... you need to be overall inclusive and diverse in your outlook and in who is sitting in your desks. I've seen European firms that have an essentially 100% Caucasian staff manage to be more inclusive and diverse in what they put out than some American firms that have several 'non-whites' - because empathy, intent, and an inclusive perspective matter a lot more than filling a quota, especially if you then fail to engage and respect. I used to get stock photos for an educational company from photographers in Sweden that somehow managed to find more Chicano and African 'college students and cultural imagery' than a photographer in California could...

Somebody just failed to tell the Swedes that Chicanos and Blacks were not supposed to be used as models for professionals and higher education students / faculty... so they somehow managed to miss learning to disrespect and categorize people by race...



Dire Bare said:


> Males "appropriating" the female experience by playing characters of the opposite gender isn't the problem. It's young, inexperienced kids doing it poorly that is the problem. And that certainly points to some issues of sexism that hide inside our American culture to be sure.




I would say it boils down to playing that female as something to observe, versus someone to be.

Its why in gaming I always cringe when a male player says something like "I'm playing a female character because I want a nice butt to look at on my screen". That is direct "objectification" of an other, rather than an exploration of a different perspective.


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## delericho (Sep 19, 2015)

Bawylie said:


> I'd stack bible quotes against Wheaton quotes for usefully-quotable material anyday.




Of course.



> Other people saying much the same words absolutely count.




No, not "much the same words". Wheaton's Law is _exactly_ those words.


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## Grumpy RPG Reviews (Sep 19, 2015)

Out of curiosity, what do you find most objectionable about the column? I mean, aside from my comments about God. What do you find to be the most unreasonable assertion or suggestion?


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## Dire Bare (Sep 19, 2015)

Grumpy RPG Reviews said:


> Out of curiosity, what do you find most objectionable about the column? I mean, aside from my comments about God. What do you find to be the most unreasonable assertion or suggestion?




Heh, the basic premise?

"Standard" D&D takes tropes from Western culture, history, mythology, and literature and "appropriates" them out-of-context into something new. Why is doing the exact same thing with Asian cultures, African cultures, or other cultures bad? Does the author of a future "Oriental Adventures" have to be Asian to make it okay? And if this author is Japanese, can he or she include Chinese influences in the book?

When creating art and taking influences from other cultures ("appropriation"), there is definitely a "right" and a "wrong" way to do it, there is a line you can cross into offensive, insensitive material. But where that line lies is fuzzy and different for each individual. But to make a blanket statement that all cultural appropriation is wrong, and worse yet, "hate speech" is utterly ridiculous.


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## S'mon (Sep 19, 2015)

I mustn't have the internal aspect on 'cultural appropriation', I can't understand why anyone would think it was a bad thing, unless they'd been trained to do so (which standard applies to literally anything). I guess I need the Commissars to get my mind right.


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## Umbran (Sep 20, 2015)

S'mon said:


> I can't understand why anyone would think it was a bad thing...




Well, if you are a Caucasian male in the United States, you've probably not had it done to you, so understanding may be hard to come by.

Think of it in terms of intellectual property theft.  Say you were a musician, and you wrote an awesome song.  Somehow, by a freak of luck, you got to play it for a music superstar that you've always idolized.  And they said it was good.

And then they took it, said it was their own, and hit the Top 10 charts with it.  And there was nothing you could do about it.  You hadn't documented when you wrote it, and nobody would believe your word against a superstar, and sure as heck they could afford much better lawyers than you could.  They didn't have to do that - they already had loads of hit songs, fame, millions of dollars.  They had all the power, and you had none, and they took it because they could.

Imagine the feeling of frustration, of violation.

That won't be exactly it, but it begins to approach the idea of how it might be a bad thing to take something as if it was yours, when it really wasn't.


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## billd91 (Sep 20, 2015)

Umbran said:


> Well, if you are a Caucasian male in the United States, you've probably not had it done to you, so understanding may be hard to come by.




On that you may be wrong. There's a current issue rumbling around Tumblr accusing white feminists of cultural appropriation for using the fist symbol embedded in the Venus mirror/women's symbol. The theory goes it was based on the Black Power fist symbol and was used by black feminists. Aside from the strategic foolishness of turning a symbol intended to mean strength through unity into a divisive issue, the claim that the fist symbol originated with the Black Power isn't correct. It dates back to at least 1917 with the IWW (and that case, probably drawn by a causcasian man). But, by the definition most often bandied about for cultural appropriation, we can't call it that even if it is a false claim of ownership because that false claim is on behalf of a minority group. 




Umbran said:


> That won't be exactly it, but it begins to approach the idea of how it might be a bad thing to take something as if it was yours, when it really wasn't.




The problem here is that cultural practice isn't owned by any single individual. It may have developed over decades, centuries, or even millennia. Nor is it clear there's a benefit to exclusive use of it. Is it really an issue for a white model to have cornrows in her hair? There may be issues of blatant disrespect or caricature - Native American sports mascots come particularly to mind, here. But most cross cultural practices, even with some kind of differential in power, aren't blatantly disrespectful nor do they take away anything except exclusiveness.


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## Celebrim (Sep 20, 2015)

Umbran said:


> Well, if you are a Caucasian male in the United States, you've probably not had it done to you, so understanding may be hard to come by.




So, do you think anyone has ever taken the symbols of Christianity and repurposed them for their own purposes in ways that some believers might find disrespectful?  How do you think they feel about the 'Preacher' comics?   Or 'Piss Christ'?  The Virgin Mary painted in Elephant Dung?  The 'His Dark Materials' series?  For that matter, the TV series 'Touched by an Angel'?  My guess is that understanding is hard to come by, but not in the way that you suggest.

But let me get more to the point, what cultural property are Caucasian males allowed to own under this theory, that they would get to reject anyone appropriating it?   In point of fact, if you tried to claim that any aspect of the culture was somehow yours and other people weren't supposed to engage in it or criticize it or mock it or stereotype it, because you were a white male you'd not only be roundly mocked, but would be socially scorned and even blacklisted from certain industries.  

Consider even your dismissive claims regarding a person or what they've experienced or what they know of frustration and violation or their ability to have empathy, simply on the grounds of their skin color and gender.

Or do you think Southern white men have never seen degrading stereotypes of themselves presented in popular media?


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## S'mon (Sep 20, 2015)

Umbran said:


> Well, if you are a Caucasian male in the United States, you've probably not had it done to you...




I'm not.

FWIW, when I see other cultures take bits of my culture I tend to find it quite flattering. I guess if I'd been repeatedly told I should feel insulted then I'd feel insulted.

(Surely US 'Caucasian male' culture gets 'appropriated' like crazy all over the planet. It wouldn't 
occur to any American Caucasian males to object).


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## Grumpy RPG Reviews (Sep 20, 2015)

People did protest the Piss Christ in the Elephant Dung Virgin Mary. However, this being America and where the law works little came of that. Back to my point, this is about etiquette, about good manners. It is not something that would actually be covered or excluded by the law, it is not something that will ever be a prosecutor offense.


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## Morrus (Sep 20, 2015)

S'mon said:


> (Surely US 'Caucasian male' culture gets 'appropriated' like crazy all over the planet. It wouldn't
> occur to any American Caucasian males to object).




Not so much "appropriated" as "exported".


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## Umbran (Sep 20, 2015)

S'mon said:


> I'm not.




Which is why so often in such discussions, I use the word "if"  



> FWIW, when I see other cultures take bits of my culture I tend to find it quite flattering.




You might not, if it was done poorly, such that it trivialized the actual meaning of the original element, or cast your people in a highly sterotyped light or perpetuated incorrect information about your people.

Let me try for an example, that steps away from the Bento Box to somethign a bit deeper...

Online, have you ever seen a "find your totem animal" quiz?  You click through a few simple questions, and it spits out, "Your totem animal is Sloth, because you're lazy!"  or the like.

These things make a Native American friend of mine cringe, because they are an utter trivialization of Native American Animism.  He likened it to a devout Catholic seeing someone come to a costume party in a "Naughty Virgin Mary" costume.  Moreover, it isn't in any way really like Native American Animism, so blatantly oversimplified that it shows a great deal of disrespect.  And, while you might say, "Well, nobody would mistake that for their religion," you'd be largely *wrong*.  In the real world, people get impressions, and if the example they see is trivial, they think the real thing is kind of trivial.  



> (Surely US 'Caucasian male' culture gets 'appropriated' like crazy all over the planet. It wouldn't occur to any American Caucasian males to object).




Depends on your definition.  To many, "cultural appropriation" *requires* there to be a power imbalance, and that it is the powerful taking cultural aspects of the less powerful.



Morrus said:


> Not so much "appropriated" as "exported".




Well, some would argue that.  Others would argue that there's a major problem with that view (As I believe got mentioned earlier, I think around the time I mentioned my bento box.)

Some would say that if I (as a white male American), take an element of Japanese culture (like my bento box), I am engaging in cultural appropriation.  This same person may argue that any time a Japanese person takes an element of American culture, it is because I am exporting it (committing "cultural imperialism", forcing my culture upon others).  Like you said above.

The problem is that this assumes that those in the less powerful culture *completely* lack agency.  They cannot borrow from more powerful cultures by their own decision, it is always coerced.  The person in the less powerful culture is *always* a victim.  Which is nonsense.


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## Morrus (Sep 20, 2015)

Umbran said:


> Well, some would argue that.  Others would argue that there's a major problem with that view (As I believe got mentioned earlier, I think around the time I mentioned my bento box.)
> 
> Some would say that if I (as a white male American), take an element of Japanese culture (like my bento box), I am engaging in cultural appropriation.  This same person may argue that any time a Japanese person takes an element of American culture, it is because I am exporting it (committing "cultural imperialism", forcing my culture upon others).  Like you said above.
> 
> The problem is that this assumes that those in the less powerful culture *completely* lack agency.  They cannot borrow from more powerful cultures by their own decision, it is always coerced.  The person in the less powerful culture is *always* a victim.  Which is nonsense.




I think that oversimplifies the situation.

Mainstream US culture is "exported" because its own creators (and in this case we're mainly talking corporations rather than individuals) deliberately export it worldwide *themselves* for profit.  I think that if you're doing the exporting of your own content, you have a very weak argument when trying to claim that your customers are "appropriating" it.

I'm sure, say, Japanese media companies do the same thing. Watching a Japanese movie is not appropriation either.

Appropriation in this context needs to be an action conducted by the recipient, not the creator.


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## Bedrockgames (Sep 20, 2015)

Morrus said:


> I think that oversimplifies the situation.
> 
> Mainstream US culture is "exported" because its own creators (and in this case we're mainly talking corporations rather than individuals) deliberately export it worldwide *themselves* for profit.  I think that if you're doing the exporting of your own content, you have a very weak argument when trying to claim that your customers are "appropriating" it.
> 
> ...




I just think we tread dangerous ground when we deal with a concept as amorphous as cultural appropriation, as evidenced by the fact that few in this thread can even seem to agree on what it means and what specific instances would be a violation of the moral principle: do not appropriate culture. The line between an artist being inspired by something created elsewhere and cultural appropriation seems so blurry. To me, it just makes more sense to focus on things like avoiding offensive stereotypes or uses that are clearly attacks on a  culture. That is stuff anyone can wrap their head around. It is easily discernible. Cultural Appropriation is a very academic concept, I don't think it is particularly helpful in the real world. 

Sometimes things, even deep and meaningful religious things, pass from one culture into another, take on new meaning and new form. I don't think that is bad. All of human history is riddled with these sorts of exchanges. In a way they are a requirement for making new things. Humans tend to link existing ideas, rather than create new ones whole cloth. 

I also think treating cultural trends or developments as IP is a little bit crazy. There is small movement toward this in music and I think it is stifling personally (I am frankly glad I am not a musician anymore as I can't imagine operating creatively in that field in the present culture). When the Blurred Lines case came up, a lot of folks were piggybacking a cultural appropriation argument onto it (which is why the idea of being able to copyright a 'sound' rather than something objective like several measures of a specific melody was a big issue). 

To me it feels like this builds more fences and separates people from each other more than anything else.


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## Umbran (Sep 20, 2015)

Bedrockgames said:


> I just think we tread dangerous ground when we deal with a concept as amorphous as cultural appropriation




Yes.  But, what would you prefer?  That we *ignore* that we might be hurting someone?  That the subject is difficult or dangerous doesn't mean we don't need to go there, regardless.



> Cultural Appropriation is a very academic concept, I don't think it is particularly helpful in the real world.




Yes, but you (we, choose your pronoun) don't get to just dismiss it at this point.  The idea exists.  Waving your hands and saying, 'Not helpful!' won't make it go away.  



> Sometimes things, even deep and meaningful religious things, pass from one culture into another, take on new meaning and new form.




I'd go beyond sometimes - often, things pass from one culture to another.  I think most of the point being that we ought to be extremely thoughtful about that process, rather than stick our heads in the sand.



> I also think treating cultural trends or developments as IP is a little bit crazy.




It is, at the moment, the best analogy we have.  I don't think anyone here is advocating treatign it literally in that fashion.  Merely that, if you can consider IP violation of an individual, why not from a group.

Heck, Apple (which, as a company, is a fair number of people) gets to defend it's "look at feel" in court!  Why can't a culture reasonably at least ask for a bit of respect when you take their look and feel?


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## Bedrockgames (Sep 20, 2015)

Umbran said:


> Yes.  But, what would you prefer?  That we *ignore* that we might be hurting someone?  That the subject is difficult or dangerous doesn't mean we don't need to go there, regardless.




I think we should respond but also with some amount of reason. Not every complaint is necessitates a response. Not every complaint is reasonable. Responding to people being offended or bothered though is, in my view, separate from the discussion of whether cultural appropriation is a workable concept. I just don't find cultural appropriation ever helpful in these sorts of discussions. Talking about offensiveness of the content due to things like being insensitive or stereotyping is a lot more productive than treating cultural borrowing itself as a kind of colonialism or hate speech.





> Yes, but you (we, choose your pronoun) don't get to just dismiss it at this point.  The idea exists.  Waving your hands and saying, 'Not helpful!' won't make it go away.




It existing as a concept doesn't mean I have to accept it as having value. I am free to critique it when I think it is not terribly useful or even harmful. I see it as a concept that creates more division than unity and is too amorphous to have a lot of use. It isn't something I think about in my design. I think about whether I am being sensitive and how well I am portraying things. I don't wring my hands over concerns of appropriating. 





> I'd go beyond sometimes - often, things pass from one culture to another.  I think most of the point being that we ought to be extremely thoughtful about that process, rather than stick our heads in the sand.




Sure but the concept of cultural appropriation does not help us do this. It makes the process more difficult and freezes dialogue. At least I don't find it helpful for myself and I've never seen it result in anything but argument and debate elsewhere. 

Being thoughtful when dealing with other cultures is a good thing. Employing a concept like cultural appropriation toward that end, is in my view not very productive. I've just never really seen it help anything. It is either a bludgeon to bang people over the head with or this esoteric thing that nobody seems to truly understand.  



> It is, at the moment, the best analogy we have.  I don't think anyone here is advocating treatign it literally in that fashion.  Merely that, if you can consider IP violation of an individual, why not from a group.




But it is a terrible analogy. IP is meant to protect individual works of a creator, not a style, trend or vibe. If people want to go down this road they are opening a huge pandoras box of problems for artists. Apple Pie is a feature of american culture, no individual can claim to own it. Once things enter into the culture they are shared, they don't belong to a single person. 



> Heck, Apple (which, as a company, is a fair number of people) gets to defend it's "look at feel" in court!  Why can't a culture reasonably at least ask for a bit of respect when you take their look and feel?




Traditionally Copyright doesn't cover feel or vibe. The reason I mentioned the blurred lines case was because it was decided on that basis, and for that reason, a horrible decision in my view. They didn't invoke cultural appropriation but it is a very similar argument (and a lot of the people pushing for 'look and vibe' in musicology do so on the grounds of cultural appropriation). If 'sound ad vibe' is covered people can only be 100% original with zero influence from others or stick entirely to the cannon of their respective folk traditions. It is simply too broad. A lot of people recognize that decision as bad, but it sets a very terrible precedent for musicians and composers. It won't empower anyone. It will just make it harder to earn a living making music. 

This is going to stifle art, stifle cultural exchange and build walls. It makes cultures things you cannot cross. It makes us unknowable to each other. It is totally fair for cultures to want to be respected. I don't think it is fair to expect people will treat our cultural artifacts in the same way as us. 

In my view American copyright law is already bad enough and favors companies way more than artists. I'd much rather we not protect apples look and feel and instead protect the works of individual creators. 

But to answer: Because once something leaves one culture into another, you can't have control of where it leads. Thinking that my people have control of what shape a musical style, a religious concept, or chair design when other people think its cool and start adapting it to their own culture makes zero sense. It isn't a commentary on me. It is merely how they are coming to understand and use something. Now if they use it to make a commentary on my people or deliberately insult them, that is fair to discuss. Like I said, I am all for being sensitive. But I don't think its reasonable to take offense because someone uses something in a different way than you do or in a way that your people consider not suitable (even if in the first instance its a very sacred and meaningful idea and in the other becomes more mundane).


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## Umbran (Sep 21, 2015)

Bedrockgames said:


> I think we should respond but also with some amount of reason.




I don't think a single person here suggests otherwise.  We simply disagree with what counts as "some amount".



> Talking about offensiveness of the content due to things like being insensitive or stereotyping is a lot more productive than treating cultural borrowing itself as a kind of colonialism or hate speech.




Yes.  Now, reread the thread, and note how that the only person who has suggested we take that idea flatly was Grumpy, and when we pointed out some of the problems, he changed it. Here you are seemingly trying to tell us we shouldn't discuss the topic, and here we are, using discussion of the topic to bring out some amount of moderation of an extreme position.  Which of us is being more constructive?

There is a musical, "1776", in which one of the founding fathers (Stephen Hopkins, of Rhode Island) notes: "Well, in all my years I ain't never heard, seen nor smelled an issue that was so dangerous it couldn't be talked about. "  While the historical man may not have said those words, the sentiment has value.  We can't even *talk* about it?



> It existing as a concept doesn't mean I have to accept it as having value.




Okay.  Fine.  You don't think it has value.  We got that.  

But, you live in a world where others do think it is valid, and has value.  So, you're probably going to have to learn to live with it.



> Sure but the concept of cultural appropriation does not help us do this. It makes the process more difficult and freezes dialogue.




The only freezing of the dialog I've seen has come from your attempt to reject the term.  The rest of us seemed to be doing just fine.  Grumpy came here looking for feedback, we gave it, and he actually took some of it.  Not all, but some.  That's not "frozen".  That motion.  You're the only one stuck in place.



> I've just never really seen it help anything. It is either a bludgeon to bang people over the head with or this esoteric thing that nobody seems to truly understand.




Yeah, but dude, if they don't at least occasionally bludgeon those in the privileged classes over the head, nothing *happens*.  If folks are gentle, kind, appeasing to your sensibilities, there's little motive to change.  I think history will show you that advancement on issues of racism, sexism, and other civil rights and equality always come at the price of someone feeling pretty darned uncomfortable.

Monte Cook didn't find a good way to present his content until he was bludgeoned over the head with the error.  Betcha he won't make that mistake again!

So, yes, we get bludgeoned with it.  We are made to feel guilty, ashamed, put upon when we feel we are innocent.  Guess what?  If we are worth what we think we are, we can handle it.  A bit of humble pie can be good for us.



> Apple Pie is a feature of american culture, no individual can claim to own it.




Interestingly, apple pie and fried chicken are *not* American.  You can find them in Italian 15th century cookbooks, among other European sources, with virtually the same recipes.  What we think of apple pie today is really... German, brought by the Pennsylvania Dutch.



> Traditionally Copyright doesn't cover feel or vibe.




Tell that to Apple.  They have active look and feel suits going over cellphone design as we speak.

Mind you, I must say (again, and so I put it in big letters so that I'm clear): _ I WAS NOT SUGGESTING WE LITERALLY USE COPYRIGHT LAW FOR THIS._

It was merely the handy example of, "someone else created it, and you took it, and we already accept that can be problematic".  That's all.  That's as far as it goes.  You have spent many paragraphs (stalling the conversation, btw) on a strawman.

I don't actually expect that point to get through, though.  One of the major issues with such discussions is that, if someone is confronted with that which they don't believe, they usually dig in and double-down on their commitment.  So, I don't actually expect you, personally, will accept a single thing I've said here.  With this post, I'm no longer trying to convince you, and I owe it to you to be honest about that.

