Poets

     “Culture comes from your environment. It’s not inherited in your genes. So many Americans still don’t understand that. You don’t inherit culture.” – Albert Murray

I.      The performers – I don’t call them singers since their talents weren’t so much for making music as for getting attention – provoked controversies related to certain dance moves. That maneuver, some critics said, came from the black community, while the other one came from the gay community, or the black community, or maybe both. In any case, white performers should not just take these moves, the argument went, or have black dancers doing them behind them either. There’s a long history of white acts popularizing (and profiting from) styles and genres and sounds first made by minority groups, and if it wasn’t right when Elvis Presley did it, then it isn’t right in the twenty-first century.

II.     The reviewer complained that the restaurant’s food was not authentic. Well, she wasn’t saying the place served something that wasn’t actual food. Instead, she alleged that it wasn’t a true version of the ethnic cuisine it to some extent resembled. She said that the new eatery’s fare was a kind of Californian reinterpretation of Mexican cuisine rather than the real thing. (Never mind that the restaurant explicitly stated as much.) The reviewer knew the difference, she explained, because she had been to Mexico, and had eaten there. 

III.      In the metro Detroit area, and especially in the small city of Hamtramck, Fat Tuesday is all about paczki, confections associated with Poland. Despite their connection with ritual indulgence prior to the traditional Lenten sacrifices of lard, sugar, and eggs, the treats became popular with people who practice religions other than Catholicism, or no religion at all, which explains how Paczki Day persisted long after Hamtramck ceased to be a predominantly Polish enclave. Every year, the lines outside bakeries on Conant Street will include Christians of Polish extraction, sure, but there will also be Jews and Hindus and Muslims (who figure prominently in Hamtramck since the city became a destination for immigrants from various Middle Eastern countries) as well as nonbelievers – just about anyone willing to wait in crowds for jelly doughnuts, which is essentially what paczki are. Whether it’s about the baked good themselves or about the communal spirit some people feel when large groups of people do the same thing at the same time (even though paczki, the plural of the singular paczek, are available on other days), the practice of eating the things on the Tuesday before Ash Wednesday became entrenched in the region. It’s like wearing green on St. Patrick’s Day regardless of your religious or national background. 

     And just as St. Patrick’s Day retains an aura of Irishness and a whiff of Catholicism, Paczki Day celebrants of all sorts generally have some awareness of its origins among Catholic Poles, I think. So I was mildly surprised when a bakery near my house (a few miles north and west of Hamtramck) promoted its own one-day-only sales of paczki. The owner of the shop proudly identifies as a member of both the black and the L.B.G.T. communities and, as far as I know, claims no Polish heritage. Are her paczki authentic? I should say here that as someone who gives up nothing for Lent and rarely eats jelly doughnuts, I have no strong feelings about paczki, who makes them, or who eats them. But I do know some paczek devotees in southeast Michigan who insist that the real thing must come from Hamtramck and, by implication, from bakers of Polish descent (and, perhaps, be eaten in the shadow of the city’s statue of Pope John Paul II). I’m also aware that some might question whether both the paczki produced in Hamtramck and the custom of ingesting them on Fat Tuesday actually jibe with true Polish tradition. What interests me is what this example might say about authenticity as a concept and about its value (if it has any).

IV.      One musician said another musician “benefitted from black culture.” When I read that I immediately thought, “Well, who doesn’t?” I certainly have. Not only would America’s – and the world’s – music be massively impoverished if it weren’t for the contributions of black people; so would its food, its literature, its art – its culture as a whole. Of course I understood that the black artist was not describing the white one as simply enjoying the work of black artists but instead was charging him with enriching himself by borrowing what others had pioneered, which is to say with cultural appropriation. “Cultural appropriation” strikes me as a phrase some people use as if it had a clear meaning when it’s actually quite vague and of questionable usefulness. (Like the word “privilege.”) According to the website About.com, Susan Scafidi, a law professor at Fordham University and the author of Who Owns Culture? Appropriation and Authenticity in American Law, defines cultural appropriation this way: “Taking intellectual property, traditional knowledge, cultural expressions, or artifacts from someone else’s culture without permission. This can include unauthorized use of another culture’s dance, dress, music, language, folklore, cuisine, traditional medicine, religious symbols, etc. It’s most likely to be harmful when the source community is a minority group that has been oppressed or exploited in other ways or when the object of appropriation is particularly sensitive, e.g. sacred objects.”As I read it, this definition raises more questions than it settles – most of them having to do with the notion of authenticity. What really belongs to “someone else’s culture”? Who has the power to grant permission to use such knowledge or artifacts, and how does one obtain such authority? What makes a person (like the food critic referred to above) want to police such matters, even when the culture purportedly being appropriated is not his or her own? If it truly is harmful, is it only harmful when members of a majority group take from an oppressed minority? And, most crucially, how does one locate the boundaries between cultures, especially when they are simultaneously components of larger national culture? In places with people of diverse backgrounds and ethnicities (i.e. larger cities), where multiple elements intermix, how does one draw the lines cultural appropriation regulators want to draw? And do they really need to be drawn at all? I bring up these questions not to condone those who might, say, wear a native American tribal headdress to a muddy outdoor music festival while knowing nothing of its meaning or pass off as their own something first forged by someone else but rather to challenge the simplistic idea of culture that prompted them. The suggestion that, four centuries after European settlers brought the first African as a slave to a land already populated by various indigenous peoples, there are distinct racial or ethnic cultures in the United States, is untenable. So is the related suggestion that certain people are born with explicit authorization to use specific clothing, music, languages, stories, food, medicines, and symbols while others must ask those designated (by some mysterious procedure) as able to grant such permission. This is not how culture works, nor how it should work. Simply put: How could American artists of any race not be influenced by their black predecessors, and why shouldn’t this influence be apparent?

