From Globe2Go:
The Writers’ Union of Canada has issued an apology and the editor of its magazine has resigned after publishing an opinion piece titled “Winning the Appropriation Prize” in an issue devoted to Indigenous writing.
“I don’t believe in cultural appropriation,” began the editorial by Hal Niedzviecki in the spring issue of Write magazine. “In my opinion, anyone, anywhere, should be encouraged to imagine other peoples, other cultures, other identities. I’d go so far as to say that there should even be an award for doing so – the Appropriation Prize for best book by an author who writes about people who aren’t even remotely like her or him.”
Some people were enraged, and the fallout was swift: TWUC issued an apology, a board member resigned, TWUC’s Equity Task Force issued a list of demands – and Mr. Niedzviecki left his position.
“I had no intention of offending anyone with the article,” Mr. Niedzviecki told The Globe and Mail Wednesday, after resigning that morning – his choice, he says.
“I absolutely understand why people are upset. I think that I was a little tone deaf, and I was failing to recognize how charged the term cultural appropriation is and how deeply painful acts of cultural appropriation have been to Indigenous people.”
. . . .
The TWUC Equity Task Force issued a statement, saying it was “angry and appalled” by the column, and shocked that it was approved by a TWUC editorial committee – saying it was an indication of structural racism, “brazen malice, or extreme negligence.” It issued a list of demands, including that the next three issues be turned over to Indigenous and other racialized editors and writers, affirmative action hiring for the next editor and future office staff and a future issue dedicated to bringing historical context to the issue.
Link to the rest at Globe2Go and thanks to Tudor for the tip.
A friend of PG’s was, long ago, the editor of an underground newspaper in Washington DC. Underground newspapers were part of the antiwar movement, cultural upheaval and general hellraising that went on during the Vietnam War period in the late sixties-mid seventies of the last century. Underground newspapers printed “news” and opinion that establishment papers were not printing. Such news was invariably inflammatory and reflected an alternate view of contemporary events.
PG and his friend were talking about the friend’s journalistic endeavors during this time and the friend commented, “Whenever we didn’t know how to respond to somebody (with differing views), we called them a nazi and they always froze up and freaked out. It worked every time.”
Name-calling is a propaganda and political control technique that certainly predates the 1960’s.
The name-calling technique links a person or idea, to a negative symbol. The propagandist employs this tool to persuade the audience to reject the person or idea on the basis of the associated negative symbol.
During the Inquisition, for example, successfully branding a political, business or social rival a heretic could make anything the person said or proposed completely unacceptable. Indeed, the only safe response to a heretic was to totally avoid him/her because of the likelihood that the heretic and his/her associates would be executed or otherwise severely punished. Galileo’s opponents branded him as a heretic for supporting heliocentrism in 1633 and his scientific discoveries became completely unacceptable thereafter.
Leon Trotsky, one of the heroes of the Russian revolution of 1917 and its brightest theoretician, was, for a period of time, second only to Lenin in the Soviet political hierarchy. After Lenin died, Trotsky contended with Stalin for leadership of the Communist party and the state. Trotsky lost that battle, was exiled and later assassinated. Trotskyism was anathema to Stalin’s continuing dictatorship. Branding anyone as a Trotskyite effectively removed that person from Soviet society and was often good for an extended visit to the Gulag.
During the 1960’s, Cultural Revolution in China utilized “counter-revolutionary revisionist” as a negative brand. Such a person would also invariably be guilty of practicing one of the “Four Olds” – old customs, culture, habits, and ideas. Once someone was categorized as revisionist, society could be certain that anything such a person said or did was tainted with the curse.
PG is not an expert on theories of cultural appropriation in either Canada or the United States, but much that he has read of this and other Social Justice activities currently being applied in various culture wars reminds him of the propaganda techniques described above.
Indeed, “Social Justice” has, for PG, a distinct Maoist/Stalinist ring to it.
Oh boy, some of you sure have grabbed the wrong end of the stick on this one. Clearly, one of the reasons this story blew up in Canada was people shooting their mouths off without bothering to read Hal Niedzviecki’s article. But you’ll never understand why Niedzviecki touched the raw nerve he did until you accept that not everybody who mouths the words “freedom of speech” is sincere, any more than every country that calls itself a “democratic people’s republic” is.