Some other reader, however, who isn't invested in the position, might see the point, and take it to heart.


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## Bedrockgames (Sep 21, 2015)

People are absolutely free to discuss any concept they want. I Would never suggest otherwise but others are free to comment and critique the concept.


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## Bedrockgames (Sep 21, 2015)

Umbran said:


> But, you live in a world where others do think it is valid, and has value.  So, you're probably going to have to learn to live with it.




Sure people believe lots of things I think are misguided or counter productive. I am okay with that. Never said people had to agree with me or that I expect everyone to suddenly not find use in the concept. I am always happy to share space with people who disagree with me on things. That is one of the things that makes life interesting.



> Yeah, but dude, if they don't at least occasionally bludgeon those in the privileged classes over the head, nothing *happens*.  If folks are gentle, kind, appeasing to your sensibilities, there's little motive to change.  I think history will show you that advancement on issues of racism, sexism, and other civil rights and equality always come at the price of someone feeling pretty darned uncomfortable.




I am all for real social justice Umbran. There are a lot of racial disparities in our culture that are very real and need to be remedied. I am not asking people to be sensitive to my sensibilities. And I am certainly not opposed to progress on social and racial issues. My point is I just don't believe Cultural Appropriation as a concept is a useful tool for improving any of this stuff. Certainly I don't think it is a useful tool for improving how cultures interact. Like I said before I think being culturally sensitive and avoiding things like stereotypes are all good. But CA is a much more esoteric concept and I think it clouds the issue.




> I don't actually expect that point to get through, though.  One of the major issues with such discussions is that, if someone is confronted with that which they don't believe, they usually dig in and double-down on their commitment.  So, I don't actually expect you, personally, will accept a single thing I've said here.  With this post, I'm no longer trying to convince you, and I owe it to you to be honest about that.
> 
> Some other reader, however, who isn't invested in the position, might see the point, and take it to heart.




I think this is an unhelpful tone. It is like you are here to enlighten me rather than have a discussion and it assumes I have no interest in listening to your arguments. As a poster I am pretty good about acknowledging when I am wrong if someone convinces me. Obviously this is an issue where people on both sides feel strongly, and we are therefore less likely to convince one another. But I approach these topics in good faith. I am happy to consider the possibility I am wrong (in every discussion I have, believe it or not, this is something I actively do and on this topic in particular I have regularly re-evaluated my position and sought input from people I know who come from other cultures). But I think it is fair for me to expect you to be as self reflective as well and genuinely consider the possibility that you are wrong. 

When I said I believed this was divisive rather than unifying, I was serious and sincere in that concern. Now I could be wrong that this is where it leads, but further fragmenting and dividing of people in this world is a consquence I think we ought to weigh carefully as a potential outcome when we effectively make certain forms of cultural borrowing and sharing immoral by invoking a concept that is vague and connects things like someone in the present making use of a cultural artifact with colonialism and imperialism. I think we are better off the more people from different cultures interact and share with each other. My view is this concept makes people more hesitant to do that (the OP himself said some fences make for good neighbors). I don't want to live in a world with more fences and more walls. Maybe this isn't the case. Maybe I am wrong. Maybe Cultural Aproppropriation will open the door for more exchange or at least exchange that is more respectful. I can certainly see the case for that. And I can certainly see that your position is grounded in sincere concerns for potential harm done to people through cultural appropriation. But I have my doubts, and this is largely due to the fact that hate movements have begun to adopt the language of Cultural Appropriation to make an argument for things like white nationalism. 

I don't think these issues are as black and white as people like to make them out to be. They certainly are not ones with easy solutions or conclusions in my view.


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## Bawylie (Sep 21, 2015)

Umbran said:


> I don't think a single person here suggests otherwise.  We simply disagree with what counts as "some amount".
> 
> 
> 
> ...




I think I reach an unfavorable conclusion, overall. I'm fine discussing anything, and any idea deserves a good airing out. 

This particular idea, though, seems intended to be used as a cudgel. And that's how I see it applied when it crops up in discussions, at museums, on forums, etc. Whatever its merits, (and there are some), the effect seems to me to be chilling. "You're privileged, you've taken what doesn't belong to you. This is morally indistinct from imperial colonizers who ruined other cultures." 

And whatever discussion we might have about what's adaptation, what's appropriation, what's imitation, all happens under an implicit accusation. A charge that some wrong must necessarily have been committed, a wrong that disqualifies one party from discourse (at best) and demands capitulation and redress (at worst). 

That's maybe not fair for this essay. And there's definitely a more charitable read. But that's not where I am just this moment.


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## Bedrockgames (Sep 21, 2015)

Umbran said:


> Yes.  Now, reread the thread, and note how that the only person who has suggested we take that idea flatly was Grumpy, and when we pointed out some of the problems, he changed it. Here you are seemingly trying to tell us we shouldn't discuss the topic, and here we are, using discussion of the topic to bring out some amount of moderation of an extreme position.  Which of us is being more constructive?
> .




I am not saying people shouldn't discuss it. I am critiquing the concept that the essay is built upon. Any full conversation on the topic is going to need to include arguments against the premise itself. I haven't said to anyone here that the should stop talking about it or that they have to take my side. I am just giving my honest assessment of Cultural Appropriation as a concept, since it is the subject the OP raised and one that I think would be counter productive for designers to rely upon. I get that you may find it a helpful concept, and others may as well, but criticism of it isn't that unusual. It isn't a universally embraced idea and there are lots of people who feel it does more harm than good. 

Further, I don't think he has moderated his position all that much (nor do I think he ought to, if he doesn't wish to). I think he has changed how he expressed it. I certainly think it is a positive thing that he has asked for feedback here and is taking it seriously. I also admire his bravery for being willing to post an article like that and ask for feedback (knowing it is going to provoke lots of different kinds of reactions). And I actually am a fan of his reviews. But the fundamental position seems to remain in place as far as I can tell. I could certainly focus my energies on trying to help him say the same thing in a more agreeable way, but that wouldn't be honest. I want to give my honest opinion to the OP. I am fine with him not agreeing with me. He seems to be taking that kind of negative feedback in stride and incorporating it. I doubt I will change his opinion. What I hope to do is to give him a sense that there are people out there who question the core assumption behind his post and try to explain the reasons why.


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## Bagpuss (Sep 21, 2015)

Umbran said:


> Yes.  Now, reread the thread, and note how that the only person who has suggested we take that idea flatly was Grumpy, and when we pointed out some of the problems, he changed it.




Not in any significant way.

I think the only significant change I saw was from "Cultural Appropriation is hate speech." to "Cultural Appropriation can be a kind of hate speech."

But there was no indication in the article of when he thinks, CA is hate speech, and when it is either okay, or just short of hate speech.


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## Bedrockgames (Sep 21, 2015)

Umbran said:


> Monte Cook didn't find a good way to present his content until he was bludgeoned over the head with the error.  Betcha he won't make that mistake again!
> 
> So, yes, we get bludgeoned with it.  We are made to feel guilty, ashamed, put upon when we feel we are innocent.  Guess what?  If we are worth what we think we are, we can handle it.  A bit of humble pie can be good for us.
> t.




My memory of events may be hazy but my impression wasn't that they made changes in response to people shaming them or bludgeoning them, in fact they were very careful in their public statements to indicate they were responding to people who came to them in good faith and with an interest in dialogue. I can't speak for them though, so maybe someone closer to monte cook games can weigh in. I think this was a complex event. I don't think it was as simple as someone invoking cultural appropriation, being rude about it, and getting results because they shamed monte (in fact, in the initial days some oft hostile social media posts had the opposite effect). The turning point I think was when Shanna went on the radio podcast and talked to two native Americans who had concerns. If you listen to that discussion it is the furthest thing from bludgeoning or shaming. It was a great dialogue in my view. I think what persuaded them was talking to people who were willing to engage and coming to the conclusion that they were handling crude stereotypes and that it wasn't as sensitive to native american culture as it could have been. You don't need cultural appropriation as a concept to reach that conclusion. You just need to be mindful of stereotypes and be sensitive to Native American culture. I didn't see change arise when people were shouting. I saw change begin when folks stopped shouting and started talking with one another. 

I know not everyone shares this view, but I feel that bludgeoning, shaming and guilting people is generally not the most effective way to convince them. Sometimes it may certainly be called for. There are things happening in the world today that certainly require strong responses. But I think in most cases, an open and respectful dialogue is the best path to change and increased empathy. Yes, people can handle it. It doesn't really affect me all that much if someone tries to bludgeon me in a debate. The point isn't that it does irreparable harm or anything. The point is it doesn't facilitate communication. This is something you can observe in real time in conversations with people. It is just rudimentary that if you begin a disagreement with your friend or your spouse by browbeating and shaming them, it isn't going to produce good results. Why would it produce better results in a conversation about games?


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## Umbran (Sep 21, 2015)

Bedrockgames said:


> I think this is an unhelpful tone.






Bawylie said:


> This particular idea, though, seems intended to be used as a cudgel.




Gentlemen, I'm sorry, but you are guilty of a logical fallacy - the "tone argument" (also known as "tone policing") in which a position is dismissed based on its presentation.  It is a variant of the more formal "Appeal to Emotion".

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Tone_argument
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_emotion

The logical content of the idea is *separate* from how it is used.  You can't dismiss the concept of cultural appropriation because it is used as a bludgeon, any more than you can outlaw kitchen knives because they occasionally cut people - veggies still need to be chopped, and all.  Quite simply - the fact that it is used to make you feel bad does not mean it is inaccurate or incorrect!  

In a very basic way, if you (meaning dominant culture, not you personally) have been walking roughshod over others, the defense, "But you should be *nice* to me!" carries darned little weight.  You (we, really) get bludgeoned in large part because we are responsible* for making things better, and are generally falling down on the job.  

Now, we can have a discussion of tone, in terms of what strategies are best for reaching an audience.  I made some comments to just that early in the thread, in my feedback to Grumpy.  However, that doesn't touch the basic validity (or lack thereof) of the position.  To conflate them is basically saying, 'I don't think we should talk about that topic, as it makes me uncomfortable."  As I noted before - there *will* be unpleasant feelings here.  This is hard, and a big humble pill we need to swallow.  But the side effects to us are not the central issue.




*In saying this, I note the difference between being "responsible" and being "accountable".  We, as individuals, may be largely innocent of the major sins, but it falls in our laps to help make things better, regardless.


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## Jim Jenkins (Sep 21, 2015)

I don't know if the problem is so much the "bludgeoning" but the selective judgment in the theory in the first place. It's another manifestation of Tumblr Social Justice Theory: Life as anyone but a straight white cis male is fraught with microaggressions that need to be constantly called out. The result is a litany of double standards that, when called out, are met with "check your privilege." 

No one cared about cultural appropriation as long as the group being appropriated wasn't seen as "oppressed." The tremendous irony in this is the fantasy genre borrows from mythology prolifically. As a result, EVERY culture appropriated (which isn't a bad thing; yay appropriation!) has at various points of history been both oppressor and oppressed. 

This is why Tumblr Social Justice Theory simultaneously overcomplicates and oversimplifies everything by interpreting all of it through the lens of oppression (often with appallingly inaccurate understanding of oppression throughout human history). Mocking anyone's culture and heritage is bad. Simple, but treated as if it's complicated. Honoring anyone's culture and heritage is good. Still simple, but treated as if it's complicated. How oppression and privilege have played roles in anyone's culture and heritage? Really really complicated, but treated as if it's simple. 

If the Mwangi had been so thoroughly researched that you'd actually learn something about African history through playing one, it would STILL be treated as a microagression because you're still appropriating, and this is just... dumb.


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## billd91 (Sep 21, 2015)

Umbran said:


> Gentlemen, I'm sorry, but you are guilty of a logical fallacy - the "tone argument" (also known as "tone policing") in which a position is dismissed based on its presentation.  It is a variant of the more formal "Appeal to Emotion".
> 
> http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Tone_argument
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_emotion
> ...




I'm going to disagree on the cudgel argument, at least in part. The terms of the debate, the definitions of cultural appropriation and assimilation, are political in nature, designed to be rhetorical weapons usable by only one side against the other. I think they are fundamentally flawed as a result and I don't think that is improved because they are intended to be used "punching up" at privileged groups rather than "punching down" at underprivileged groups.


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## Jim Jenkins (Sep 21, 2015)

billd91 said:


> I'm going to disagree on the cudgel argument, at least in part. The terms of the debate, the definitions of cultural appropriation and assimilation, are political in nature, designed to be rhetorical weapons usable by only one side against the other. I think they are fundamentally flawed as a result and I don't think that is improved because they are intended to be used "punching up" at privileged groups rather than "punching down" at underprivileged groups.




There's a good point here. "Tone" is an inherent point of the argument being made, in that the argument is basically "Stop being bad white cis males and be a good little ally." There is an accusation implicit in the argument and therefore it's nearly impossible to rebut it _without_ tone policing. After all, one of the strongest and most legitimate counterarguments is "Who are you to tell others how to refer to adapt elements of various cultures?"


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## Bagpuss (Sep 21, 2015)

Umbran said:


> Gentlemen, I'm sorry, but you are guilty of a logical fallacy - the "tone argument" (also known as "tone policing") in which a position is dismissed based on its presentation.




I'm not seeing it dismissed because of the tone, they are just saying the tone it is unhelpful for debate.


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## Bedrockgames (Sep 21, 2015)

Umbran I only brought up tone because you were advocating the utility of shaming and guilting people. You seemed to be making the claim that using cultural appropriation as a bludgeon was effective (in response to me saying it tends to result in bludgeoning or confusion).

I am not going to get into a debate over fallacies, but I think here discussion of tone is relevant. also in the post of mine you quoted,I was talking about your tone specifically, not the tone of people invoking cultural appropriation. I was talking about what seemed to be an assumption by you that Si was arguing in bad faith.

i am not dismissing cultural appropriation over tone. I do think it's usefulness is something worth debating though. I also think what effect it has matters.


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## Bedrockgames (Sep 21, 2015)

Umbran said:


> se we are responsible* for making things better, and are generally falling down on the job.
> 
> Now, we can have a discussion of tone, in terms of what strategies are best for reaching an audience.  I made some comments to just that early in the thread, in my feedback to Grumpy.  However, that doesn't touch the basic validity (or lack thereof) of the position.  To conflate them is basically saying, 'I don't think we should talk about that topic, as it makes me uncomfortable."  As I noted before - there *will* be unpleasant feelings here.  This is hard, and a big humble pill we need to swallow.  But the side effects to us are not the central issue.
> 
> ...




Not what I am saying at all. Me critiquing an idea or concept is not saying it shouldn't be discussed. Nor is it rooted in me being uncomfortable (I am not). Same goes for holding the position that an open and respectful dialogue is better than a hostile one that relies on shaming. People are free to say and do what they want here. But others are free to question key assumption. When an idea like cultural appropriation is introduced into a conversation, it is fair to question it, to question how well it applies. That isn't about discomfort (personally I welcome voices that disagree with me). I have already listed my reasons for holding these positions, so I won't repeat them here.


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## Bawylie (Sep 21, 2015)

Sure, and pointing out logical fallacies in an argument is addressing the form of the argument rather than its substance. 

My point was that the idea behind CA is to create some new sin demanding redress, to invent a category of compensable harm. And in my experience, that's the only way I've seen it used so far.  Nobody's obliged to be nice to me, of course, but when, as a practical matter, people are devising new ways to make an enemy out of me (or us) or cast me (or us) as some oppressor, then I'm not terribly interested in offering the best advice on how to sharpen the knives aimed at me (or us). (This is all rhetorical). 

And maybe that's NOT what's going on. Maybe there is a wrong that demands redress. But from my "lived experience" that's not the case. It appears to me to be the presumption of guilt based on charges alone, and not a demonstration of harm done, damages tallied, and proof given. 

In essence I don't take for granted that CA exists, exists in such a way that necessarily harms anyone, that any CA done is a substantial contributor to systemic oppression, that any harm done outweighs any benefits such that compensation is fair/reasonable/necessary, nor from whom such compensation should be taken. 

It's a category of grievances and unsubstantiated charges. And, IMO, it's not tone policing to say "Hey wait a minute, you can't jump straight to liability and compensation; charges have been levied but the case hasn't been made." Nor is that a shutdown of the conversation. If anything it's at least the idea that assertions ought to be proved and counter-arguments entertained.


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## Grumpy RPG Reviews (Sep 21, 2015)

I thought about including "tone policing" in the column but decided not to because it would have made it too long.
I realize that the column creates barriers - I more or less say strong fences make for good neighbors. I am not remotely a white nationalist and I fully realize those barriers can be a problem but I see all the other options as worse. Be it Taylor Swift watching people twerking or Bruce Cordell trying to include Native Americans in RPGS, these things will always go off the rails, they will always fail and do more damage than they will help.


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## Bedrockgames (Sep 21, 2015)

Grumpy RPG Reviews said:


> I thought about including "tone policing" in the column but decided not to because it would have made it too long.
> I realize that the column creates barriers - I more or less say strong fences make for good neighbors. I am not remotely a white nationalist and I fully realize those barriers can be a problem but I see all the other options as worse. Be it Taylor Swift watching people twerking or Bruce Cordell trying to include Native Americans in RPGS, these things will always go off the rails, they will always fail and do more damage than they will help.




I just want to be clear, I am not accusing you at all of being a white nationalist. And I am not accusing you of being a bigot. I merely made the point that white nationalists have easily appropriated parts of this argument and I think there is a good reason why: it helps create more barriers between cultures and people. I don't personally think such barriers are a plus. Maybe in the short term they do reduce discomfort, and tension, but I've always believed its important for people to interact, exchange and share culture and be open. Saying that Taylor Swift can't twerk or Bruce Cordell can't write about native americans because they are white, seems like a rule of thumb that would choke widespread integration and understanding of different cultures. Certainly if Taylor swift uses twerking in a way that is insulting or deliberately mocking black people, that is not a good thing. And if Bruce Cordell is insulting in his handling of Native Americans, it is fair to criticize. But to completely prohibit people from attempting to share culture, whether it be music, art or history, seems like a pretty poisonous idea to me.


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## Celebrim (Sep 21, 2015)

Bedrockgames said:


> It makes us unknowable to each other.




At the heart of the constructed view of the world that generates the "cultural appropriation" meme, runs the highly racist idea that each person is completely unknowable to each other.  That idea hides behind words like "diversity" and "authentic".  It shows up in ideas like: "You just can't understand what it is like to be a woman." or "You can't understand what it is like to be black.".  It seeks to exaggerate and highlight our differences rather than what we have in common.  It emphasizes not that we are more alike than different, but that we are more different than alike. 

Nineteenth and twentieth century racialists (not all of whom were necessarily promoting racial hatred, even if hatred was the inevitable and most visible consequence) used to argue that there was an essential national character to each race of mankind which was inescapable.  You could take a person out of his environment, but his inherited national traits and tendencies would still be inescapable.  

Now the inheritors of that same logic no longer speak of inescapable national traits, but will speak of an inescapable and unique racial experience which everyone on the basis of their race will still have.  It amounts to the same thing in new language.  There is this idea that a person with dark skin, raised in suburban New Hampshire to a well to do family inherently has by virtue of their skin color an 'African' experience which is distinct from and unknowable by anyone who hasn't the proper melanin and that on that ground alone has more in common with other dark skinned people than he does with his fairer skinned peers that he ate lunch with in high school.  Conversely, a person of fair skin, who grows up in Africa, speaks African languages, and who wrecked his car by hitting a Kudu, because of his fair skin still has a distinctly 'European' experience which makes him unable to understand or share in darker skinned experience.

The idea ultimately is that we are so different because of our race or what ever group we are said to belong to, that it is impossible to walk a mile in each others shoes.  Whites inherently have privilege and cannot truly understand oppression or speak of oppression authentically.  Blacks inherently are victims and cannot truly speak from a place of privilege.  No person can truly understand anyone else, because there is no common human experience.  No one's experiences crosses the lines.  No one is able to imagine on the basis of their own suffering the sufferings or joys of others.  Even the claim to empathize with and share a common experience with someone outside or your group is called hate speech.  
This theory has it that an inner city white kid inherently has more in common with a rural white kid or a suburban white kid, than he has with inner city peers of a different race.  Suburban black kids have more in common with inner city black kids than they do with their suburban peers.  In short, your race remains your destiny under this theory, and diversity is counted not according to life experiences, viewpoints, philosophies or anything else, but can be tagged by race alone.  

