Cultural Appropriation is Bulls**t

Let’s jump into something touchy, and separate the people from the snowflakes. The idea that you cannot pay homage to or mimic a culture without being called a racist is just outright bullshit. The people who are calling it cultural appropriation are failing to realize one important fact: culture is not something one person or group can own and copyright. In other words, you cannot build a wall around culture, especially in the age of the internet.

I have an issue with this because I’m a writer. If writers were banned from writing outside of their own gender, ethnicity or sexual orientation, fiction would be near impossible to create anything. Even if we write a protagonist that is our own ethnicity and gender, we still need to create supporting characters of other genders and cultures to create an accurate portrayal of this world. Writing a book is hard enough, the last thing we need is a cultural straight jacket that would make creating our art that much more difficult.

If I want to write a book with a female protagonist, why the hell not? I believe I am more than capable of creating a strong, independent woman in my novels because of the women I lived around when growing up. I had some very strong female role models in my life, and I usually call to their example whenever writing any character that is not my own gender. Could you imagine if a woman was told she couldn’t write a book with a male protagonist because she isn’t a man? What kind of world would we live in if Harper Lee wasn’t allowed to write To Kill A Mockingbird because she wasn’t a man, or if Author Golden wasn’t allowed to create Memoirs of a Geisha because he’s not Japanese? This is why I have a serious problem with Cultural Appropriation.

Restricting what art a person can or cannot create because of their ethnicity is discriminating and it’s wrong. If I want to write a story about an Indigenous person who fights the people who are colonizing his lands and killing his people, I should be allowed to. Now if the book is grossly inaccurate, badly researched and is a terrible distortion of actual history, then you are more than free to give me that criticism with both barrels, and I will deserve every barb that I get. But saying I’m not allowed to write that book merely because I don’t share the same ethnicity as the character I am writing about is a bullshit excuse that shouldn’t be tolerated.

To a writer, the call for people to respect “cultural appropriation” sounds like nothing more than a call for censorship, or at best a warning to self-censor. This would be a gross infringement of the creative liberty to which so many surprising proclaim to value. Many classic books throughout our history of literacy were created by people who didn’t share the same gender and ethnicity of their characters and this world would be a lesser place if they were not allowed to publish their works because of cultural appropriation. I think there should be a call for writers to be accurate if they are writing about historical events and real people in history, that’s a legitimate gripe. Yet if the story is fictional, writers should be allowed the freedom to create a story without the shackles of cultural appropriation.

Just saying,

Peter