Cultural Appropriation

Today I'm thinking about cultural appropriation.    

If you're unaware, cultural appropriation is when you take something from a culture that's not your own (usually an oppressed or minority culture) and strip it of its intended meaning to use it for your own devices because it looks cool.  Like fashion designers that put fake Apache headdresses on their models.

I'm afraid it's snuck its way into my story.  I'm not saying this to condemn myself, but rather to tell you that I'm checking myself, I'm sitting back and having a think, asking, "Is what I'm doing completely obnoxious?"  So now I have this great opportunity to correct myself before I embarrass myself and hurt people.  At the point I'm at in the process for this story (I've just finished the horrible first draft and I'm going through a first round of editing) it's okay.  I can fix it before anyone sees it.  I can stifle my obnoxiousness before the words get loose.  

If I didn't write this blog post, you'd never even know.  But I think it's good to talk about these things.  I'm not perfect.  I'm learning.  And I'm trying to be respectful.  Part of that is being aware, catching myself, correcting, and doing better next time.

It's pretty easy to get caught up in questioning "well, is this really appropriation, or is it inspired by X or an homage to X?"  Maybe some of my issues with this draft aren't appropriation and I'm being hard on myself and overly cautious, but the issues are close enough to make me uncomfortable and with this train of thought I feel like I'm just trying to justify myself. I'd rather err on the side of not offending people.

There are two instances I've come across in this story and I can track how they both got there.  For both of them, I did research, learned all about them, then when I went to write I got swept away in what my characters needed and what my story needed, which ended up shifting the meaning.  One is a spell out of the Wiccan tradition.  (And when I looked into "appropriation of Wiccan traditions" I got back results about Wiccans appropriating other people's traditions into their own.  I don't think this even remotely puts me in the clear.)  The idea behind the spell is so interesting: to remove a darkness inside you, ask it to leave.  Just ask!  Brilliant!  But when I started writing the spell, the cadence and emotion turned it from a request to a command.  That stripped away the meaning that I found so interesting to begin with.  Appropriation.

So I have two options.  I can put the meaning back and change the spell to a request, or I can pull the initial spell out completely and replace it with something I make up where there are commands.


These are some of the rewrites I'll be doing in coming weeks.  What about you?  How often do you check yourself and what do you do about your missteps?