Ultimately, this new racism is the same as the old racism.  The same stereotypes are in play.  Black suit wearing businessmen aren't authentic voices; real authentic black voices are criminals.  "White men can't jump".  Mexicans like spicy food.  Asians are goofy glasses wearing dorks.  And so on and so forth.  Only this actually demeaning stereotyping isn't counted as damnable "cultural appropriation" as long as "authentic" "well-intentioned" people do it, where as non-hateful exploration of other cultures is - regardless of your intention - accounted hate speech. 

Lying behind all this lie is a bit of Newspeak twisting of the word identity so that it means both itself and its opposite.  We now have people using the word "identity" both for the distinctive thing that makes you unique, and for the non-distinctive thing which makes you a member of a class or group.  When we identity people now, we know longer point to what makes them an individual, but to a long list of group memberships as if merely knowing something about ones group membership told us more about the individual than knowing the individual did.

Why should being black be like anything, and really is it like anything?  Just as intelligent black man could be dismissed by 19th century racial movements not as disproof of the theory that blacks could not be intelligent, but simply as an outlier that didn't represent the overall pattern of his race, so modern racists dismiss men of the same character - or really anyone of any group that doesn't fit their stereotype - as being inauthentic and non-representative.   Today we've reached the point we no longer are pointing out the outlier to dismiss the theory, because the theory has become undismissable and unquestionable.  Today the outlier is celebrated precisely to mark them as an outlier, and when that person says anything remotely to question the theory, this is proven by the fact that they are easily dismissed as inauthentic.  

And they'll do this even if the person unquestionably shares the life experiences that supposedly make the group unknowable and distinctive.  If you lack the stereotype, if you don't mouth the expected rote opinions, you aren't an "authentic voice".

But it's noteworthy who the "authentic voices" are said to be.  If you were cynical you'd say that the "authentic voices" are being carefully chosen by privileged groups to further their own privilege and influence. 

My brother was closely acquainted with Comanche medicine man.  Full blood.  Not this 1/16th crap where 15 of the persons ancestors were white and yet he thinks he's got exclusive title to be the spokesperson for native culture.  You'd think this would be an unquestionably authentic voice of his people.  Regarding sports teams adopting names like Braves and Indians and the like, his opinion was that the White people were counting coup.  That they defeated the red men in battle, and so it was to be expected.  If they had won, they would have done the same thing out of very much the same impulse.  Indeed, you can see the same impulse when native Americans put on the jackets of the US Cavalry soldiers.  His idea was that the white people didn't count coup on us because they despised Indians.  There is no honor in counting coup on something pathetic.  They counted coup because they wanted to share in the bravery and strength of their enemy.  That isn't to say that he thought there weren't real injustices and real problems out there, but he was convinced this whole thing regarding sports teams was a controversy imposed on the Native Americans by people who wanted to make themselves feel good and not something most of them really cared about.   And if you go looking, you'll find other voices in the Native American communities saying much the same thing.  Why don't we engage those voices?  Are only angry voices worth engaging, and only if they are angry about the things we want them to be angry about?

At best, "cultural appropriation" is about trivializing justice down to holding a few easily held opinions about things that don't matter much, and then feeling good about yourself - like some Ave Maria repeated endlessly to absolve yourself of not actually changing anything.  At worst, it's the stealth recreation of every important point of 19th century racism either by the cultural inheritors of those views or perversely by the inheritors of the people who had those views imposed on them, clutching the very demeaning views to their chests as if they were literal truths.  Because it's there 'identity' or something.

I'm inclined to think it's a lot of both.  

You note later: "I merely made the point that white nationalists have easily appropriated parts of this argument and I think there is a good reason why: it helps create more barriers between cultures and people."

You are mostly right except for one point.  The white supremacists didn't appropriate parts of this argument.  They invented it.  The relationship between the ideas is the other way around.  The SJW's appropriated this argument from the white supremacists.  It's fundamentally accepting the world view of the KKK or the Neo-Nazi's as correct, and then in the midst of that hateful world view trying to construct some sort of moral framework.  But it fundamentally can't work, because the framework itself is hateful and twisted.   The ultimate end of pushing this crap on people will be to increase hatred and feelings of alienation and to try to push people into tribes.  Because once you deny that people have a basis for understanding one another, and deny that they belong to a common community, then you've basically denied that they have any reason to care for one another.  That's ultimately the reason why if you look not even very hard at the SJW community, if you even only look as mainstream as say The Guardian, you'll find that preaching hatred of the other is conventional within the community.


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## Bagpuss (Sep 21, 2015)

Bedrockgames said:


> Certainly if Taylor swift uses twerking in a way that is insulting or deliberately mocking black people, that is not a good thing.




Which she didn't.



> And if Bruce Cordell is insulting in his handling of Native Americans, it is fair to criticize.




Which it seems he didn't either.



> But to completely prohibit people from attempting to share culture, whether it be music, art or history, seems like a pretty poisonous idea to me.




Agreed.


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## Bedrockgames (Sep 21, 2015)

Bagpuss said:


> Which she didn't.
> 
> .




I have to confess I don't really know much about this one. I was just basing it on the post someone made.


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## Bedrockgames (Sep 21, 2015)

Bagpuss said:


> Which it seems he didn't either.
> 
> 
> .




I wasn't saying he did. I was just making the point that it's fair for folks to weigh in with opinions on the matter once something is published. Basically saying a designer should be free to borrow cultural elements and that it's reasonable to react if the treatment is insulting or offensive. I think holding up cultural appropriation as a gate that bars him from trying in the first place or as a fuzzy rubric of how problematic content is, is a much worse way to go than just judging its cultural sensitivity.


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## Bedrockgames (Sep 21, 2015)

Celebrim said:


> t
> 
> t
> 
> ...




I don't think this is true at all. I think it may play into to the hands of bigoted people but I see these as two very different things and see no causal link leading from white supremacy to CA in history. To me it seems the intent is sincere. There may be bad actors but I am not going to project motives onto everyone who subscribes to cultural appropriation. Certainly not going to lump them in with neo-nazis (that is just as much of a rhetorical bludgeon as CA itself).

I do think Cultural Appropriation as it has come to be understood, leads to people being more divided and locked inside their own cultural paradigm though. But I don't believe that is the goal or that it arises from a belief in racial essentialism (or supremacy).


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## Dimitrios (Sep 21, 2015)

I tend to agree that cultural appropriation is a no value added term. Except for a few extreme cases, people who decry cultural appropriation insist that they're not advocating for unbreachable walls between cultures (as though that could possibly make any sense in any case), so that no one who isn't Thai should use Thai spices in their cooking and no one who isn't Japanese should incorporate manga influences in how they draw characters & etc.

When asked "OK, what <i>are</i> advocating against?", the answer is generally something along the lines of representing other cultures as crude stereotypes, or outright stealing whole styles without any acknowledgement of where they came from, or imitating some cultural practice in disrespectful or mocking way. The thing is, those are concrete, specific objectionable things, so if that's what you mean, why not say that? The primary distinguishing feature of cultural appropriation as a concept is its vagueness.


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## Bagpuss (Sep 21, 2015)

Bedrockgames said:


> I wasn't saying he did.




I knew that, sorry if you thought I didn't. I was just making the point that the vast majority of people 
(even those of the supposedly offend against culture) had no issue with either of those examples.



> I was just making the point that it's fair for folks to weigh in with opinions on the matter once something is published.




I think there is an issue actually, both those examples were pretty mild, nothing like the issue with blackface or even the issue with the Washington Redskins.

If small numbers of individuals and they are small numbers with mild examples like these (the petition against The Strange barely got half to its 1,000 target) continue this call out culture to even the mildest of what they consider offense, then it creates an environment where people won't be willing to take any risk. There won't be another publisher that will risk the fallout from doing a native american setting.

I think while people are welcome to comment, there should be an expectation that their comments automatically have value and should be listened to.


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## Bedrockgames (Sep 21, 2015)

Bagpuss said:


> I think there is an issue actually, both those examples were pretty mild, nothing like the issue with blackface or even the issue with the Washington Redskins.
> 
> If small numbers of individuals and they are small numbers with mild examples like these (the petition against The Strange barely got half to its 1,000 target) continue this call out culture to even the mildest of what they consider offense, then it creates an environment where people won't be willing to take any risk. There won't be another publisher that will risk the fallout from doing a native american setting.
> 
> I think while people are welcome to comment, there should be an expectation that their comments automatically have value and should be listened to.




That is an issue of how people choose to respond to criticisms. My point is offensive treatment of a culture is fair game for critique. What constitutes offensive is another matter and probably beyond the scope of this thread. As I said before, not every critique is reasonable. Just as people have a right to weigh in on something, the designer and others have a right to evaluate the criticism and decide if it is grounded in anything.


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## Celebrim (Sep 22, 2015)

Bedrockgames said:


> I don't think this is true at all. I think it may play into to the hands of bigoted people but I see these as two very different things and see no causal link leading from white supremacy to CA in history.




Drawing the direct historical links, this person read this person, who read this person, who read this person, and so forth goes beyond the discussion and would probably be even more politically inflammatory than I already am.  But I do there is a direct line of influence, a descent through modification between the 19th century writers and the modern movement along multiple lines right back to Condorcet, and from that you can see everything from White Man's Burden to Identity Politics and how different writers shaped that thought to where we are now.  



> To me it seems the intent is sincere. There may be bad actors but I am not going to project motives onto everyone who subscribes to cultural appropriation.




Nor did I.  I don't at all question that the vast majority have the best of intentions and really believe that what they are saying is about restorative justice, any more than I claim that everyone who held racialist beliefs in the past was necessarily a hateful person.  We can find many examples of people who very much assumed a racialist description of the world was a true one, that nonetheless admired, worked with, advocated for, and perhaps even genuinely loved people of different races.  This juxtaposition of holding that a person's race defined them and yet not necessarily having hateful intent seems very jarring to us from our present vantage, but it really need not - we can find many parallel examples today if we take our blinders off.

I used to be a colleague of a black ex-boxer that had found religion.  We were rather friendly and had long talks about religion and politics during breaks in the work.  One day he told me, "It's a shame that you were born white."  I laughed and asked him why, and he said, "I won't know you in Heaven, because white people don't have souls."  He didn't mean it in any particularly hateful way.  He certainly would have considered it incompatible with his religion to treat me poorly on account of my infirmity (if you will).  He just matter of factly believed that white people through no fault of their own weren't really people.

The same sort of good intentioned racism permeates the "politically correct" movement.  It likewise has parallels among the typical beliefs of my Southern forbearer 2 or 3 generations back.  Many people who read the sequel to "To Kill a Mockingbird" were shocked at the portrayal of Atticus as holding racist views as being incongruous with the profound sense of justice he demonstrates in the first book.  I found it very creditable, as far more reflective of reality than Atticus as ideal modern man.  I'd met people much the same, that held to both the racialist view that race was a very real and inescapable destiny, but also that was no reason to mistreat anyone and that it was a sign of poor character - and beneath their dignity - to do so.  "Politically correct" advocates tend strike me of being, at their best, of the same sort.

And at their worst, they remind me of the KKK members I argued with in high school, except that the KKK had the good grace to blush when confronted with their hatred and hypocrisy.



> I do think Cultural Appropriation as it has come to be understood, leads to people being more divided and locked inside their own cultural paradigm though. But I don't believe that is the goal or that it arises from a belief in racial essentialism (or supremacy).




I believe that not only does it arise out of racial essentialism, but that the language of it is frequently taken up by those that believe in a racial supremacy or superiority.

And without getting into the details here which would be even more politically charged than this thread unavoidably is, the general theory that "political correctness" arises from a response to racial essentialism that argues against the outcome ("white supremacy") but not the axioms in which that theory is grounded, or which in in the case of feminism argues against the outcome but not the axioms of male chauvinism, is not I think a particularly surprising or strained one at first glance.  Leaving aside the specific writers that armed the feelings with ideas and language, I generally proposing the following:

a) People that are abused, often are observed becoming the very thing that they hate.  Thus, people respond to abuse with abuse, becoming abusive at a notably higher rate than those not so ill-treated.  There is nothing particular hard to understand about how injustice damages ones trust in justice.
b) When you are steeped in a particular cultural paradigm, it's often very difficult to notice the framework for it.  It's very natural when presented implicitly with A, and then the claim that A->B, to argue against the implication and not the factuality of the initial claim.  It just becomes an unconsidered fact.  For example, when someone claims, "Whites are superior to blacks.", and you are living in a world where the social reality of being black versus being white is so self-evident, it's very difficult to question the claim on the basis that maybe race is principally an artificial social construct and much of what you think of as defining who you are isn't really part of your skin color or any other physical part of you.  And, even when you do accept that it is, it's very hard to avoid coming back to that idea of essential difference and reinventing it. 
c) The same tempting beliefs that led people to propose white supremacy or male supremacy, are still present in people who are arguing against those beliefs.


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## Umbran (Sep 22, 2015)

Bedrockgames said:


> Umbran I only brought up tone because you were advocating the utility of shaming and guilting people.




Nope.  You brought up tone when you referred to "bludgeoning".  You said, "I've just never really seen it help anything. It is either a bludgeon to bang people over the head with ..."  

This is very much trying to discount the concept based not upon its content, but upon how it is used.  That, right there, is the Tone Argument.  The Tone Argument comes up a lot in other areas of social equality - the "Not All Men" argument is really underneath a tone argument.  




> You seemed to be making the claim that using cultural appropriation as a bludgeon was effective (in response to me saying it tends to result in bludgeoning or confusion).




I don't think the *utility* of shame and guilt are in question.  Broadly speaking, they *work*, they are effective.  We are primates, and our psyches are built with these elements precisely to help control our behavior.  They are a natural part of our social behavior.

When use of these things is appropriate is a separate question from their effectiveness  



> I am not going to get into a debate over fallacies..




'I don't care if my argument is actually valid"?  Really?



> but I think here discussion of tone is relevant.




It is... and it isn't.  It is only relevant if the other party already views you as an ally, and is looking to you for guidance on how to reach others.  

Before you are recognized as an ally, attempting the Tone Argument is basically telling them, "You shouldn't tell me that, because it makes me feel bad."  In that statement, you take what they feel is a real problem, and you redirect discussion to be one about *your* feelings, rather than their problem.  That's at best disrespectful, at worst darned manipulative - do you realize that abusive relationships are often based on the same dynamic?


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## Bedrockgames (Sep 22, 2015)

Umbran said:


> Nope.  You brought up tone when you referred to "bludgeoning".  You said, "I've just never really seen it help anything. It is either a bludgeon to bang people over the head with ..."
> 
> This is very much trying to discount the concept based not upon its content, but upon how it is used.  That, right there, is the Tone Argument.  It amounts to, "DOn't tell me that, it makes me feel bad," which, really, is irrelevant.  They have a problem, and you try to make the discussion about your feelings?  Why do they care?
> .




This was about its effectiveness as a tool and model for understanding. You can invoke the tone argument all you want, but I think both how the concept gets used by people (which includes tone but isn't limited to it) and its general murkiness are quite relevant to the discussion. Tone does matter. It does have an impact. I do think it is important. But that isn't why I brought up bludgeoning. I was saying I see it used as a rhetorical bludgeon but to no other real effect. At least in discussions outside of sociology. That isn't an appeal to emotion. That is a fair criticism of an idea that claims to be more than a rhetorical device. It is supposed to be an effective model for understanding cultural exchange and for improving interactions between cultures. I don't see it doing either once it moves outside a highly specialized field. And I think it does more harm than good, as we can see by the premise of the OP which advocates for fences and walls between cultures on the grounds that it always leads to harm when white people borrow from other cultures. 

In fact I would argue that your post here is much more of an appeal to emotion because it tries to frame people who bring up the issue of tone as thin-skinned and weak (i.e. "DOn't tell me that, it makes me feel bad...."). Again, I am not terribly interested in debating logical fallacies, since I had enough of that in college, but they are over invoked in these discussions and I don't think the tone argument fallacy is all that persuasive here. Of course if you think it is you are free to ignore my point regarding CA being used as a bludgeon. And if you think that makes me thin skinned or something, that is fair. I am not terribly concerned about that.

Also let's keep in mind this whole topic is built around concern for peoples' feelings. The whole reason cultural appropriation is invoked in the first place is because presumably people have been hurt by others using their cultural symbols in ways they consider to be offensive or inappropriate. I don't know, I think  it is reasonable for both sides in such a debate to point to concern about tone and call for greater empathy (this is one reason I've been careful to emphasize that cultural sensitivity is still important).


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## Bedrockgames (Sep 22, 2015)

Umbran said:


> Before you are recognized as an ally, attempting the Tone Argument is basically telling them, "You shouldn't tell me that, because it makes me feel bad."  In that statement, you take what they feel is a real problem, and you redirect discussion to be one about *your* feelings, rather than their problem.  That's at best disrespectful, at worst darned manipulative - do you realize that abusive relationships are often based on the same dynamic?




Umbran I don't think I've deflected much. I've responded to each of your points as you've raised them. Nor do I think I made it about my feelings. The only time I brought up my feelings was with one of your posts, which I felt suggested I was arguing in bad faith.  

I certainly don't think I've been disrespectful to anyone, except perhaps early on in the discusssion when I could have addressed one of the OP's points with more politeness.


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## Bedrockgames (Sep 22, 2015)

Umbran said:


> 'I don't care if my argument is actually valid"?  Really?
> ?




That isn't what I said. Like I said before, if you feel I've been making invalid arguments, feel free to discount them. I've raised a lot of the points beyond just the one about bludgeoning though.


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## Bedrockgames (Sep 22, 2015)

Umbran said:


> I don't think the *utility* of shame and guilt are in question.  Broadly speaking, they *work*, they are effective.  We are primates, and our psyches are built with these elements precisely to help control our behavior.  They are a natural part of our social behavior.




This is an interesting point and I don't think I gave it a fair reply in my initial response. 

I think this is fair to say. I would add that just because something comes natural to primates and just because we are primates, that doesn't mean it is good (or that it is useful). I would also add that something being effective in one instance doesn't mean it is effective in another (nor does being effective mean we ought to do something----kicking a person in the head can be very effective, but I would generally cdvise against it). Shame can certain produce results. But when I questioned its effectiveness as a bludgeon I wasn't thinking whether it was useful at making people feel ashamed and not engaging in behavior. I think CA as a bludgeon is effective at making people feel shame and avoid cultural borrowing, and that is the problem. It isn't an effective tool because it doesn't really do anything to remedy problems surrounding cultural exchange and imbalance, it just creates more of a gulf between cultures because it causes people to avoid stepping out of their own cultural paradigm and into another. It encourages people to remain within their group. At its most extreme, I think you get what the OP is advocating which is blanket condemnation of any culture perceived to be more powerful than another from engaging in that culture (and in my experience it is cultural borrowing that is an important part of getting the more powerful culture to empathize with the less powerful one in the first place). Like I said, I think cultural sensitivity is a good a good thing. I just don't think it is a good thing for us to build walls.


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## Raloc (Sep 23, 2015)

In my experience people concerned about "cultural appropriation" tend to be mostly authoritarians who want to dictate that everyone in the world live by their rules, no argument.


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## Grumpy RPG Reviews (Sep 23, 2015)

Celebrim said:


> But I do there is a direct line of influence, a descent through modification between the 19th century writers and the modern movement along multiple lines right back to Condorcet, and from that you can see everything from White Man's Burden to Identity Politics and how different writers shaped that thought to where we are now.




I had to look up Condorcet, as I was not familiar with the name – and I am not certain what to make of your use of his name here.

In any event, while I disagree with your statements I respect your position and the passion with which you argue your case. 

Bruce Cordell wrote the _Thunder Plains_ and Elizabeth Bear in her column _Writing the Other_ (where she asserts that white people writing for minorities is “simple”) and even in her story _Shoggoths in Bloom_, where she writes a main character who is a black man; in these cases, white people are writing stories which purport to “speak” for members of minority cultures. I advocated caution and that restraint equals good manners. They are far deeper into “the honkey’s burden” territory than I am. 



Celebrim said:


> Leaving aside the specific writers that armed the feelings with ideas and language, I generally proposing the following:




I have no inherent issues with these conclusions, merely where you eventually go with them. 



