(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.