The Canadian publishing industry has always been an elitist, incestuous old-boys-and-a-few-girls network. Take everything you hate about the big New York publishing houses, shrink it to 10% of the size while keeping everybody’s ego just as inflated, then add in craven squabbling over taxpayer subsidies. *Those* are the bad guys in this story, okay? In order to help justify their government handouts, publishers will begrudge a few token slots to minority writers, but only if they write about stereotypical minority topics that make the publisher appear oh so diverse. An aboriginal writer has practically zero chance of getting published unless they write about poverty, alcoholism, and despair in aboriginal communities (or unless they somehow manage to become personal friends with a publishing executive without letting on that they’re aboriginal).
So you can imagine how jealously many minority writers regard the few crumbs of the subsidized pie that they’ve been allowed to compete over. But way too often, self-serving cultural elitists come along, hypocritically pretending to be color-blind, claiming that a downtown Toronto hipster can write about poverty on a remote northern reserve just as well as somebody who’s actually lived on a remote northern reserve. Granted, that’s occasionally true. But whenever an elitist author or publisher starts pontificating about how everybody should be open-minded and post-racial, what many minority writers in Canada hear is that somebody wants to bulldoze the only ghetto they’ve been allowed to live in without giving them anywhere else to go — they know full well that the allegedly open-minded publishers *still* won’t buy an aboriginal author’s latest political thriller about the Middle East.
I have no idea what Hal Niedzviecki’s motives were in writing his opinion piece. Probably he’s a truly decent and sincere guy. But it isn’t at all surprising how what he wrote — in the token issue of the writers guild magazine devoted to indigenous writing, no less — would be interpreted by many as saying “Let’s get rid of token issues devoted to minorities, without bothering to let them into our non-token issues either,” and even “The next time my publisher needs to placate the government by putting out a novel about alcoholic despair in a remote northern reserve, they should come to me and my friends in our Toronto coffee-shop. They don’t need those pesky minorities for *anything*.”
Yeah, it sucks that Canadian publishing works like this. Somebody in a remote northern reserve should be able to write and publish a political thriller about the Middle East if they want to. A Toronto hipster should be able to write about alcoholism in a remote northern reserve if they ever get bored with writing postmodernist meditations about Ashkenazi circus dwarfs with leukemia. Feel free to try to sell them your libertarian magic wand as a way to make the world work that way by Tuesday. But at least try to understand where they’re coming from in the world that exists today.
Wow, way off the mark on this one 🙁
The article sounds ridiculous on multiple levels, starting with the fact that it doesn’t seem to understand what cultural appropriation means. Much like this post.
Quote #1: “The name-calling technique links a person or idea, to a negative symbol. The propagandist employs this tool to persuade the audience to reject the person or idea on the basis of the associated negative symbol.”
Quote #2: “Indeed, ‘Social Justice’ has, for PG, a distinct Maoist/Stalinist ring to it.”
Ahh, irony. Gotta love it. Or not.
Yeah, “tag’em and bag’em”.
Demonize and destroy.
Steve is saying that calling something Maoist/Stalinist is indeed name calling. So accuses PG of being a hypocrite.
Steve you might be correct. But some name calling is accurate. Some is not. Some is propaganda. Some is truth. Some name calling is descriptive instead of pejorative.
It’s a constant dialog.
Most marxists are proud of it and don’t consider the term offensive.
Of course, other movements prefer to obscure their philosophy and rebrand themselves, preferably with a label with a positive history or, better yet, from the history of the opposition.
Right. Even the most knowledgeable scholars in the oppressor/oppressed dynamic might not realize the Marxist underpinning. They’ll call themselves feminists, social justice warriors, post modernists, etc…some of it is actually helpful in the constant reform and dialog in society.
A little Marxism is good. Concern for not oppressing people is good. When it gets to demoninzing whole groups and calling for tearing down the existing order or whatever, that’s super bad.
Progressive –> Liberal –> Progressive –> Social Justice Warrior