Celebrim said:


> c) The same tempting beliefs that led people to propose white supremacy or male supremacy, are still present in people who are arguing against those beliefs.




This is probably an accident of language and the use of political terminology. I am not concerned that a member of a minority group will somehow make my life less white. However, I fully acknowledge the complaints raised by members of minority groups that “entitled” white people are ripping them off. At the very least, as a matter of etiquette, to say nothing of being decent human beings, we should stop doing that.  



Raloc said:


> In my experience people concerned about "cultural appropriation" tend to be mostly authoritarians who want to dictate that everyone in the world live by their rules, no argument.




That is overstating the case by a considerable amount. The fact I posted the columns - original and revised - here for comments is a statement I wanted dialogue, if not expressly asking for an argument.


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## Raloc (Sep 23, 2015)

Well it wasn't directed at you - more so at the perpetually-offended types that bandy around "cultural appropriation" as a serious problem, when it's largely them creating the problem in the first place. Not to mention how ridiculous it is that these people feel the need to "white knight" for people who never asked them to.


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## Celebrim (Sep 24, 2015)

Grumpy RPG Reviews said:


> I had to look up Condorcet, as I was not familiar with the name – and I am not certain what to make of your use of his name here.




He's the founder of Progressivism.  Pretty much any "progressive" philosophy, including some regressive retro-feudal philosophies that think of themselves as "progressive", has its roots in the think of Condorcet.  



> They are far deeper into “the honkey’s burden” territory than I am.




There is that racism again.  Also, you don't even appear to be using the term correctly.



> This is probably an accident of language and the use of political terminology. I am not concerned that a member of a minority group will somehow make my life less white. However, I fully acknowledge the complaints raised by members of minority groups that “entitled” white people are ripping them off. At the very least, as a matter of etiquette, to say nothing of being decent human beings, we should stop doing that.




I don't even know where you got that from what you quoted, but do you realize how racist the idea of "making my life less white" is?  I mean, why is that even a thing and what do you mean by that?  What are these "white things" you are referring to anyway?   I get that you are saying that you aren't concerned with it, whatever that would mean, but what things were you thinking of as "white", and would you ever occur to you to write a sentence about making a the life of a minority group "less brown"?  

What I actually wrote was that particularly if you view "white" and "brown" or "black" or whatever as distinctive and exclusive categories, then it is very tempting to think that for whatever reason you belong to the superior one.  This is particularly tempting to do whenever someone asserts otherwise and that they are in the superior category.   It's instinctive.  As such, you see a lot of oppressed groups, but particularly racially oppressed groups, asserting the moral and intellectual superiority of whatever their group is compared to the white group.  Often ironically this will be asserted on the basis of white racism which brings us back to that whole racial essentialist idea, that ones race is ones inescapable destiny.  And you see parallel ideas arising with some feminists.  And so forth.   

Whereas on the other hand, if you are inclined to think that race "isn't a thing", and rather that despite differences in peoples melanin and other outward markers, we all have basically the same capacities, the same feelings, the same instincts, and so forth then this is a an incredibly powerful defense against thinking you are inherently better than someone else on account of race.  Thus the inherent danger in buying into racial essentialism, even if with the best of motivations.  



> That is overstating the case by a considerable amount.




Well they sure as heck aren't usually libertarians.  The followers of Adorno and Marcuse aren't exactly known for thinking society needs to be left to its own devices.  The core of Condorcet's progressive ideology is that everyone needs to be improved on.  It's not a long jump to "whether they like it or not".  I suggest you read "A Critique of Pure Tolerance."  

UPDATE: I got snippy with a parting shot in a previous version of this post.


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## Grumpy RPG Reviews (Sep 24, 2015)

Race, in America, is both a real thing and more social in construct than genetic makeup. It would be foolish to pretend such a thing does not exist.
I used the term "hunky" to replace "white" in "white man's burden" because I am white and I find the term funny.
I am not arguing anything I have argued for racial superiority, white pride or anything related to those cancerous concepts. This is nothing more than nothing less than an attempt to respect minorities and their  complains about cultural appropriation.


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## Umbran (Sep 24, 2015)

Bedrockgames said:


> That isn't what I said.




I find it to be an accurate paraphrase of what I saw on the page.  You're making an argument, and you are not interested in or willing to discuss the logical validity of that argument?  



> Like I said before, if you feel I've been making invalid arguments, feel free to discount them.




That's pretty much what I'm doing - publicly noting the logical (and some of the communications) issues with your position.



> I've raised a lot of the points beyond just the one about bludgeoning though.




The *number* of points you raise is not really relevant.  A ton of weak arguments sums up to a weak argument.


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## Bedrockgames (Sep 24, 2015)

Umbran said:


> I find it to be an accurate paraphrase of what I saw on the page.  You're making an argument, and you are not interested in or willing to discuss the logical validity of that argument?




Like I said, I have no interest in debating fallacies because I think in gaming discussions they are frequently overused and mishandled. But you are invoking an informal logical fallacy and using it to accuse me of making an invalid argument. That isn't what informal fallacies address. Formal fallacies address logical validity, informal fallacies address persuasiveness and failing to prove your point. Pointing to fallacious logic is fine. But merely naming a fallacy using it like a hammer isn't terribly productive. I've pointed to a number of logical fallacies in this discussion myself, but I've never felt the need to invoke them by name like that. It is a lot more productive in my view to take each argument and explain why you think there is a logic flaw there.


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## Bedrockgames (Sep 24, 2015)

Umbran said:


> The *number* of points you raise is not really relevant.  A ton of weak arguments sums up to a weak argument.




Well, we just disagree on this point. To me it seems like you are focusing on one or two points and ignoring stronger ones. I don't know that there is much either of us can say to persuade the other though. In my view, I've made plenty of sound arguments and a few weak ones. Certainly i haven't put them into logical form or refined them as good as they could be, as this is an online discussion where people react in real time. But I find over the course of these discussions points do get refined and you can start to see some tangible, logical positions emerging. But this is a pretty meta-discussion a this point.


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## Bedrockgames (Sep 24, 2015)

Grumpy RPG Reviews said:


> Bruce Cordell wrote the _Thunder Plains_ and Elizabeth Bear in her column _Writing the Other_ (where she asserts that white people writing for minorities is “simple”) and even in her story _Shoggoths in Bloom_, where she writes a main character who is a black man; in these cases, white people are writing stories which purport to “speak” for members of minority cultures. I advocated caution and that restraint equals good manners. They are far deeper into “the honkey’s burden” territory than I am.
> t.




I am unfamiliar with Bear's writing, so I can't really address her in particular. I guess where I have concern here isn't saying a bit of caution when dealing with other cultures is called for (that seems pretty reasonable to me). What troubles me, and maybe I am misreading your position, is you seem to be saying something that is close to "white people shouldn't borrow from these cultures or try to write minority characters". Again, I may be totally misreading you. To me though this seems like it closes us off to each other. I doubt that me trying to write from the point of view of a minority character is going to be as accurate or authentic as a person in that minority group doing so. But I feel like it is an important step toward empathizing with people. Granted if I am a racist who uses that characterization to present them negatively or if I am just grossly insensitive, that warrants criticism. But otherwise I would see it as a good thing (in my view it is good for writers to try to see things from the points of view of different people). My other worry here is it feels like we are creating this gulf where we can't ever truly know each other. Sort of like the old ballad by Kipling "Oh, the East is East, and the West is West, and never the Twain shall meet...". As I pointed out earlier I am in in an inter-racial/intercultural marriage and am the product of intercultural household. I think this kind of thinking creates an illusion of distance that really separates people and divides them further. 

Another concern I have is, this seems to really kind of be about sophistication. And the people who don't have a sophisticated understanding of other cultures, not necessarily a negative or prejudicial one, are the folks who get hammered by the accusation of Cultural Appropriation. That means your well educated, privileged white person is going to have a pretty easy time navigating CA concerns, but someone who maybe didn't have the benefits of money and a four year degree or masters program, is going to be less likely to have encountered some of these concepts in depth. Granted you can develop that understanding without college or a masters program, but I do think there is a disparity there.


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## Celebrim (Sep 24, 2015)

"It didn’t come from the government down...There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no!...You must understand that our civilization is so vast that we can’t have our minorities upset and stirred. Ask yourself, what do we want in this country above all? People want to be happy, isn’t that right?...Colored people don’t like Little Black Sambo.  Burn it.  White people don’t feel good about Uncle Tom’s Cabin.  Burn it.  Someone’s written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs?  The cigarette people are weeping?  Burn the book.  Serenity, Montag. Peace, Montag.  Take your fight outside.  Better yet, to the incinerator.” - Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

That was written in 1953 when people were laying the intellectual groundwork for your good intentioned outrage.

Today, not ironically and quite appropriately, what he wrote also requires a "trigger warning".


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## Grumpy RPG Reviews (Sep 24, 2015)

Again, I disagree with you Celebrim, but you are giving the most interesting argument I've heard in ages.


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## Celebrim (Sep 24, 2015)

Grumpy RPG Reviews said:


> Again, I disagree with you Celebrim, but you are giving the most interesting argument I've heard in ages.




Well, that's probably the nicest compliment I've been paid since someone told me that arguing with me was like taking a 2x4 to the face.

I hope though that it doesn't quite feel like that in this case.


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## Ovinomancer (Sep 24, 2015)

Just to step in here...



Umbran said:


> I find it to be an accurate paraphrase of what I saw on the page.  You're making an argument, and you are not interested in or willing to discuss the logical validity of that argument?



A charitable reading of his comment would be that he doesn't want to go down the path of increasingly minute point making about who's fallacy is bigger.  




> That's pretty much what I'm doing - publicly noting the logical (and some of the communications) issues with your position.



Actually... I didn't say anything when you first made the fallacy argument because I was hoping it would just go away, but you misused both the Tone Argument fallacy and the Appeal to Emotion fallacy.  You misused the Tone Argument fallacy because, for it to be an actual informal fallacy, the comment on tone needs to be used as a stand in for arguments against.   In other words, you substitute a comment on tone instead of addressing the argument.  What actually happened was the bedrock commented that he thought your combative tone wasn't helpful, and then went on to directly address your points.  In that context, his comment on your tone wasn't a fallacious argument because it wasn't being used in place of an argument -- it was being used to comment on how he felt about your tone. 

The appeal to emotion fallacy (specifically appeal to fear) might still be valid if the arguer uses it to dispute the validity of the theory.  Instead, I see them discussing it's actual use.  You made the argument that the comments on usage applied to the idea, but that wasn't actually presented.  They may still do that, or I may not recall an instance where they did, but I think the jury is still out on this one.




> The *number* of points you raise is not really relevant.  A ton of weak arguments sums up to a weak argument.



In closing, this is actually a formal fallacy -- the fallacy of composition.  That states that you cannot impute the traits of the individual points in a group to the entire group.  In this case, many weak points may indeed lead to a strong argument, and unless and until you address that, you can't categorically state that a ton of weak arguments sums to a weak argument without committing the fallacy.

All of this is to show that perhaps bedrockgames was wise to not want to litigate fallacies.  I'm quite sure that you'd disagree with my points here on your fallacies or misuse of them (although I stand by them with my long practice of using them in debates), but that just leads down the rabbit hole.  I'll freely agree that I'm entirely wrong about all of this, and just a victim of internet vapors, if you'll not start a fallacy war and just address the arguments (which I don't think are weak).


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## S'mon (Sep 25, 2015)

Umbran said:


> Yes.  But, what would you prefer?  That we *ignore* that we might be hurting someone?




I'd say it was a balance of interests. Claiming hurt shouldn't be an absolute trump card. I remember talking with a Saami legal representative about this. He didn't want people in 
London wearing Saami dress or selling Saami dolls. I don't think that's reasonable, 
whatever hurt he claims. His claim that (non-Saami) Finnish tour guides in Lapland shouldn't wear Saami dress seemed somewhat more reasonable.

Totem animals - lots of cultures have totem animals, just because yours happens to do so does 
not give you a monopoly on the concept, and other representations of totem animals should not have to conform to your own culture's ideas.


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## Celebrim (Sep 25, 2015)

Bedrockgames said:


> I doubt that me trying to write from the point of view of a minority character is going to be as accurate or authentic as a person in that minority group doing so.




Perhaps.  It depends on if you feel there is a such a thing as an essential minority experience.  What you probably can't do if you are a white person from rural Minnesota is write with the immediatecy and depth of experience about a black character from Brooklyn as you could if you really were a black person from Brooklyn.  There might indeed be shared experiences and voice you'd have being a minority in Brooklyn that weren't immediately obvious to someone who was from rural Minnesota.  Your voice wouldn't be authentic because it wasn't.  But notice how very different this claim is than the one I'm supposed to make. 

1) It doesn't claim that there is an essential common "black" experience.  It doesn't put an entire group of people in a single box which quite notably, we get to put the label on and decide what is "authentic" (or if not us, then the racial spokesperson we appoint).  The ultimate end of that sort of thinking is to say that black criminals are authentic real blacks, but a black entrepreneur or a black suburbanite gamer nerd is not an authentic blacks.   And you do hear lots of racists saying that, from the cultural studies professors that claim that those aren't authentic voices, the political pundits that call black politicians 'Uncle Toms' and 'House Slaves' if their beliefs don't conform to what they consider 'authentic' black beliefs, to the kids that would pass my table in high school and sneer at my friends for being 'oreos' and trying to be 'too white' as if it wasn't authentic for a black person to love books, do their homework, try to stay out of trouble, and generally be anything but a criminal.
2) It's not an absolute claim.  I'm not claiming a writer can't imagine lives other than their own nor discouraging people to try.  
3) It's not a racist claim.  I'm not claiming that the reason a person can't write authentically about another person is skin color.  The writer from rural Minnesota would have just as hard of a time writing in an authentic voice about authentic experiences of anyone from Brooklyn regardless of face.  The black writer in Brooklyn likewise might well have a hard time speaking in the voice of a black family living in rural Minnesota.  Indeed, we might expect that the writer in rural Minnesota could conceive either from personal experience or extrapolation better what that situation might be like and how his community would react - positively or negatively I can't imagine because I didn't grow up in rural Minnesota.
4) It's not a double standard: Did you notice how this point is only raised in one direction?  Whenever it comes up, it's invariably about the inability of white people to write minority characters.  But the same standard being raised doesn't claim that black people can't write authentic white characters.  That standard says that privilege (a word twisted often so badly to Newspeak style mean its opposite) prevents whites from speaking of minorities, but minorities can speak of whites authentically.  That double standard isn't the only reason that the idea promotes hatred - I mean it's racism, so it tends to promote hatred period - but it's a big part of it.



> Granted if I am a racist who uses that characterization to present them negatively or if I am just grossly insensitive, that warrants criticism.




I half agree, but you really have to be careful there.  Because when you remove tolerance and understanding from the equation here, the way that tends to be interpreted - and the way it is continually interpreted in our present society - is that it is ok to portray "minorities" if you portray them in a completely positive fashion.  And what that tends to mean is that it's only ok to portray minorities as fully positive characters without significant flaws because to show a minority character as flawed is racist.  Likewise what it tends to mean is that if you are doing comedy of some sort, the person doing the broad comedy has to be a white male.  But I put it to you that this isn't exactly a big step forward.  What it tends to mean is that we've gone from a society where in situation comedy, the broad comedy is done by a bimbo character ("I Love Lucy" being an interesting example on several levels) to a situation where every situation comedy has a 'himbo' father figure.  We aren't actually attacking stereotypes or creating more real characters.  We are just creating new stereotypes.  That's not progress.  And even wholly positive stereotypes can be damaging, because they create the impression not only of falsehood, but that any person of that race that doesn't live up to high standard has something wrong and threatening about them.  You tend to end up in a situation where a person without a lot of multiracial experience who sees anyone that doesn't look like a Huxtable thinks that they must be a dangerous thug or in some other way anti-social.

You mention Kipling later, a writer that tends to send the cultural studies people into fits because he decidedly doesn't create singularly positive romantic views of other groups nor condemn his own group as uniformly devils.  But close reading of the guy shows he's a lot more subversive than people used to only seeing "minorities" (as if Hindu's in India were a minority group) presented in entirely flattering ways.  He's actually repeatedly attacking the assumptions of his own culture.  His heroes tend to sit astride both worlds - Kim across England and India or Mowgli between civilization and the jungle or Sir Purun Das between Western and Eastern philosophy - and ultimately not only do they tend to choose to forsake Englishness, but Kipling vindicates them for it as choosing the better part.  He's often explicitly attacking the values and even political policies of his own nation.  He deserves a nuanced reading.  But he doesn't get one because he's decidedly not 'politically correct'.  He doesn't uniformly condemn England.  He doesn't uniformly praise India.    



> My other worry here is it feels like we are creating this gulf where we can't ever truly know each other.




The whole theory proceeds from the idea that there is this gulf where we can't ever truly know each other.  That's one of its bedrock beliefs.   No one can "walk a mile in another's shoes".  No one can empathize enough to understand.  No one has common experience.  No one can speak to another's situation.  All you can do is confess your inability to know and understand and shut up (and take direction from the self-appointed "authentic" voices).  Separating and dividing is what it is all about.  It's the same group of idiots - black and white - that were always insulting my friends for being "oreos" or "zebras" because they were trying to be "white" (whatever the hell that means) promoting this damnable idea.



> Another concern I have is, this seems to really kind of be about sophistication.




No. No. No.  Just no.  I mean it is a sophistication, but its not that getting the right sort of education makes you immune and allows your privilege and education to see more clearly than the ignorant racist country bumpkins.  That's what they'd like you to believe, but notice how self-serving and how classist that ultimately is.  They'd like to give the 2%er's in the Hamptons or in the academic Ivory Towers the privilege to ignore this once they've kowtowed and performed their religious absolutions because they are the 2%er's.  Of course they want the privilege to ignore their own rules.  But even without getting into a rant about how so many that think they are educated don't have a real education, nothing about having lived in the ivory tower gives you any kind of authentic understanding of anything except living in the ivory tower.  Believe me, I've been in academia.  Got the published papers to prove it.  It's filled with just as many ignorant idiots as any dusty warehouse I've ever swept.  Education is no defense against normal human stupidity, and to the extent that it inculcates arrogance its arguably a wide open temptation to stupidity and not a bulwark.  I trust your average construction worker to have a more nuanced understanding of race and race relations than your average academic, because he has to make his theories work for him on a daily basis.  It isn't proof against racism, and indeed sometimes it creates a daily friction and chaffing that shows up in racist frustration by all parties involved, but by golly it's real and not a fantasy.

You sir shouldn't back down in the slightest from some racial essentialist whose biggest encounters with people of a different race are on TV as if they understood race.  90% of these white knights are the sort that are all publically social justice, but privately are like "This black family moved just a 1/2 mile from here.  I'm afraid we are going to have to sell the house.  Not racist of course, just property values you understand"   And no, those quotes aren't made up or hypothetical.


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## Bedrockgames (Sep 25, 2015)

Celebrim said:


> Perhaps.  It depends on if you feel there is a such a thing as an essential minority experience.  What you probably can't do if you are a white person from rural Minnesota is write with the immediatecy and depth of experience about a black character from Brooklyn as you could if you really were a black person from Brooklyn.  There might indeed be shared experiences and voice you'd have being a minority in Brooklyn that weren't immediately obvious to someone who was from rural Minnesota.  Your voice wouldn't be authentic because it wasn't.  But notice how very different this claim is than the one I'm supposed to make.
> .




My point was, a lot of this seems to be more about accuracy in portrayal and that I don't think inaccuracy on its own is an evil. We could debate all day long the feasibility of giving an accurate account of something from an outside perspective. I guess what I am trying to say here, rather than draw some kind of line about what is and isn't possible for writers, is to to say there isn't anything wrong with making the attempt.


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## Bedrockgames (Sep 25, 2015)

Celebrim said:


> You mention Kipling later, a writer that tends to send the cultural studies people into fits because he decidedly doesn't create singularly positive romantic views of other groups nor condemn his own group as uniformly devils.  But close reading of the guy shows he's a lot more subversive than people used to only seeing "minorities" (as if Hindu's in India were a minority group) presented in entirely flattering ways.  He's actually repeatedly attacking the assumptions of his own culture.  His heroes tend to sit astride both worlds - Kim across England and India or Mowgli between civilization and the jungle or Sir Purun Das between Western and Eastern philosophy - and ultimately not only do they tend to choose to forsake Englishness, but Kipling vindicates them for it as choosing the better part.  He's often explicitly attacking the values and even political policies of his own nation.  He deserves a nuanced reading.  But he doesn't get one because he's decidedly not 'politically correct'.  He doesn't uniformly condemn England.  He doesn't uniformly praise India.
> .