 V.     In 2017, “Open Casket,” a painting by Dana Schutz displayed at the Whitney Biennial exhibit in New York, caused controversy. Or, more precisely, the artist’s identity as a white person offended some people who believed her skin color disqualified her from depicting the corpse of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old black child murdered in Money, Mississippi, in 1955, after having been accused of flirting with a white woman. Another artist, Hannah Black, said the work should “be destroyed and not entered into any market or museum,” according to The Guardian. Black asserted that Schutz had “nothing to say to the black community about black trauma.” She also said: “The subject matter is not Schutz’s; white free speech and white creative freedom have been founded on the constraint of others, and are not natural rights.”Writing in the aftermath of World War II, Albert Camus urged a refusal “to be either victims or executioners.” Several decades later, perhaps it’s become imperative to assert an unwillingness to be censored or to censor. Yet even if one can set aside the fact that calling for art works to be obliterated puts such critics on the side of some of history’s worst people and is not a justifiable argument for an artist (or anyone else) to make, this call for censorship is fraught with exceptionally twisted reasoning. It seems to depend on a conviction that only members of a given community (another troublesome word) can legitimately attempt to communicate with each other, can potentially understand each other, and can have implicit permission to speak of particular topics to which the community has exclusive claim (or intellectual property rights, as a law professor like Scafidi might phrase it). To suggest that lynching is a subject only black people can address and that no other people should respond to it artistically defies logic. White men killed Till because of an allegation by a white woman (later revealed to be false). Perhaps white people no less than any others (and perhaps even more than anyone) should reflect on the brutality white people have inflicted on other people throughout American history. Do those leveling accusations of cultural appropriation really think the violence committed by white people against black people should only be reflected upon by the latter and ignored by the former? What, exactly, would this solve? I have no idea how popular opinions like Hannah Black’s are. When “Open Casket” was first publicly shown in Berlin in fall of 2016, it caused no controversy. Yet I suspect that if Schutz, who grew up just outside Detroit, had shown her work in the city she would have been seen as demonstrating typical suburban racial insensitivity. Even as the painting prompted commentary by detractors (and supporters) after its appearance in New York, I saw a friend condemn on Facebook a reporter for Detroit’s alternative weekly newspaper because of an online opinion piece pointing out that the name for a planned new business could offend Detroiters by seeming to mock the city’s struggles and because of its sexual innuendo. Her complaint said nothing about the validity of the argument; instead it only mocked a white man for saying something negative about a venture undertaken by a black, female, lifelong (that is, authentic) Detroiter. To her, what mattered was not what was said but who was saying it. (And like the restaurant reviewer more concerned with the authenticity than the flavor and quality of certain food, she belonged to a different group than the one on whose behalf she opted to speak.) None of the criticism of Schutz’s painting I saw suggested that she belittled or demeaned Till, the way postcards with images of black people hanging from trees sold as souvenirs once did. None of it had anything to say about the work’s artistic merit either. Instead, it questioned the right of a white person to depict a mutilated black body, as if doing so automatically and unavoidably amounted to exploitation and could not possibly result from efforts at empathy or understanding or sincere outrage. 

     Even before she’d completed “Open Casket,” Schutz told The New Yorker’s Calvin Tomkins that she considered a picture of Till “an American image.” I think she’s right. After she finished the painting, she admitted to Tomkins that she had sometimes worried whether Till was “off limits,” but ultimately concluded that “any subject is O.K., it’s just how it’s done.” I think she’s right about that too. After the uproar about the piece’s inclusion in the Biennial, she wondered, “Is it better to try to make something that’s impossible, because it’s important to you, and to fail, or never to engage with it at all?” Having only seen photographs of “Open Casket” online and in a magazine, I can’t say whether the thirty-nine by fifty three inches painting failed, but I can say that it’s better to engage with risky subjects than to self-censor. 

VI.     “Cultural appropriation” may be the term used when a white person takes something from an oppressed minority, but the belief that these groups are somehow truly distinct from each other and in certain respects should remain that way implies that minority groups shouldn’t borrow culturally from the majority either. Get Out, an incisive social satire of ways white Americans who regard themselves as non-racist nonetheless feel entitled to use black bodies for their own purposes, falters at least once, in my opinion, when its jokes revolve around clichés of black authenticity. In a key scene, a character is deemed by the film’s protagonist and (via social media) his best friend as essentially non-black, or insufficiently black, or something-other-than-truly-black, because of his clothing: no real black person would dress that way. It’s not only fucked up, this implies, when white people appropriate black culture, but it’s messed up, too, when black people mimic white people. Pretty funny, huh? (Yes, I understand how this all fits into the plot, but there’s no denying what lies behind the jokes related to this character’s attire: that’s white; that’s black; they’re different.) 

VII.     Remember those doughnuts? Is it the final product or the background of the baker that matters? If the Polish Catholic and the black lesbian follow the same recipe, then the outcome should be basically the same. 

But if everyone follows the same recipe, or if people are told they can only use certain recipes (or shouldn’t even attempt them), then you’ve got the makings of a pretty lame carnival. 

John G. Rodwan, Jr., author of the essay collections Holidays and Other Disasters (Humanist Press, 2013) and Fighters & Writers (Mongrel Empire Press, 2010) as well as the chapbook Christmas Things (Monkey Puzzle Press, 2011), lives in Detroit, Michigan.