I wasn't commenting on Kipling one way or the other. I mentioned him because the "never the twain shall meet line" seemed apropos.


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## Celebrim (Sep 25, 2015)

Bedrockgames said:


> I guess what I am trying to say here, rather than draw some kind of line about what is and isn't possible for writers, is to to say there isn't anything wrong with making the attempt.




I'm totally on board with that.


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## Bedrockgames (Sep 25, 2015)

Celebrim said:


> No. No. No.  Just no.  I mean it is a sophistication, but its not that getting the right sort of education makes you immune and allows your privilege and education to see more clearly than the ignorant racist country bumpkins.
> .




That wasn't at all what I was arguing. I was saying this is like knowing how to talk about fine wines. It becomes a test of class and upbringing. It isn't necessarily a reflection of how racist or bad a person is, just their ability to navigate discussions using certain words and concepts.


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## Celebrim (Sep 25, 2015)

Bedrockgames said:


> I wasn't commenting on Kipling one way or the other. I mentioned him because the "never the twain shall meet line" seemed apropos.




I know.  And I agree. 

But even quoting Kipling without condemning him will be counted as proof positive in some circles that you are a racist.   

Anyway, Kipling didn't agree that "never the twain" can meet.  What he actually wrote was condemning that:

"Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God's great Judgment Seat:
*But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth!*"

I've said before that "cultural appropriation" and its surrounding intellectual framework is a strand nakedly 19th century "progressive" racism, and I meant it.  Kipling was speaking out against its philosophies, just as I am here and in the same language, long before it ever was labeled "political correctness".


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## Celebrim (Sep 25, 2015)

Bedrockgames said:


> That wasn't at all what I was arguing. I was saying this is like knowing how to talk about fine wines. It becomes a test of class and upbringing. It isn't necessarily a reflection of how racist or bad a person is, just their ability to navigate discussions using certain words and concepts.




Ok, yes, then I agree and am on the same page as you.

This is what is called "cocktail liberalism".  You have an education sufficient to allow you to pass as a member of the right social class, as being "our sort of people", when at an exclusive cocktail party.  Arguably, college education exists primarily for that reason, and not the reason the average middle class person assumes - to help prepare them for a job.

Having at least that much education myself and been invited on that account to a number of such cocktail parties, some of the worst racism I've ever encounter was in situations like that.


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## Bedrockgames (Sep 25, 2015)

Celebrim said:


> I know.  And I agree.
> 
> But even quoting Kipling without condemning him will be counted as proof positive in some circles that you are a racist.
> 
> ...




I wasn't suggesting that the whole poem can be reduced to that one line. It just captured an assumption that seems to be embedded in the concept of CA.


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## Celebrim (Sep 25, 2015)

Bedrockgames said:


> I wasn't suggesting that the whole poem can be reduced to that one line. It just captured an assumption that seems to be embedded in the concept of CA.




Ok, well in that case, either by art or accident you were 100% spot on.  I just wanted to make clear to your or any other reader that it wasn't Kipling that was voicing admiration for that idea, and that in fact Kipling was attacking it.


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## Bedrockgames (Sep 25, 2015)

Celebrim said:


> Ok, well in that case, either by art or accident you were 100% spot on.  I just wanted to make clear to your or any other reader that it wasn't Kipling that was voicing admiration for that idea, and that in fact Kipling was attacking it.




It was by accident. I haven't given Kipling much thought since I had to take two required lit. courses. That line just stuck in my head. I have to admit I am not much into poetry or literature.


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## Bagpuss (Sep 30, 2015)

Did you ever make this vlog?


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## Grumpy RPG Reviews (Sep 30, 2015)

I have been busy with real life issues and work - I am at a business confrence right now - and hope to make the vlog this weekend.


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## The Yellow Pill (Sep 30, 2015)

Celebrim said:


> Ok, yes, then I agree and am on the same page as you.
> 
> This is what is called "cocktail liberalism".  You have an education sufficient to allow you to pass as a member of the right social class, as being "our sort of people", when at an exclusive cocktail party.  Arguably, college education exists primarily for that reason, and not the reason the average middle class person assumes - to help prepare them for a job.
> 
> Having at least that much education myself and been invited on that account to a number of such cocktail parties, some of the worst racism I've ever encounter was in situations like that.




One of the reasons I'm a fan of Ruby Payne why I believe her program works time and time again is it acknowledges the hidden rules of economic class and how it is most often that - and not education, skill or experience - that keeps people locked in their current economic class. Her programs mainly center on teaching those hidden rules to people in poverty and though it's amazing seeing how effective those programs can be, it's also a little depressing about the state of things if you think too hard about it. 

In fact, if you look at the roots of many "progressive" causes, particularly those rooted in either socialist or social-engineering schools of thought, it's scary just how prolific the elitist and classist roots are. A number of the suffragettes were basically arguing that lowly working class men shouldn't have a say in government before women of class and culture do.


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## Bedrockgames (Sep 30, 2015)

The Yellow Pill said:


> One of the reasons I'm a fan of Ruby Payne why I believe her program works time and time again is it acknowledges the hidden rules of economic class and how it is most often that - and not education, skill or experience - that keeps people locked in their current economic class. Her programs mainly center on teaching those hidden rules to people in poverty and though it's amazing seeing how effective those programs can be, it's also a little depressing about the state of things if you think too hard about it.
> 
> In fact, if you look at the roots of many "progressive" causes, particularly those rooted in either socialist or social-engineering schools of thought, it's scary just how prolific the elitist and classist roots are. A number of the suffragettes were basically arguing that lowly working class men shouldn't have a say in government before women of class and culture do.





I just want to be clear that I am not throwing my hat in here with conservatives or anti-progressives. I am a liberal and I am a democrat. I may even vote for Bernie Sanders this election. I just think there is room in the hobby for lots of different points of view and that when we get hung up on esoteric concepts like CA it creates more barriers between people than anything else. I think too often discussion about media or gaming is framed as a zero sum game between the left and the right. The thinking feels like: if we can just get out all the liberals, or just get out all the conservatives, or if we just hit them hard enough this one time, they'll go away and things will be perfect. 

I guess my other issue is this really seems to be about shaming people in a negative way. The Monte Cook games incident came up earlier and as a case in point I think there was a lot of attempts to shame the company into doing something different. There was also a lot of dialogue. But the shaming, particularly when it was directed primarily toward Shanna Germain who has been nothing but open and accepting of everyone, troubled me. It felt cruel. It felt like people were high on feeling righteous. I think there were also plenty of people coming to the table making real points and expressing real concerns. But there was an ugliness that emerged there as well. That kind of shaming I simply can't get behind or support. Particularly when you are talking about something as everyday as gaming. When I hear people say "He'll think twice before trying that again"....I find that a very chilling mindset to contemplate. I don't think that is a healthy way to encourage change. If Monte Cook is only avoiding things because he's afraid of how people react, that seems like an almost coercive situation. I mean, if someone voices a complaint and he mulls it over and agrees, then decides to make a change, that is cool. The approach that just tries to shame him into another course of action, just feels like bullying to me.


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## The Yellow Pill (Sep 30, 2015)

Nor am I characterizing you as such, and in fact many who would also call themselves liberal Democrats are starting to have serious problems with the SJW mentality. Examples: http://www.spectator.co.uk/features...ys-students-want-the-right-to-be-comfortable/ http://www.vox.com/2015/6/3/8706323/college-professor-afraid

I, likewise, could not be categorized into the Glenn Beck camp, but I do believe the SJW phenomenon isn't just a random bubble of weirdness but can be directly traced back to some of the roots of progressivism, and one of those biggest roots is a hatred of the plebs.


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## Bedrockgames (Sep 30, 2015)

The Yellow Pill said:


> Nor am I characterizing you as such, and in fact many who would also call themselves liberal Democrats are starting to have serious problems with the SJW mentality. Examples: http://www.spectator.co.uk/features...ys-students-want-the-right-to-be-comfortable/ http://www.vox.com/2015/6/3/8706323/college-professor-afraid
> 
> I, likewise, could not be categorized into the Glenn Beck camp, but I do believe the SJW phenomenon isn't just a random bubble of weirdness but can be directly traced back to some of the roots of progressivism, and one of those biggest roots is a hatred of the plebs.




You can find plenty of examples of classism on the right as well. For ages Republicans  were viewed as the party of the wealthy while democrats were viewed as the party of the workers. When I was a kid, being liberal and being working class were strongly linked. I think there really isn't much strong evidence to support the line of causality you claim here. You can always find a person or group in any movement that expressed a particular sentiment in history...that doesn't demonstrate a direct line to behavior today. It doesn't mean it is a legacy of the thing you are pointing to.


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## Bedrockgames (Sep 30, 2015)

The Yellow Pill said:


> A number of the suffragettes were basically arguing that lowly working class men shouldn't have a say in government before women of class and culture do.




I don't know much about this, but your at least going to have to site some primary sources making these statements and some reliable secondary sources demonstrating how widespread they were. I don't normally like to press for sources but this is a sweeping claim and I am going to ignore it if it isn't supported with reputable sources. 

That said, when you go back that far, you get people saying all kinds of terrible things on all sides because people were way less sensitive about others then. But I think the suffragettes were right to demand the vote. Have to admit, I get a 'feminism bad' vibe when one of the first things you raise in your critique of the left is suffragettes behaving badly. I wouldn't want to paint a whole movement as this negative thing even if those sorts of sentiments were expressed by some of their members.


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## The Yellow Pill (Sep 30, 2015)

Bedrockgames said:


> You can find plenty of examples of classism on the right as well. For ages Republicans  were viewed as the party of the wealthy while democrats were viewed as the party of the workers. When I was a kid, being liberal and being working class were strongly linked. I think there really isn't much strong evidence to support the line of causality you claim here. You can always find a person or group in any movement that expressed a particular sentiment in history...that doesn't demonstrate a direct line to behavior today. It doesn't mean it is a legacy of the thing you are pointing to.




First of all, I'm not on anyone's team, so "Republicans do it, too" is a non sequitur. It's even more so since you're talking about party affiliation instead of political philosophy when the parties have criss-crossed on that several times in the country's history. In my lifetime I have watched MANY people in the Great Lakes region where I grew up doggedly stay Democrat because organized labor was their primary voting issue, only to finally go Republican when even that wasn't enough, or when they came to believe that organized labor had turned on them completely. 

My position is a lot more moderate than the suggestion that any insistence on liberal policies is rooted in elitism. What I'm suggesting is that, like all political movements, it's a tapestry of threads and one of those threads is a long running, consistent resentment of the working class. You're saying that the original motivations of some of the movement's founders shouldn't automatically apply have never gone away, but I see the exact same arguments being made when it comes to the "educated" vs. the "uneducated". If you follow morons like Bob Chipman and Jonathan McIntosh you see this ongoing frustration that people who just don't have the right credentials get any say at all in all of this. They can't possibly understand. 

In fact, the argument has been made that the reason liberals tend to hate capitalism so much is precisely because uneducated but hard working folks can gain equal wealth and prestige. Without a PhD? Without even a high school diploma? What kind of world are we living in?

Also, don't confuse concern with the poor for concern for the working class. Democrats literally use the term "middle class" something like 13 times per floor speech (someone counted) but show absolute contempt for everyone whose clock reads 10:45AM right now. As in Rome you had Patricians, Plebs, and slaves; in the US you have the wealthy, the middle class, and the impoverished. Progressives are all about that last group, because they know their place and never forget how much they need those well educated folks looking out for them.


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## Bedrockgames (Sep 30, 2015)

The Yellow Pill said:


> First of all, I'm not on anyone's team, so "Republicans do it, too" is a non sequitur. It's even more so since you're talking about party affiliation instead of political philosophy when the parties have criss-crossed on that several times in the country's history. In my lifetime I have watched MANY people in the Great Lakes region where I grew up doggedly stay Democrat because organized labor was their primary voting issue, only to finally go Republican when even that wasn't enough, or when they came to believe that organized labor had turned on them completely.
> 
> My position is a lot more moderate than the suggestion that any insistence on liberal policies is rooted in elitism. What I'm suggesting is that, like all political movements, it's a tapestry of threads and one of those threads is a long running, consistent resentment of the working class. You're saying that the original motivations of some of the movement's founders shouldn't automatically apply have never gone away, but I see the exact same arguments being made when it comes to the "educated" vs. the "uneducated". If you follow morons like Bob Chipman and Jonathan McIntosh you see this ongoing frustration that people who just don't have the right credentials get any say at all in all of this. They can't possibly understand.
> 
> ...




No, I am saying you have to demonstrate causality and you haven't done that. Nor have you backed up your initial assertion that it was this hugely prevalent feature of the early progressive movement (it may well have been, but that is at least step on in your argument). You are just asserting that its the case, because you think a handful of feminists look down on working class men. Lots of people at that time looked down on working class men. 

Either way though, I think it would be a mistake to derail the thread by debating this point. You obviously have a belief about this, and I am unlikely to dissuade you. I believe other wise. I think most people have a lot more sincerity in their motives (on both the left and the right) than your last paragraph suggests. What I can say is my liberalism does not stem from wanting people to know their place or viewing myself as some kind of paternal class (I am not upper or even middle class). I believe in social programs because I know a lot of people who are helped by them and who need them to get by. I also believe, due to the religious tradition I was raised in, that we have an obligation to take care of the least amongst us. Living in a poor city in Mass, and knowing liberals from wealthier communities, I can say I've encountered snobbery on the left, but I don't think it originates from the motives or lineage you describe in your post. However the vast majority of liberals I know (even those living in nice neighborhoods) are not snobs or classists.


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## The Yellow Pill (Sep 30, 2015)

Bedrockgames said:


> I don't know much about this, but your at least going to have to site some primary sources making these statements and some reliable secondary sources demonstrating how widespread they were. I don't normally like to press for sources but this is a sweeping claim and I am going to ignore it if it isn't supported with reputable sources.
> 
> That said, when you go back that far, you get people saying all kinds of terrible things on all sides because people were way less sensitive about others then. But I think the suffragettes were right to demand the vote. Have to admit, I get a 'feminism bad' vibe when one of the first things you raise in your critique of the left is suffragettes behaving badly. I wouldn't want to paint a whole movement as this negative thing even if those sorts of sentiments were expressed by some of their members.




Of course the suffragettes were right to demand the vote. Please.

Here are your sources:
http://www.npr.org/2011/07/13/137681070/for-stanton-all-women-were-not-created-equal
http://manchesterhistorian.com/2014/the-suffragette-split/
http://the-toast.net/tag/suffragettes/


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## Bedrockgames (Sep 30, 2015)

The Yellow Pill said:


> Here are your sources:
> http://www.npr.org/2011/07/13/137681070/for-stanton-all-women-were-not-created-equal
> http://manchesterhistorian.com/2014/the-suffragette-split/
> http://the-toast.net/tag/suffragettes/




I appreciate you linking these. I am presently working through them. My initial thoughts though are these seem to indicate not a hugely prevalent strain of thought that came to dominate the movement over time, but that they reflected existing class and racial divisions in american society that were current with the movements. This is like when I first started looking at the early labor movement stuff and discovered, to my dismay, an awful lot of racist rhetoric. The question for me though is one of causality and lineage. It is one thing for a movement to have its genesis at a time when racism or classism was pretty common and for that to be reflected in the movement at that time. It is another to say that it carried those ideas over time even as they came to be less prevalent in society. I'm not seeing the case for that. I'll take a deeper look at the links though.


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## Lwaxy (Oct 2, 2015)

This has gone too far into politics by now. Please return to issues in RPGs specifically.


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## Grumpy RPG Reviews (Oct 2, 2015)

This kind of topic is always intensely and inheritly  political. That said, to keep anyone from justifibly closing this thread, perhaps we should just focus on cultural appropriation as it applies to role playing games.


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## Bedrockgames (Oct 2, 2015)

That seems fair.


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## Grumpy RPG Reviews (Oct 2, 2015)

Will someone please make counterarguments to my column, but only in terms of the column itself or how CA applies to RPGs.


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## Bedrockgames (Oct 2, 2015)

Grumpy can you repost the most recent version of the column (having trouble finding it in the thread)?


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## Ovinomancer (Oct 2, 2015)

Grumpy RPG Reviews said:


> This kind of topic is always intensely and inheritly  political. That said, to keep anyone from justifibly closing this thread, perhaps we should just focus on cultural appropriation as it applies to role playing games.




Cultural appropriate is a political theory, though.  Unless you're going to confine the discussion to entirely within RPGs, like one RPG culture borrowing from another RPG culture (like Thay culturally appropriating form the Sword Coast), I don't see how you can avoid the political aspects here.  Your article is deeply political in nature.


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## Grumpy RPG Reviews (Oct 2, 2015)

I can fully believe Thay culturally appropriated all the worst characteristics of the Sword Coast but only the worst characteristics, none of the charity or other virtues. Just the a****** qualities. Because that's the way Thay rolls.
In any case, please let us just try to focus on the issue as it pertains to role playing games rather than chasing rabbits into real world politics.


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## Bedrockgames (Oct 2, 2015)

Grumpy RPG Reviews said:


> I can fully believe Thay culturally appropriated all the worst characteristics of the Sword Coast but only the worst characteristics, none of the charity or other virtues. Just the a****** qualities. Because that's the way Thay rolls.
> In any case, please let us just try to focus on the issue as it pertains to role playing games rather than chasing rabbits into real world politics.




I am not terribly familiar with Thay, so I don't know much about that specific case, but taking the worst of something as inspiration isn't necessarily commentary. Often times the worst features are the most interesting. Take Salem. If I did a game set in Salem during the early history of the colonies, you can bet I am going to focus on the witch trials and not pay as much attention to things like their self sufficiency. With RPGs in particular, but also with things like movies and books, conflict is often a key ingredient to make things go, so you will often focus on the bad. Heck when I do my bog standard Medieval Europe type settings I tend to focus on things like corruption of the church, the inquisition, demonology, heresy, the witch craze, religious wars, warlords, etc. I also usually paint it as backwater against my equivalent of Byzantium. This is simply because I find those elements more interesting and gameable.


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## Ovinomancer (Oct 2, 2015)

Grumpy RPG Reviews said:


> I can fully believe Thay culturally appropriated all the worst characteristics of the Sword Coast but only the worst characteristics, none of the charity or other virtues. Just the a****** qualities. Because that's the way Thay rolls.
> In any case, please let us just try to focus on the issue as it pertains to role playing games rather than chasing rabbits into real world politics.




Sorry, but I'm having trouble understanding how you can discuss something as political as cultural appropriation theory in a way that doesn't discuss the politics.  I suppose we could just ignore all of the real world politics in your article, but if we do that, what's left to comment on?


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## Grumpy RPG Reviews (Oct 2, 2015)

Bedrockgames said:


> I am not terribly familiar with Thay, so I don't know much about that specific case, but taking the worst of something as inspiration isn't necessarily commentary....




I was making a joke. The nation of "Thay" from the Forgotten Realm is an evil nation and their evil is almost vaudeville in terms of being over the top. They would totally rip off being jerks from other nations and pretend they were the ones who invented that type of being a jerk.  



Ovinomancer said:


> Sorry, but I'm having trouble understanding how you can discuss something as political as cultural appropriation theory in a way that doesn't discuss the politics.




No, it will include politics but it should not just be about real world politics, it should - by definition - include a discussion of RPGs. Right now the trajectory of the thread is just into real world politics with no RPG content. It needs a change of direction, to include commentary on things like Kara-Tur and Al-Qadim and Windego werewolves to get it back on track.


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## Ovinomancer (Oct 2, 2015)

Grumpy RPG Reviews said:


> I was making a joke. The nation of "Thay" from the Forgotten Realm is an evil nation and their evil is almost vaudeville in terms of being over the top. They would totally rip off being jerks from other nations and pretend they were the ones who invented that type of being a jerk.
> 
> 
> 
> No, it will include politics but it should not just be about real world politics, it should - by definition - include a discussion of RPGs. Right now the trajectory of the thread is just into real world politics with no RPG content. It needs a change of direction, to include commentary on things like Kara-Tur and Al-Qadim and Windego werewolves to get it back on track.




You mean, how those setting exhibit cultural appropriation (a political theory) from real life cultures?  Okay, which RPG only parts of that would you like to discuss?


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## Grumpy RPG Reviews (Oct 2, 2015)

(Trigger warnings for; racism, religious persecution, sexism, genocide, slavery and related issues)

Greetings from a place of unexpected discomfort or possibly just social consternation. 

This column will discuss cultural appropriation in role-playing games. 

This column will not discuss every implication of cultural appropriation, the work and legacy of Edward Said, the ability of people from different backgrounds to speak and understand one another, a thorough examination of racism, post colonial critical theory and related subjects. Those factors are worth exploring but this discussion focuses on cultural appropriation in role-playing games, not a college set of semester long classes. Nor is it intended to make anyone comfortable. 

Back to the subject at hand, to paraphrase a column on cultural appropriation by Maisha Z. Johnson  that appeared at the Everyday Feminism site; 

“A deep understanding of cultural appropriation refers to a particular power dynamic in which members of a dominant culture take elements from a culture of people who have been systematically oppressed by that dominant group.”  

Johnson also states;

“It’s also not the same as assimilation, when marginalized people adopt elements of the dominant culture in order to survive conditions that make life more of a struggle if they don’t.” 

Johnson asserts cultural appropriation trivializes violent historical oppression, allows people to demonstrate facile interest in a culture while remaining prejudiced against its actual people and spreads mass lies about the marginalized, among other problems. 

The name of the Washington Red Skins is cultural appropriation , as are college black face parties and  most of the music by Katty Perry . All are forms of entertainment, the sports team employing the pejorative name and warrior symbolism of a Native American tribe, college s acting like s and a rich white woman pop-musician assuming the musical traditions of minority groups. All without so much as a thank you. 

To digress for a moment, communication always attempts to accomplish something, be it laying out an agenda for a business, a statement of emotion, persuasion to a new philosophy, to entertain at least one person or something similar. All “dialogue” – whatever the format – is about something and dialogue is frequently home to a conflict between the participants, in terms the form of the communication, the emotions employed, who is paying attention to what and so forth. Music is designed to elicit an emotional response, business meetings pursue profit and most conversations serve at a bare minimum as an effort to glen useful information if not an effort by one person to coerce another person into doing something. There is no such thing as “just talking” because all communication is about something and much of it is a contest of wills. The phrase “just talking” is meaningless; both denying the nature and purpose of communication and serving as a moral dodge, a phrase employed by people in an effort to avoid accountability for their message and means of communication. Asserting “you’re just talking” is like saying gravity may suddenly shut off. 

The writing, art, design and composition of RPGs is usually a monologue, as it is designed to communicate something, usually someone’s idea of a good time. In its execution – when employed at a game table – it is a dialogue between the participants, the game master and the players. As all of it plays out on the internet, it is defiantly a dialogue. 

Cultural appropriation can be a kind of hate speech . Cultural appropriation can be a kind of speech against an ethnic minority group, spoken in the language of that ethnic minority. Cultural appropriation is done by gormless  people who employ phrases like “just talking” when called on their bad behavior. The fact that fans of the Seattle football team, attendees at college blackface parties and Katy Perry are not actively encouraging racial violence is essentially incidental – they wallowing in their privilege and taking something that is not theirs to take for their own amusement. 

Cultural appropriation is a problem in role-playing games and even as racism and sexism is arguably getting better, if only incrementally, cultural appropriation is not improving in any meaningful way. 

Jonathan Korman , at his Miniver Cheevy blog, wrote a column on the subject of cultural appropriation in gaming. In this column, he stated; “We need to find a way to enjoy the media we like without hurting other people and marginalised (sic) groups.” This is a sentiment with which most people can agree, hopefully. 

There two ways to go about representation, direct translation of a real people and culture and the pastiche, even if both may lead to some variant of blackface play . 

According to Mirriam-Webster Dictionary, a pastiche is something – such as a piece of writing or music – that imitates the style of someone or something else. For example, Stephen King’s short story “Jerusalem’s Lot ” is a pastiche of H.P. Lovecraft’s works, only better. Stephen Sondhheim has composed many tunes that function as pastiches of music originally composed in the 1920s and 1930s. A pastiche does not make the original a subject of ridicule, which would be a satire. 

Direct translation of a real people and culture is exactly what it sounds like – an attempt to fictionalize a real world people, their culture and frequently their religion. Examples include White Wolf’s regional source books, which provide details for places such as New York City, Hong Kong and Berlin. 

Aesthetic, according to Mirriam-Webster, is a set of principals underlying and guiding the work of a particular artist or movement and here – in terms RPGs – it refers to how cultural minorities, regions and the like might have a particular overall style quickly identified upon sight. 

For example, a character from Piazo may wield a saber and wear a particular set of robes , so the audience understands she possesses a pseudo- Arabian Nights aesthetic. This is to say, she appears Arabian… in a vaguely pop-culture manner , meaning she does not have to know the pillars of Islam . Also, while there are non-Muslim Arabic peoples – such as the Yazedi – such people so rarely appear in pop culture that the pseudo-Arab is usually also a pseudo-Muslim.

By comparison, any attempt at a direct representation of the Middle East and people of the Muslim faith should get pillars of Islam correct. Too often RPGs fail in this type of effort. Instead, they become efforts at just creating a pastiche, at just ripping off an aesthetic, while pretending to be something more for the purposes of a game. 

Both ultimately serve as examples of cultural appropriation, and while one may be worse than the other, that does not excuse the lesser. Class C Felonies might be more severe crimes than Class A Misdemeanors, but that does not excuse the misdemeanors. 

RPG examples of settings functioning as at least pastiches include;
•	Mazteca from TSR for Meso-America,
•	Al-Qadim from TSR for Persia, the Middle East and North Africa,
•	Nyambe from Atlas Games for Africa,
•	Kara-Tur from TSR for East Asia,
•	Rokugan from  Alderac Entertainment Group also for East Asia,
•	Osirion in Pathfinder and from Piazo for ancient Egypt,
•	Galt in Pathfinder and from Piazo for Revolutionary France,
•	Chelix in Pathfinder and from Piazo for Colonial or Post-Reconquista Spain,
•	Katapesh in Pathfinder and from Piazo for North Africa,
•	Qadira in Pathfinder and from Piazo for Persia,
•	Ganakagok, from an independent publisher, for Artic peoples,

Examples of real world settings and even real world peoples, employed for role-playing games include;
•	The Ravnos vampires from White Wolf Games for the Rom or Gypsies to use to more widely recognized term, though it is a pejorative,
•	The Giovanni vampires from White Wolf Games for the Italians,
•	The Followers of Set vampires from White Wolf Games for Egyptians,
•	The Assamite vampires from White Wolf Games for Muslims,
•	Masque of the Red Death from TSR and its representation of many places, including Eastern Europe,
•	White Wolf and its representations of Mexico City and Eastern Europe as home to most of the puerile evil in the universe,
•	The Dreamspeaker mages from White Wolf games for all the indigenous aboriginal magical forms ever and in their original incarnation this group formed a single cohesive and coherent tradition, 
•	The Akashic Brotherhood mages from White Wolf games for most of the Eastern Asian martials arts and philosophical traditions ever as  a single cohesive and coherent tradition, 
•	The Euthanatos mages from White Wolf as a group of mages from southern Asian who more or less worship death and frequently act as serial killers,
•	The Uktena and the Windego from White Wolf as Native America werewolves
•	Gypsies, from White Wolf, which was a book about how the Rom people possesses actual magic,
•	Going Native Warpath, from an independent publisher, which makes a mélange of most of the Native American and Pacific Islander peoples, 
•	Far West, also from an independent publisher, for most of the Chinese people and cultures while erasing Native Americans,

There are more than those listed here but this column is not just a list of these things and so we shall move on. 

Taylor Swift referred to twirking – a form of dance generally exclusive to African American cultures – in her video “Shake it Off.” Swift herself did not engage in twirking, but appeared to consider it as something inaccessible to her, something witnessed and considered but not something in which she might participate.

However, even so the inclusion of twirking in the video offended people. 

Amy Zimmerman , in a column for the Daily Beast, writes “While Swift’s interpretation of black culture was doubtlessly meant as a celebratory homage, it comes off as lazy and reductive at best, and racist at worst.”

Morally and ethically, intent counts for less than we might wish. Only God knows someone’s actual intent and he does not exist – the rest of us have to cope with the person’s excuses and mealy-mouthed assertions about the best of intentions. 

We deal with a contemporary world out of our control produced by ante-contemporary people  whose actions if performed today would be considered morally insane and functional adults never get to pretend we do not live day-to-day eye-ball deep in this legacy. This legacy includes express slavery, genocide and cultural genocide and a grab bag of lesser horrors. 

This will never go away any more than gravity  will go away. 

When called upon to justify racism and slavery, at various times people asserted that Africans were undeveloped and unprepared for civilization and required slavery to domesticate them properly.  Likewise, people with the power stripped Native Americans of their heritage, culture and language in an attempt to “civilize”  them. While the appearance of minorities in RPG does not approach anything like the level of horrors of genocide, slavery and cultural annihilation, minority people understandably may view any bit of RPG material through a historical lens that includes of horrors of genocide, slavery and cultural annihilation… and entitled whites mealy mouthing stuff about the best of intentions. 

This is exacerbated by decades – at least – of media representation of minorities, their cultures and religions that provide grossly distorted depictions of everything “other” as a kind of proverbial comfort food for privileged white people.   

Randa Jarrar  in a column written in 2014 for Salon asserts that when western women, white women, engage in belly dancing they are engaging in cultural appropriation. They don costumes and employing something from outside their culture – belly dancing, or Raqs Sharqi – for their own amusement. In this, they strip the dance of its original intent and make a self-satisfied game of pretending to be something they are not. 

“Many white women who presently practice belly dance are continuing this century-old tradition of appropriation, whether they are willing to view their practice this way or not.”

This has been going on for a century or more, however, that long history does not make it morally acceptable for bored white women to wear the trappings of a minority, particularly when they can walk away at anytime while actual women in the Arab world cannot walk away from how society views them, their society and their religion. 

Time does not make such practices acceptable. 

According to Nayyirah Waheed , in his essay “Cultural Consent is Not a Strange Concept,” modern Western society and its history over the last few centuries “has convinced us that no peoples have agency over their individual expressions of life. That this is a free market, that peoples’ cultures are created for sale, and everyone is free to take what they want, when, how, with no thought to the violence this causes.”

Waheed is correct. At the same time a business in the Western world makes a buck off sexy version of the hib-jab for Halloween, exhibiting abiding disrespect for the faith of Islam, it also makes sexy versions of nun’s habits for Halloween, exhibiting the same contempt for Catholicism as it does for Islam and Native Americans for the matter, all for the same juvenile sexual reasons. The point being, in modern Western Civilization, no one is special, no wounds are worth consideration and everyone and everything exists to be exploited and discarded. 

Waheed also asserts that “no,” or refusal is not limited to an individual, but “…peoples also have a right to say no. …we have to check our privilege.”

Waheed – and RPG blogger Christopher Chinn, aka Bankeui – also discuss cultural consent, or that members of one cultural should be consulted by members of another culture, that they should gain permission for the use of some aspects of their culture in a certain context. This is not a bad idea, but it falls apart – at least somewhat – in application. 

Who do we seek permission from when and how we may use something from another culture? How many members of that culture are required to grant permission? What ratio of consenting voices, as compared to objecting voices, is required to proceed on such an effort?

This might seem like snide quibbling, but it is not and this is going somewhere.

In 2014 Monte Cook Games released a product, intended to be a romp, titled “the Strange.” The Strange of the title referred to the phenomena of a series of small, alternate Earths or dimensions – each with a particular theme, such as Roman World, Science Fiction World and so on. One such world, the Thunder Plains, in a section composed by Bruce Cordell, focused on the upper mid-west plains the Native Americans there prior to colonial contact. 

Cordell asserts he possessed the best of intentions, is related to Native Americans and that he consulted with Native Americans he knew about the product, that he researched the real background before composing the Thunder Plains. 

However, there was sufficient backlash from Native Americans, who blogged about their issues with the product and how it represented them.  Some Native Americans created a petition against the product and at first Monte Cook Games attempted to avoid the issue, though eventually they would reach out and make a compromise to work with Native Americans on the issue. The columns by Morning Star Angeline and others are the Tumblr blog the Last Real Indians should be read before employing the Strange setting. 

Angeline  asserts that it is lazy and offensive to steal from a race’s actual culture only to “redefine” the words used to suite your agenda and that Monte Cook Games cannot claim to have created a fantasy when they included so many aspects of a culture that actually exist and actually have meaning. She also states that employing inaccurate use of Native American imagery, regardless of intent, does not honor the Native American peoples but elicits negative thoughts and feelings about them. 

Cordell is likely quite sincere in his statements that he meant well, that he attempted to research the subject matter and consulted with Native Americans… and this proved to be insufficient for a number of reasons. 

While Cordell and everyone else at Monte Cook Games is making a sincere effort to correct the errors and do a good job now, it would have been better for all parties if they had made such an effort in the first place. The fact they thought and probably still think that they had all along amounts to little. 

To refer again to Korman’s column on the issue; “Sometimes awareness of the problems with things we enjoy does not constitute a strong enough response. Sometimes we have not just ‘problematic’ culture but minstrelsy, in which a people and a culture become twisted into cartoon parodies of themselves, and I think we have to reject that completely.”  

A term employed in feminist and minority critiques of all kinds of media is agency. According to the Mirriam-Webster Dictionary, agency is the capacity, condition or state of exerting power. It is about the capacity of a character, or characters, to make decisions and pursue those decisions. Stories where a white dude becomes a part of some “minority” group is not about the agency of those people. The Last Samurai is not about the agency of the traditional Japanese samurai – it is about the agency of Cruise’s character fulfilling some Japanophile power fantasy. The same is true of Dances with Wolves and Kevin Coster. 

So, to head off potential excuse making in advance…. players and game masters running games set in a minority culture, be it a pastiche or a direct translation, are neither granting that culture or its people agency or paying respect to those people – no more than fans of the Washington D.C. football team are respecting Native Americans or granting them agency. They are only fulfilling a power fantasy, complete with otherising, pursuing the appeal of the exotic and quite probably brown-face or a variant of brown face play. That such play does not strip minorities of agency is incidental. 

Representation does in fact matter but white people have historically failed to represent anyone but white people. Why should white people be granted an infinite series of mulligan’s for screw-ups allowing them to try again? Why should the minorities accept this as a non-negotiable fact, like gravity? 

Sometimes it can feel like we are morally and ethically standing on a sandy beach and the waves are eroding the foundation out from under us, meaning we move or fall. The technical term for this is life and your choices are only noteworthy if you get them wrong and fall down. 

In many ways, this is a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation. None of the options available are good, some are simply worse than others. Sometimes things do not really get better and pursuing your appetites hurts people. 

In conclusion, here are several points;

First, this is not to encourage or condone erasure – the disappearance of minorities from gaming, either as players or as characters. However, perhaps such work is best in the hands of people from the cultures represented. For example, the game Ehdrigor draws heavily from Native American cultures, its themes and motifs. It is also written and composed by Allan Turner , a Black Indian and the setting is probably not something a non-Indian could have composed. 

Second, if someone is pursuing writing about real world minority cultures – as direct translation or even as pastiche – then there are bare minimum factors of which they need to be aware and which they should pursue. The intentions of the writers, artists and other creators involved are at best invisible and at worst irrelevant. Seek out as many people from the culture you are attempting to represent and get their permission for the endeavor, be patient, be willing to walk away from the project if it is not working out – the minorities owe the majority nothing, except obeying the letter of the law. Also, as you did in when working math in school, show your work. Set aside space in the publication to discuss the goals and process of the publication. This is something Derrick Clifton  asserts in his column of cultural appropriation in a column for the Daily Dot. 

Third, if you are uncomfortable with the idea, then do not go there, do not do the deed – write the game or play the character – in the first place. Walking away from something that makes you uncomfortable is your right. Even if you do choose to avoid games guilty of cultural appropriation, this does not limit anyone to gaming in pseudo-western Europe. For example, Numenera – by Monte Cook Games as it happens – and Vornheim by Zak Sabbath are deep and interesting settings worth exploring which do not rip anyone off or exploit any cultures.

This all said, it also comes down to a matter of etiquette, or manners. Cultural appropriation will never be a matter of law and there is no gaming Gestapo to enforce any style of play. It is purely a matter of personal choice.

Consider Wil Wheaton’s Law; Don’t be a dick. You are not the only person who gets to determine if you are being a dick and your supposed intent counts for little. The people you are speaking to, for and about have more of the final word about you being a dick than you do. 

Sometimes good fences make for good neighbors not so much because it keeps them out of your yard but because it keeps you out of theirs.


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## Bedrockgames (Oct 2, 2015)

Grumpy RPG Reviews said:


> I was making a joke. The nation of "Thay" from the Forgotten Realm is an evil nation and their evil is almost vaudeville in terms of being over the top. They would totally rip off being jerks from other nations and pretend they were the ones who invented that type of being a jerk.
> .




Went over my head. lol


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## Lwaxy (Oct 3, 2015)

I dislike the term in general, but especially in regards to RPGS. 

In earlier RPGs, the stereotypes were so bad it was sometimes hardly bearable (I was just a kid then and still noticed). But I never once saw them as relating to any real world cultures at all, especially because the stereotypes were so obvious. It has always been clear to the groups I was in that any culture, stereotyped or not, would inevitably have borrowed elements from our real world; indeed it is not possible not to do so even if you invent very out-of-there concepts. 

Nomads traveling with tents? Indians! With wagons? "Gipsies." Ninjas? Japanese/Asian etc. And it can be good to have these ideas, to know what to expect in the game. Just like grumpy dwarves and arrogant elves are stereotypes you expect. What the games do it take the stereotypes and turn them real in their own fictional world. And that's ok to a point, as long as the people themselves aren't portrayed to narrow (like the always evil, always good nonsense we used to have, and to some extend STILL have). What does bother me is when people think fantasy nation XXX is "the Gypsies" or "the Chinese" when it is really just about the stereotypes mixed in with a little bit of their real way of living. But that is not CA in any way, it is a mis-interpretion.

Take the Varisians from Golarion for example. They are a mix of the Gypsy and Italian Mafia stereotypes, mixed with a little bit of this and that here and there. Now depending who you ask and what they played, it is possible not to notice one of the stereotypes. I recently merged 2 of my online groups, one which had played almost exclusively in city settings and the others who had been traveling Varisia up and down. The latter had no idea about the Mafia aspect, and the first was surprised to see the Gypsy aspect of the Varisians suddenly come out (no, none of them ever reads any sourcebooks).

Well, I don't see the Mafia complaining about CA (if you are even considering it to be a cultural aspect in nowadays society, I personally do) but I happen to know a few Roma who also play and who don't care the least. If you asked them, they'd probably stare and tell you that the Varisians have nothing to do with them, no matter the background. And they would likely also tell you that the Roma themselves took parts of other peoples' tradition and languages over the centuries. Just like the Jews did. 

Now, Ravenloft, that is a different story. The way the "Gypsies" were portrayed there, especially considering the real-world-like surroundings for some parts, were very clearly recognizable as being Roma, if I remember right specifically Sinti, folk. For the Romni girl in our group, this was not playable as the group was portrayed as inherently evil, less so because of CA - that was a secondary complaint. 

There is nothing wrong to take parts of our world's rich cultural, religious and historical heritage and mix them all up for a fantasy world. Especially when all people are going to want to complain about is what style of coat someone is wearing or what type of weapon and what the weapons are called. And in a fantasy world, where magic exists and the gods are active (well sometimes, anyway) it does not matter at all if the fictional culture is based on a stereotype. 

Now, for temporary settings, them being fantasy or not, it is a different issue. I don't know the Vampire setting all that well, so I can't really comment on it. Any such settings need to portray the cultures used much more accurately. But that isn't to say it shouldn't be done. But I am not sure anyone would need said culture's permission, especially because a whole "culture" would never agree. 

As a German, I do not care if a non-German runs around in Dirndl and Lederhosen, no matter their skin color or culture. I think it a little silly when I see a black US guy and a Japanese guy dancing half drunk around the tables at Oktoberfest-like events. But, if they have fun... But there are other Germans who deeply disagree, especially when it comes to the female regional dresses and their possible historical significance ( as dresses for specific occasions or signifying engagement etc). So who, from any given culture, should decide? And where does one culture start any another end? Germany isn't one culture, there are several different ones, which of course overlap by now, but they are distinctly different. My mother was from Saxony, and we followed all the Xmas traditions from there. Yet I grew up in Swabia, so we assimilated some of those traditions. My dad's from a region now in Poland... And I'm Buddhist...

As others have said before, everyone is a mix of things. We live in a multicultural world now.  I do not need anyone's permission to use something from another country/culture as long as I don't mock it (not including religion here though, which is not the same as culture). I will wear African and Indian clothes, simply because they are beautiful and practical and very very comfortable. And that's also why I will use, for example, A-Qadim in my games - it is beautiful, practical and very very comfortable, as we all know the basics of it, stereotype or not. 

Late night/early morning here and my eyes are bad again, so please excuse typing errors and half thought through sentences, but I hope you get my general view on things


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## Grumpy RPG Reviews (Oct 6, 2015)

For the first time in ages I have recorded another episode. I am beginning to edit it now, and will complete editing it tomorrow - hopefully. It should go up sometime later this week.


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## Bagpuss (Oct 7, 2015)

Grumpy RPG Reviews said:


> For the first time in ages I have recorded another episode. I am beginning to edit it now, and will complete editing it tomorrow - hopefully. It should go up sometime later this week.




Good man, I don't really agree with most of what you've said, but I totally support your right to say it, and appreciate the effort needed to do something like this.


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## Bagpuss (Oct 7, 2015)

I'm going to use sblocks for some of your stuff that I am quoting so that this doesn't look too huge a reply. It will still look huge mind you.



Grumpy RPG Reviews said:


> (Trigger warnings for; racism, religious persecution, sexism, genocide, slavery and related issues)




So trigger warnings for life basically? Not really a fan of trigger warnings, not because of what they were originally intended to do, but how they have been used since. Seriously a trigger warning for racism? Like that is something anyone is going to be able to avoid in everyday life? It's not like you are being racist in the passage. Perhaps a KKK meeting should carry such a warning, but they are hardly likely to put one on, so what does this achieve?



> This column will discuss cultural appropriation in role-playing games.




Unfortunately most of you examples seem to be pop-culture references, like Taylor Swift. You mention titles of RPG materials but very rarely look at them in any detail. I think it would have been a stronger article if you had researched those RPG materials you mentioned in more detail.

*Maisha Z. Johnson quotes*
[sblock]Back to the subject at hand, to paraphrase a column on cultural appropriation by Maisha Z. Johnson  that appeared at the Everyday Feminism site; 

“A deep understanding of cultural appropriation refers to a particular power dynamic in which members of a dominant culture take elements from a culture of people who have been systematically oppressed by that dominant group.”  

Johnson also states;

“It’s also not the same as assimilation, when marginalized people adopt elements of the dominant culture in order to survive conditions that make life more of a struggle if they don’t.” 

Johnson asserts cultural appropriation trivializes violent historical oppression, allows people to demonstrate facile interest in a culture while remaining prejudiced against its actual people and spreads mass lies about the marginalized, among other problems.[/sblock]

Here you take one persons definition of cultural appropriation, a view that on a subject that is controversial at best. Cultural borrowing is something that happens whenever to cultures mix, and it is frequently a good thing. It can lead to greater understanding of the other culture, an acceptance of it and new cultural developments due to the fusion of two cultures.

Cultural appropriation proponents tend to paint any cultural borrowing from a less dominant culture to a more dominant one as a  largely negative phenomenon. 



> The name of the Washington Red Skins is cultural appropriation,




Actually that isn't. The Native American's didn't refer to themselves as Red Skins, that is a pejorative term used by the settlers, it is basically racist not cultural appropriation. The wearing of the headdress and their logo is cultural appropriation. They are different but related issues.



> as are college black face parties and  most of the music by Katy Perry.




Why not Elvis Presley? Paul Simon's Graceland? etc. etc.

Katy Perry actually responded to the idea of cultural appropriation

"I guess I'll just stick to baseball and hot dogs, and that's it," Perry said. "I know that's a quote that's gonna come to  me in the ass, but can't you appreciate a culture? I guess, like, everybody has to stay in their lane? I don't know."

Of course the social justice types, will say "check your privilege" to a response like that, but she has a point. There are a number of areas where cultural exchange happens frequently and on the whole is good is viewed as a good thing Music, Food and Fashion. Without cultural borrowing in music we wouldn't have had Elvis, Rock and Roll which was a fusion of western swing and country with African-American genres such as blues and jazz. Without cultural exchange western food would lack a lot of the spices it has now days, and we wouldn't have curry sauce on chips! Fashion has always borrowed influences from different culture and styles have gone in and out of fashion, people claiming cornrows are cultural appropriation from African-Americans seem to forget it is an ancient hairstyle going back to 3000BC, and found not only in Africa, but worn by the Greeks, Romans and Celts.

*Just Talking Digression*
[sblock]To digress for a moment, communication always attempts to accomplish something, be it laying out an agenda for a business, a statement of emotion, persuasion to a new philosophy, to entertain at least one person or something similar. All “dialogue” – whatever the format – is about something and dialogue is frequently home to a conflict between the participants, in terms the form of the communication, the emotions employed, who is paying attention to what and so forth. Music is designed to elicit an emotional response, business meetings pursue profit and most conversations serve at a bare minimum as an effort to glen useful information if not an effort by one person to coerce another person into doing something. There is no such thing as “just talking” because all communication is about something and much of it is a contest of wills. The phrase “just talking” is meaningless; both denying the nature and purpose of communication and serving as a moral dodge, a phrase employed by people in an effort to avoid accountability for their message and means of communication. Asserting “you’re just talking” is like saying gravity may suddenly shut off.

The writing, art, design and composition of RPGs is usually a monologue, as it is designed to communicate something, usually someone’s idea of a good time. In its execution – when employed at a game table – it is a dialogue between the participants, the game master and the players. As all of it plays out on the internet, it is defiantly a dialogue.[/sblock]

Not sure what the point of this digression is, and while I agree all dialogue serves some purpose, clearly not all dialogue has the same weight or importance. Me passing a stranger in the street and passing the time saying "Good Evening", clearly doesn't have the level of exchange we are having here. If I chat to a friend at work about who we think is going to win "The Great British Bake Off" I think that falls into the category of "just talking". Neither of us is trying to win dominance, or pass on important information. Still it has little bearing on the subject at hand.

*Hate speech and "Just Talking" again.*
[sblock]Cultural appropriation can be a kind of hate speech.  Cultural appropriation can be a kind of speech against an ethnic minority group, spoken in the language of that ethnic minority. Cultural appropriation is done by gormless  people who employ phrases like “just talking” when called on their bad behavior. The fact that fans of the Seattle football team, attendees at college blackface parties and Katy Perry are not actively encouraging racial violence is essentially incidental – they wallowing in their privilege and taking something that is not theirs to take for their own amusement. 
[/sblock]

While I agree it can be, I think there can be a lot of cultural exchange and borrowing before it approaches hate speech. 

Hate speech "is any speech, gesture or conduct, writing, or display which is forbidden because it may incite violence or prejudicial action against or by a protected individual or group, or because it disparages or intimidates a protected individual or group." Even Washington fans wearing headdresses barely falls into that category. Certainly not for inciting violence, which is what most people associate with the term hate speech, but only because it could be seen as reducing the worth of the headdress and thus disparage Native Americans. So using it in this context is just being deliberately inflammatory.

I just want to pick up on _"taking something that is not theirs"_ statement. Does anyone actually own cornrolls, arranging feathers into a headdress (rather than a particular headdress), a particular style of music (rather than an actual tune itself), a style of dress (rather than the dress itself)? People own things, cultures don't own things, they may originate ideas, but the idea that a group of people can effectively have intellectual copyright, in perpetuity on ideas is ridiculous and detrimental to progress, development and understanding.



> Cultural appropriation is a problem in role-playing games and even as racism and sexism is arguably getting better, if only incrementally, cultural appropriation is not improving in any meaningful way.




On to gaming at last. 



> Jonathan Korman , at his Miniver Cheevy blog, wrote a column on the subject of cultural appropriation in gaming. In this column, he stated; “We need to find a way to enjoy the media we like without hurting other people and marginalised (sic) groups.”




Actually he was quoting Rachael at Social Justice League, and her piece on How to be a fan of problematic things careful you've made him actually appropriate, rather than culturally so. (Rachael's piece is well worth a read by the way)

What he actually says in the blog is...

_"That said, I have to confess my own ambivalence about some of the rhetoric of “cultural appropriation”, which implies that Group X “owns” some ideas/images/practices/etc such that if Group Y employs them this constitutes “stealing” from Group X. This carries a whiff of Maintaining Cultural Purity which spooks me. Plus it seems to suggest an unrealistic conception of culture, which in practice always transmits itself across borders of all kinds and manifests a stew of crisscrossing influences."_

Which I agree with. Still back to Rachael's statement.  “We need to find a way to enjoy the media we like without hurting other people and marginalised (sic) groups.” which you say 



> This is a sentiment with which most people can agree, hopefully.




I guess I'm not most people because I have a problem with this statement. We accept running the risk of hurting people all the time to enjoy things. I enjoy peanut butter, but for some people this is fatal, if we wanted to avoid all hurt we could cause these people, we could ban peanut butter from sale, we could destroy the peanut harvest. I like getting to work on time so I drive a car, countless people are killed by cars on road every year, but it is a risk we are willing to accept.

With cultural exchange we run a risk that some people might feel upset that their culture is misrepresented. It is hardly life threatening. It's a level of "hurt" I'm willing to accept to have RPGs like Werewolf:Wild West, VtM, Mazteca, Nyambe and the countless other RPGs you mention later on.

These aren't hate speech, they aren't KKK pamplets, or BNP propaganda. These are an authors attempt to show aspects of a different culture to other people, they aren't even making huge amounts of money (like Katy Perry) off this cultural borrowing. Niche RPGs like these are never as popular as western medieval fantasy anyway, and it's not like RPGs are big business for most publishers anyway. 

Minimize harm, yes, be careful to approach issues of race and culture sensitively, sure, but no risk of harm? Sorry but that just means people will become risk adverse, fearful to publish anything outside their own experience.



> There two ways to go about representation, direct translation of a real people and culture and the pastiche, even if both may lead to some variant of blackface play.




Oh dear another emotive term. Really is someone playing an Asian character in say Feng Shui, yellowface play? Is Nyambe blackface play? If I play a female character, is it disrespectful to women, transgender people? Are you suggesting we really to be confined to just playing ourselves in RPGs? As that seems the logical conclusion. 

If you are just trying to say something along the lines of; when playing characters of other cultures or backgrounds be careful not to fall into offensive racial/gender stereotypes; then say that, rather than using such emotive language. Emotive language is the sort of thing that will either turn people off from your argument or as I mentioned earlier make them so risk averse they won't every try something outside of western medieval fantasy.

One of the joys of roleplaying it playing someone else, trying to experience a world from a different perspective. Now often that will involve stereotypes as these are easy handles for people to grab, and mistakes will be made, occasionally some people maybe offended, but that's a level of "hurt" I'm willing to accept. 

I think I'll leave it there for now, and break this into 2 posts at least.


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## Bagpuss (Oct 8, 2015)

*Okay Round 2.*



Grumpy RPG Reviews said:


> There two ways to go about representation, direct translation of a real people and culture and the pastiche, even if both may lead to some variant of blackface play.




I mentioned at the end of my last post my feelings on the use of the heavily emotive "blackface play" phrase, I've included this sentence again because it leads into the next point about direct translation or pastiche.

*Mirriam-Webster Dictionary on pastiche*
[sblock]According to Mirriam-Webster Dictionary, a pastiche is something – such as a piece of writing or music – that imitates the style of someone or something else. For example, Stephen King’s short story “Jerusalem’s Lot ” is a pastiche of H.P. Lovecraft’s works, only better. Stephen Sondhheim has composed many tunes that function as pastiches of music originally composed in the 1920s and 1930s. A pastiche does not make the original a subject of ridicule, which would be a satire.[/sblock] 



> Direct translation of a real people and culture is exactly what it sounds like – an attempt to fictionalize a real world people, their culture and frequently their religion. Examples include White Wolf’s regional source books, which provide details for places such as New York City, Hong Kong and Berlin.




I must say I've never heard "Direct Translation" used in that sense. To me direct translation, means a literal translation, where you convert something word for word from one language to another and sometime because of that it sounds weird or in the worse cases the meaning is lost or changed. Direct translation stays slavishly true to the source_ (hmm perhaps I shouldn't use 'slavishly' while we are talking social justice, lucky you've given a trigger warning earlier)_.

What you are describing is Fictionalization to use Mirriam-Webster like you did, "to change (a true story) into fiction by changing or adding details". White Wolf's regional source books provide details for such places as New York City, Hong Kong and Berlin, but then add a load of stuff about vampires which clearly aren't real.



> Aesthetic, according to Mirriam-Webster, is a set of principals underlying and guiding the work of a particular artist or movement and here




I found that definition in Oxford not in M-W. Generally it is more commonly used to describe the study of beauty or designs intended to provide beauty. IE: I planted the tree there for aesthetic reasons. Still you seem to invent your own use for the word in use with RPGs as we see so what dictionaries use it for doesn't seem to matter.



> – in terms RPGs – it refers to how *cultural minorities*, regions and the like might have a particular overall style quickly identified upon sight.




Why not just use "style" in that case? Why not just say Paizo's character has an Arabian style? I assume we are talking about these sorts of characters. I'm not sure they actually count as "cultural minorities" when they are actually in there own culture, Arabs aren't minorities in Arabic countries. "Minorities" seems another unnecessary use of an emotive term. Every culture has a style an aesthetic if you must, and in there own region they aren't a minority.



> For example, a character from Piazo may wield a saber and wear a particular set of robes , so the audience understands she possesses a pseudo- Arabian Nights aesthetic. This is to say, she appears Arabian… in a vaguely pop-culture manner , meaning she does not have to know the pillars of Islam . Also, while there are non-Muslim Arabic peoples – such as the Yazedi – such people so rarely appear in pop culture that the pseudo-Arab is usually also a pseudo-Muslim.




That because they are borrowing the style, and applying it to a fictional world, they aren't necessarily wanting to take the whole culture. In the fictional world Islam doesn't exist so it would make no sense for the character to know anything about it anyway. Do we expect Western European styled knights to know all about Christianity, rather than following Tempus or some other fictional diety?



> By comparison, any attempt at a direct representation of the Middle East and people of the Muslim faith should get pillars of Islam correct. Too often RPGs fail in this type of effort. Instead, they become efforts at just creating a pastiche, at just ripping off an aesthetic, while pretending to be something more for the purposes of a game.




RPGs [-]don't do[/-] very rarely do direct representations, for example none of White Wolf's stuff is a direct representation, they are all fictionalizations. They take some of the mythology or the style of a culture and use that to create a fictional world. The intention is to be a pastiche, that is the goal. They don't want to be an accurate encyclopedic representation of the real world. This is not a failure this is by design.



> Both ultimately serve as examples of cultural appropriation, and while one may be worse than the other, that does not excuse the lesser. Class C Felonies might be more severe crimes than Class A Misdemeanors, but that does not excuse the misdemeanors.




They are both just borrowing a certain style, or myths, or folklore from new sources, usually because Western European style, myth and folklore have been done to death. This isn't cultural appropriation, this is artists finding different sources of inspiration. You need to stop talking like cultural appropriation applies to any and every borrowing from a different culture. The difference between blackface and Al-Qadim, isn't they are both wrong one being a Class C Felony the other a Misdemeanor, it's the difference between mainlining heroine and drinking coffee.

Grumpy's bumper list of problematic RPG materials. 
[sblock]
RPG examples of settings functioning as at least pastiches include;
•    Mazteca from TSR for Meso-America,
•    Al-Qadim from TSR for Persia, the Middle East and North Africa,
•    Nyambe from Atlas Games for Africa,
•    Kara-Tur from TSR for East Asia,
•    Rokugan from Alderac Entertainment Group also for East Asia,
•    Osirion in Pathfinder and from Piazo for ancient Egypt,
•    Galt in Pathfinder and from Piazo for Revolutionary France,
•    Chelix in Pathfinder and from Piazo for Colonial or Post-Reconquista Spain,
•    Katapesh in Pathfinder and from Piazo for North Africa,
•    Qadira in Pathfinder and from Piazo for Persia,
•    Ganakagok, from an independent publisher, for Artic peoples,

Examples of real world settings and even real world peoples, employed for role-playing games include;
•    The Ravnos vampires from White Wolf Games for the Rom or Gypsies to use to more widely recognized term, though it is a pejorative,
•    The Giovanni vampires from White Wolf Games for the Italians,
•    The Followers of Set vampires from White Wolf Games for Egyptians,
•    The Assamite vampires from White Wolf Games for Muslims,
•    Masque of the Red Death from TSR and its representation of many places, including Eastern Europe,
•    White Wolf and its representations of Mexico City and Eastern Europe as home to most of the puerile evil in the universe,
•    The Dreamspeaker mages from White Wolf games for all the indigenous aboriginal magical forms ever and in their original incarnation this group formed a single cohesive and coherent tradition, 
•    The Akashic Brotherhood mages from White Wolf games for most of the Eastern Asian martials arts and philosophical traditions ever as a single cohesive and coherent tradition, 
•    The Euthanatos mages from White Wolf as a group of mages from southern Asian who more or less worship death and frequently act as serial killers,
•    The Uktena and the Windego from White Wolf as Native America werewolves
•    Gypsies, from White Wolf, which was a book about how the Rom people possesses actual magic,
•    Going Native Warpath, from an independent publisher, which makes a mélange of most of the Native American and Pacific Islander peoples, 
•    Far West, also from an independent publisher, for most of the Chinese people and cultures while erasing Native Americans,
[/sblock]



> There are more than those listed here but this column is not just a list of these things and so we shall move on.




You never go into if you think any of these cross the line (if there is a line) or if some are fine? You also seem to forget that the World of Darkness is fictional. The Gypsies in WoD aren't real world gypsies, and real world gypsies can't do magic. They might be inspired by real world gypsies, but clearly they are fictional. I don't have my books to hand but I'm pretty sure they have that all persons fictitious disclaimer you see in most works of fiction, just in case the person reading it doesn't know the difference.



> Taylor Swift referred to twirking – a form of dance generally exclusive to African American cultures – in her video “Shake it Off.” Swift herself did not engage in twirking, but appeared to consider it as something inaccessible to her, something witnessed and considered but not something in which she might participate.




Have you actually watched the video? I suggest you do and make up your own mind rather than listening to the constantly offended types. Twerking was one of several dance styles that appeared in the video, none of which Taylor Swift was any good at.



> However, even so the inclusion of twirking in the video offended people.




Doesn't mean you have to listen to them. 



> Amy Zimmerman , in a column for the Daily Beast, writes “While Swift’s interpretation of black culture was doubtlessly meant as a celebratory homage, it comes off as lazy and reductive at best, and racist at worst.”




And I wonder how many ad clicks that earned her? To give you an idea of the level of idiocy she quotes Rapper Earl Sweatshirt's tweets about the video the first one reads.

_"haven't watched the taylor swift video and I don't need to watch it to tell you that it's inherently offensive and ultimately harmful"_

Haven't watched it... okay. Then you have a link to another article about the online backlash, which has other great tweets like.

_"why are white girls ballerinas and the ones that twerk black thats racist af"_

No mention of the modern dance section where they is a wide range of diversity, or the same with the breakdancers, and body-poppers, gymnasts, cheerleaders, band or all the dancers at the end. These people are just looking to get offended for the attention it brings them. People complain when Miley Cyrus twerks as cultural appropriation, then other people complain when only black women twerk in a Taylor Swift video because it is racist for only black women to be doing it. Do you see the problem?



> Morally and ethically, intent counts for less than we might wish.




Actually intent counts for a lot, it could be the difference between accidental death and murder for example.



> Only God knows someone’s actual intent and he does not exist – the rest of us have to cope with the person’s excuses and mealy-mouthed assertions about the best of intentions.




"mealy-mouthed" - means afraid to speak frankly. I wonder why that is in this current climate of outraged twitter and clickbait articles that are happy to call people racist, just because their dancers in 15 seconds of a 4 minute video don't match some diversity quota. Do you think Taylor Swift's intention in that video (you have watched it now I hope), was to instill prejudice, encourage racism? Or do you think perhaps it was to say well people are going hate no matter what you do, and the response to it is proof.

Okay I think I might have to stretch to a part 3... we'll leave it there for now, one last thing though....

[video=youtube;nfWlot6h_JM]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfWlot6h_JM[/video]


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## Grumpy RPG Reviews (Oct 9, 2015)

Bagpuss said:


> Unfortunately most of you examples seem to be pop-culture references, like Taylor Swift.




As I stated above, that is because cultural appropriation is not often discussed in the general public. The columns by Jonathan Korman and Christopher Chinn are all the ones strictly on the subject of cultural appropriation in RPGs - so I use other discussions to make comparisons. 



Bagpuss said:


> Here you take one persons definition of cultural appropriation, a view that on a subject that is controversial at best.




Her's is a useful , coherent and concise definition. 



Bagpuss said:


> Why not Elvis Presley?




He's dead. 

Also, Perry is more a part of the modern, current discussion of cultural appropriation than Presley.



Bagpuss said:


> Not sure what the point of this digression is...




I am heading off any attempt to say C.A. in RPGs is "just talking," I am heading off attempts at denying responsibility. 



Bagpuss said:


> Hate speech "is any speech, gesture or conduct, writing, or display which is forbidden because it may incite violence or prejudicial action against or by a protected individual or group, or because it disparages or intimidates a protected individual or group."




That is the legal definition. The colloquial definition is; "hate speech noun 1. speech that attacks, threatens, or insults a person or group on the basis of national origin, ethnicity, color, religion, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, or disability."



Bagpuss said:


> Really is someone playing an Asian character in say Feng Shui, yellowface play? Is Nyambe blackface play?




They can be.


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## Mallus (Oct 9, 2015)

Grumpy RPG Reviews said:


> The columns by Jonathan Korman and Christopher Chinn are all the ones strictly on the subject of cultural appropriation in RPGs - so I use other discussions to make comparisons.



I've read some of Chinn's blog posts and all I can say is his opinions don't reflect my experiences as a minority gamer/nerd media fan. From what I've seen, he does a lot of question-begging; accepting for a fact that certain representations/partial-representations/(mis)appropriations are harmful without demonstrating how or why or to whom, specifically. Also arguments of the form: racism exists, therefore this is racist. Or hypothesizing 'someone might be harmed by X'. I don't find that particularly insightful, or helpful.  

Then again, I'm probably not the right audience for his criticisms. If you put a hula-dancing orc or an elf in lederhosen in your D&D campaign, I'd laugh. I wouldn't get mad because you stole part of my cultural heritage.   

(and in the interest of accuracy, my cultural heritage is best described as "working-class northern New Jersey", despite me being Polynesian & German, also Ukrainian and a little Japanese, possibly some other stuff, too, Hawaiian ancestry can get complicated)



> Also, Perry is more a part of the modern, current discussion of cultural appropriation than Presley.



Perry gets a lot of flack for appearing in stuff like Geisha-drag, but I'm don't see how that's meaningfully different from, say, Guitar Wolf dressing kinda like the Ramones (if you don't know who Guitar Wolf is/was, Google them! Then go watch _Wild Zero_!!). 



> That is the legal definition. The colloquial definition is; "hate speech noun 1. speech that attacks, threatens, or insults a person or group on the basis of national origin, ethnicity, color, religion, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, or disability."



Yes, fine, but how does that apply to settings like Kara-Tur, or Orlais in the Dragon Age games (the snotty, elitist pseudo-French country)?


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## Grumpy RPG Reviews (Oct 9, 2015)

This really twerks me off.

I'm not angry, but I have trouble resisting a bad joke - the worse the joke, the more I want to tell it. 



Bagpuss said:


> I must say I've never heard "Direct Translation" used in that sense...




I could not think of what else to call it. 



Bagpuss said:


> Why not just use "style" in that case?




Style, to me, has a different connotation, is more specific and more transitory. Also, while this should be from the Oxford Dictionary (I got the references mixed up), "aesthetic noun A set of principles underlying and guiding the work of a particular artist or artistic movement: the Cubist aesthetic."



Bagpuss said:


> RPGs [-]don't do[/-] very rarely do direct representations, for example none of White Wolf's stuff is a direct representation, they are all fictionalizations...




I disagree - yes, it is a fiction, but a fiction of real people who did not given consent to be fictionalized. While such consent is not required, such things should raise the bar in terms of standards and the effort should be handled responsibly. People should not just just use "it's fiction" to excuse any failures in terms of representation - that is like saying "they were just talking." 

Any yes, I've seen the video. 



Bagpuss said:


> Actually intent counts for a lot, it could be the difference between accidental death and murder for example.




It is not easily proven and is generally invisible.


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## Bagpuss (Oct 9, 2015)

Grumpy RPG Reviews said:


> As I stated above, that is because cultural appropriation is not often discussed in the general public. The columns by Jonathan Korman and Christopher Chinn are all the ones strictly on the subject of cultural appropriation in RPGs - so I use other discussions to make comparisons.




But you hardly reference them are all? Why is that? Wouldn't they make more relevant sources?



> Her's is a useful , coherent and concise definition.




It's one definition and certainly one you can work from, but you seem to be taking it as gospel. Even if we accept...

_“A deep understanding of cultural appropriation refers to a particular power dynamic in which members of a dominant culture take elements from a culture of people who have been systematically oppressed by that dominant group.” _

...as the definition we will work with for our discussion, you list things like

The Giovanni as cultural appropriation, at what point did the Western Culture (USA where most of these writers are from) systematically oppress Italy (also Western Culture), or ancient Egypt, or a number of other of the examples you give later on? Buy this definition Katy Perry dancing in Egyptian costume can't be cultural appropriation as the culture she is taking from is long gone.

Also that definition doesn't place any moral judgement on cultural appropriation, it just defines what it is, as yet I've not seen anything to say if it is a good or a bad thing.



> He's dead.
> 
> Also, Perry is more a part of the modern, current discussion of cultural appropriation than Presley.




Are you being deliberately obtuse? Surely you can't mean because he's dead what he did wasn't cultural appropriation, because in that case Katy Perry's actions become fine after her death. If you aren't saying that then Elvis, Paul Simon, any musical artist is just as appropriate to the discussion as Katy Perry. If what she did was wrong, then what they did was, then Rock 'n' Roll, and everything that came after it is cultural appropriation. Are you willing to accept that?



> I am heading off any attempt to say C.A. in RPGs is "just talking," I am heading off attempts at denying responsibility.




You haven't even defined what they are responsible for, or if cultural appropriation is a bad thing. Why deny it when you've not provide any evidence that it is even wrong?




> That is the legal definition. The colloquial definition is; "hate speech noun 1. speech that attacks, threatens, or insults a person or group on the basis of national origin, ethnicity, color, religion, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, or disability."




So they are pretty much identical.

Here's what I said again.

Hate speech "is any speech, gesture or conduct, writing, or display which is forbidden because it may incite violence or prejudicial action against or by a protected individual or group, or because it disparages or intimidates a protected individual or group." 

The legal definition has used disparages instead of insults, intimidates instead of threatens. They have clarified that speech includes gestures, conduct and writing. They have also used "protected group" rather than spelling them all out, but basically it reads the same.

It doesn't alter anything I said, so why deflect?



> They can be.




Of course they can be, so can fancy dress, if you black-up like a minstrel, *but most of the time it isn't*. Would it not be better to call out the occasions when it does go too far than to make some generalised statement that playing outside your own culture "may lead to some variant of blackface play".

We don't say dressing up at Halloween may lead to blackface play, because for the vast majority of people it is harmless fun. We just call out those people that do blackface.

By making a blanket statement, using emotive phrases like "blackface", like an accusation, you will scare people off what is otherwise (more than 99%) of the time a harmless, enjoyable and sometimes educational hobby. You and others like you will put writers off looking outside western european fantasy, for fear of backlash from the constantly offended, and the public shaming they bring.

You can talk about you consider problematic things, but do so carefully, try not to stir up emotions, talk rationally and reasonably. Point out where things have been done well, what works and what doesn't. What is enjoyable so long as we understand it is a fiction, and perhaps even based on an now out-dated and offensive stereotype.

I'm still yet to be convinced cultural appropriation is a bad thing, and you've not really provided any strong evidence of where it is. All cultures borrow from each other when they meet, I don't think labelling one type of borrowing appropriation and another assimilation really helps.


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## Bagpuss (Oct 9, 2015)

Grumpy RPG Reviews said:


> This really twerks me off.
> 
> I'm not angry, but I have trouble resisting a bad joke - the worse the joke, the more I want to tell it.




It's okay I can shake it off. 



> Style, to me, has a different connotation, is more specific and more transitory. Also, while this should be from the Oxford Dictionary (I got the references mixed up), "aesthetic noun A set of principles underlying and guiding the work of a particular artist or artistic movement: the Cubist aesthetic."




Yeah I think we both know what each other means we shouldn't really get hooked up discussing semantics.



> I disagree - yes, it is a fiction, but a fiction of real people who did not given consent to be fictionalized. While such consent is not required, such things should raise the bar in terms of standards and the effort should be handled responsibly. People should not just just use "it's fiction" to excuse any failures in terms of representation - that is like saying "they were just talking."




It isn't really, there is a great difference between something that clearly is fantastical fiction, like WoD Gypsies that gives Romani people ties to vampires and access to magic and say doing a sourcebook on the Romani people for a modern setting like d20 Modern, that claims they all have the Criminal Starting Occupation. One is borrowing elements of mythology and culture for a clearly fictional work, the other is clearly racists (and thankfully doesn't exist).

This is part of the problem I have with "cultural appropriation" as a term. As it seems to lump in *any* cultural borrowing by a dominant culture along with things that are a little problematic, and things that are clearly a racist stereotype. The whole thing is more nuanced and lumping them all together under one label of "cultural appropriation" isn't at all helpful. Well unless you want to get clicks for your blog by engaging in outrage culture.



> Any yes, I've seen the video.




So do you really think it was racist?



> It is not easily proven and is generally invisible.




You know you could just listen and believe what people tell you about why they did things, give them the benefit of the doubt, and assume innocence until you can prove guilt. Don't be so quick to shame, be the calm voice, people that are intentionally racist normally aren't that good at hiding it.


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## Mallus (Oct 9, 2015)

Grumpy RPG Reviews said:


> I disagree - yes, it is a fiction, but a fiction of real people who did not given consent to be fictionalized.



Who has _ever_ given their consent to be fictionalized? Did Joyce get the permission from the residents of Dublin? Did David Chase get north Jersey to sign off on _The Sopranos_? Heck, even Karl Ove Knausgård didn't seek out the okay from, like, everyone he ever knew before publishing _My Struggle_ -- however, I'll grant you, in his specific case he probably should have. 

And how does an entire cultural group go about _granting_ consent to be represented in the first place? This sounds nonsensical to me. How can I "own" culture? Do you feel like you own your cultural heritage? 

"Consent" seems like the wrong word to be using here. It comes off as a rhetorical dirty trick; using a word freighted with meaning w/r/t the current discourse about sexual consent and re-appropriating it to lend emotional weight to an argument about cultural exchange.

edit: let me throw this out there: misrepresenting a culture in fiction (or fiction-like things) is, usually, an aesthetic failure not an ethical one. In order for it to be an ethical failure, there needs to be (much) more than mere 'not getting it right'.  As if 'getting a culture right' was a trivially easy thing to do. Also, you first need to establish 'right according to whom?'. 

One of the things I dislike the most about these arguments about cultural representation in media/RPGs is this notion that "other" cultures are something you 'get right or wrong'. Like they're a standardized test you can ace with the right amount of study. Any writing about culture, regardless of the context, has to be approached with a reasonable set of expectations about how thoroughly & accurately they will address a subject the size of a 'culture'.


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## Grumpy RPG Reviews (Oct 9, 2015)

[video=youtube;-boC4a9SFFM]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-boC4a9SFFM&index=32&list=PLmAnaUwVu3wmNK98wh-PCM22mycONgux_[/video]

Me and my mild stammer glory.


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## Lwaxy (Oct 10, 2015)

Grumpy RPG Reviews said:


> They can be.




You know, for all my involvement with "black culture" - my Nigerian ex husband btw begs me to ask you what exactly that is, as there are probably more different black cultures than there are nations in the world - the first thing I heard about "blackface" was when there was all this online bashing going on of this poor young star (forgot even who it was, as it didn't seem to matter) because she applied make up to look like her fav char of some show last Halloween. After picking myself up from the floor nearly dying of laughter, I read up on it and had so many facepalm moments I would really have needed an extra pair of hands. 

Seriously?? Someone dressing up as someone else gets bashed because they actually took their time to get the skin color right? That was the most nonsensical thing I ever heard. It has absolutely nothing to do with the real "blackface" issue that went on in the past. There is such a clear, obvious difference between wanting to portray a specific thing and mocking a whole race or culture. I talked about this with several, including 'colored' people here in Germany and none got it. My son's black cousin (in London, where painting your face for a costume seems to be mostly a non-issue as well as it seems) insisted to have his face in a white make up to be Clark Kent - not just anyone, specifically Kent - and no matter the overly stupid political correctness with superheroes lately, Clark Kent is white. Where is the problem? In the minds of activists-gone-crazy US non-whites mostly, as it seems. 

My son is what in Nigeria is still called a halfcast without any of the negative connotations this carries in other places. He was constantly put in the role of the black king when it came to Xmas plays, even though he's relatively light, especially in winter. On one hand, he loved it because with the exception of the Ghanan boy who once did it, he always had a part in the plays. On the other side he just wanted to be someone else once in a while. He was so happy when he got other parts in other plays. If he had been any darker, I'm sure he would have asked to paint his face white to portray his fav chars during Halloween or carnival. And nothing at all wrong with that. 

Then I read the news about how there is international pressure on Germany to change the tradition to usually put one of the kids portraying the 3 Kings in black make up. Same thing with the Netherlands and their Zwarte Piet.  Seriously, some OTHER culture, mainly US culture (if there is such thing as a coherent one) tries to force their views on European countries? That's not CA, but call cultural assimilation again. How is this not insulting? 

The racism coming from those people flying under the name of anti-racism is quite frightening. It is even more frightening to have it extended to RPGs. Yeah there are issues with stereotypes, but those go in all directions. It is a stereotype, for example, that everyone who puts on different skin color make up is "insert-color-here"facing anything. In most cases they are just taking on another persona. So yes, intend matters. It always does. It is the most important thing to judge on. 


Oh and someone else mentioned above that real "Gypsies" can't do magic. Don't ever say that to a Rom - they might agree with you, but from what I have seen most would not (and actually me neither but that is a different story).


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## billd91 (Oct 10, 2015)

Lwaxy said:


> You know, for all my involvement with "black culture" - my Nigerian ex husband btw begs me to ask you what exactly that is, as there are probably more different black cultures than there are nations in the world - the first thing I heard about "blackface" was when there was all this online bashing going on of this poor young star (forgot even who it was, as it didn't seem to matter) because she applied make up to look like her fav char of some show last Halloween. After picking myself up from the floor nearly dying of laughter, I read up on it and had so many facepalm moments I would really have needed an extra pair of hands.




Absolutely seriously. You don't screw around with some issues here in the US because of our history of racism - and that includes something as seemingly innocuous as wearing blackface. In earlier days of entertainment - throughout the 19th and early 20th century - if a black person was performing on a stage, it was usually really a white person in blackface makeup portraying an insensitive caricature of blacks as dim-witted, happy-go-lucky (as slaves, right), lazy, and superstitious. To pull from Wikipedia: "Frederick Douglass described blackface performers as "...the filthy scum of white society, who have stolen from us a complexion denied them by nature, in which to make money, and pander to the corrupt taste of their white fellow citizens.""

So before you think that people are being ridiculous about blackface, realize that the history of black slavery and racism is a pretty serious issue in the US. You may think it's an overreaction but there are plenty of countries out there with their own hypersensitive issues that other countries don't have and probably think are overreactions as well.


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## Grumpy RPG Reviews (Oct 10, 2015)

billd91 said:


> Absolutely seriously. You don't screw around with some issues here in the US because of our history of racism...




Yes, Lwaxy... billd91 is correct and this is important to understand for how it influences all conversation about race and race relations in America and with Americans. And that kind of black face play, though no longer culturally acceptable, is part of the historical framework that pop culture is viewed through today by minorities - and that will include RPGs.

Also, African American culture - though composed of many subcultures - is distinct from other African and/or black cultures of the world, such as Sudanese, Nigerian, etc.


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## Bagpuss (Oct 10, 2015)

I noticed you uploaded some other videos of a panel at ChupacabraCon, and I do like Ken Hite's reply to I guess your question about cultural appropriation.

[video=youtube;XJaS50WqkG4]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJaS50WqkG4[/video]


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## Lwaxy (Oct 11, 2015)

Doesn't make it any less ridiculous. As I said, there is a big big difference between dressing up as someone and making fun of someone, and if people in the US can't get that, it is very very sad. It is even more sad if those activists are trying to enforce those weird views on the rest of the world. It makes absolutely no logical sense. At all. It's like you are being held hostage by your history. There is quite some ridicule about it at least in the Nigerian community over here, including jokes about whether they will see it as "blackface" if a white guy gets a good tan. 

But that's getting off topic by now. 

As for RPGs, have you ever come across someone who takes the stereotypes in the fake cultures seriously? Because I haven't, not once. I've seen a lot more difficulties when people are trying to play the other gender than playing out a fake culture as they can make a lot more stuff up.


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## Bagpuss (Oct 11, 2015)

Lwaxy said:


> As I said, there is a big big difference between dressing up as someone and making fun of someone, and if people in the US can't get that, it is very very sad.




The US is a very particular culture, blackface in the US is pretty much always tied up with making fun of blacks. They assume it is therefore racists even in other cultures that don't have the same assumption. Yes it is sad, but understandable. Unfortunately the US activists are basically involved in cultural imperialism, expecting their values to be accepted by the rest of the world.


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## Ovinomancer (Oct 11, 2015)

Bagpuss said:


> The US is a very particular culture, blackface in the US is pretty much always tied up with making fun of blacks. They assume it is therefore racists even in other cultures that don't have the same assumption. Yes it is sad, but understandable. Unfortunately the US activists are basically involved in cultural imperialism, expecting their values to be accepted by the rest of the world.




Careful with the broad brush, there.


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## Grumpy RPG Reviews (Oct 13, 2015)

I will disagree with some of the posts here, I am comfortable with the discussion and want to thank everyone for participating in it. The next video/episode I produce will be less controversial. It is just about 5E D&D...

...which is the exact same thing as cannibalistic Satanism. 8P


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## mythago (Oct 16, 2015)

Lwaxy, do you really not understand the irony of your ordering Americans to think about blackface in a particular way that matches your thinking - based on the views of your Nigerian ex-husband (nice twist on the 'black best friend' btw!) and some random German nationals - and then flipping out that Americans have views on Zwarte Piet? How do you get from your lecturing Americans being a simple view on free speech, but (some) Americans' disapproval is "forcing their views on European countries"? 

That "international pressure", btw, does not simply come from the US, and the belief that all Germans and Nederlanders are united in their love of blackface is laughable.


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## Lwaxy (Oct 18, 2015)

Uhm, I'm not "ordering" anyone to do anything. I have no idea how that should even be possible. Also, I don't base my views on those of my ex - we just happen to agree on a lot of things. Not so much on others, obviously. He's also not my best friend, I don't know where you got that from. Neither was I "flipping out" about anything.  Especially as it wouldn't matter to me either way what traditions the Dutch are gonna keep and which they won't - I was merely pointing out the intrusion. Also, did I say "all Germans" anywhere? I haven't even mentioned any views of Dutch people, as I wouldn't know. Asides, I am talking about makeup for costumes, not "blackface" - might be the same for some people, it is not for me, and most people over here will never have heard the word in their life. I tried to explain the concept once and was just met with blank stares. 

Of course pressure doesn't come only from the US, but that's where it originated, and that's where the main pressure comes from. Strangely, hardly anyone ever talkes about "whiteface." It seems to be fine for Eddy Murphy for example to play a white person, and I can see absolutely no difference in who puts on what make up.


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