Culturally Appropriate Cultural Appropriation

Cultural appropriation can be defined as taking the cultural knowledge, ritual or items of a cultural community, specifically a minority community, without their permission.  This is wrong because it deprives the minority community of the empowering uniqueness of their own culture against that of the dominant culture which has appropriated their culture into itself.  This process can perpetuated minority stereotypes by modeling the impression of minority culture and can normalize oppression by redefining such inequality as a part of the culture rather than a conflict between two cultures.  Cultural appropriation is routinely discussed in relation to white privilege for it is the latter that enables the former and the former that reinforces the latter.  

White people occupy positions of power that allow them to redefine their own culture and those of minorities for oppressive exploitation, often in the form of imperialism and colonialism, making their dominating culture more invisible and therefore more impenetrable to resistance.  If the oppressor appears to be the same as the oppressed they are not only harder to recognize and criticize but they are also able to redefine minority culture by the superficial semblance of being a member to it.  This covert oppression is all the more offensive when minority culture is redefined through representations of negative stereotypes by those in power.

Discussions of cultural appropriation operate as if one could comprehend a culture scientifically as a discreet empirical unit that can be abstracted out of the ongoing progress of cultural assimilation for analysis.  Because a culture is historically mediated and history is an interpretive reduction of events, culture is continually being re-defined across time according to the priorities and experiences of its current historical context.  Cultures borrow from one another in order to preserve themselves.  Even the most reductively fundamentalist interpretations of a tradition are inherently appropriative and interpretative.  They reduce an entire cultural history down to those elements which resonate with contemporary concerns and dynamics of power between other cultures and defend such elements through the appropriation of foreign technology and ideology.  

One can only understand a culture through its current context but one can more honestly and respectfully negotiate with it.  The cultural fundamentalists do not have an honest or respectful relationship to their culture because they believe that they are preserving it against foreign influence even as they are erasing recognition of it and preserving what remains through the very foreign influences they fear.  One must perpetually negotiate between one’s inherited tradition, authority and the commodities of one’s collective history.  Such negotiation arises from within a culture in relation to others and this process precludes it from being abstracted out of its current context as a distinct item of scrutiny. 

Cultural items are often treated by those discussing cultural appropriation as if they all operate as commodities of identity-political investment, as if each item in a culture could be reduced to a mere ideological representation of the cultural community.  Each item is likely to have a plurality of interpretations to its cultural significance and is likely to transcend any local culture.  Items of any given culture are ironically likely to belong to some other culture that had already been appropriated into its own (pasta being an identifiable aspect of Italian culture despite having it traced back to Chinese culture).  So when one culture complains against another that it is being appropriated, it is probably a conflict over the appropriation of some third, likely forgotten culture; the appropriation of one of the cultures simply appears more innocent as its appropriation has been forgotten by history and has become accepted as an essential part of the dominant culture.  

Even if cultural appropriation was ended it would be difficult to determine who belongs to what group and what belongs to each group and who has the authority to define these limits, especially since these tend to define one another. And if an item has a plurality of interpretations, then once appropriated, who determines its meaning and who determines the significance of it being appropriated based on such meaning?  Who has the authority to define the boundary of a cultural identity is ambiguous and may be relative to the values and beliefs within each culture which would themselves be defined by those recognized as legitimately authoritative within the community.  It is commonly said that for cultural assimilation to be appropriation, one must be invited into a culture in order to participate in it.  But this requires someone with the authority to invite one into the culture, and one must be sensitive to such variance.  To assume that anyone speaks with authority for their culture would be presumptuous on their part and one’s own. 

One must be sensitive to the context of ritual or artifact and who is available to legitimate its adoption.  So too must accusations of illegitimate cultural appropriation be tempered by personal understanding; without understanding the significance of the item to the person, one cannot be confident that their adoption of it is insincere.  Perhaps the white woman wearing a bindi is in fact a Hindu convert or the white man in a keffiyeh has a Palestinian wife with family in the West Bank.  So much discussion of cultural appropriation occurs around the internet which makes spectacles of de-contextualized images and video such that a seemingly offensive example of cultural appropriation may actually be a meaningful gesture of solidarity.  This inattentive disregard for a nuanced understanding of cultural assimilation and participation has only served to reinforce an oppositional binary between people of white privilege and people of color.        

The rhetoric of cultural appropriation places emphasis on cultural appropriation as analogous to theft; it is the theft of a minority people’s cultural heritage.  And while such rhetoric is superficially convincing, further scrutiny proves that it is insubstantial and often incoherent in many contexts.  Understanding cultural appropriation as theft presupposes that culture is to be understood as a finite resource possessed exclusively by a particular population that can be exchanged, freely or through coercion, between populations.  If culture was not finite, if it was not bound to any particular people, and if it cannot be exchanged, then the analogy to theft breaks down.  

As said before, cultures reflexively change over time by selectively emphasizing their accumulated traditional histories, emphasizing and transforming particular elements over others.  Such a process occurs within the context of the community’s contemporary interests in relation to other communities such that any given culture may, and indeed must, incorporate elements, often in the form of technological artifact or political ideology, from other cultures, in order to preserve its own communal identity.  No culture can be considered in absolute isolation from the influence of other cultures since there will always been some overlap between it and others and thus culture is not bound to any one community, but multiple cultures may be present within the same community with each culture overlapping in shared knowledge, rituals, or artifacts.    

Even if a culture can be understood in abstraction as a finite number of ideas, customs, rituals and artifacts, there is nevertheless infinite potential for the interpretation of these items and their infinite relations between one another across time and place within the identifying community.  The idea that one can exchange these items between cultures becomes obviously incoherent in most cases since exchange requires the transfer of something from one person to another for something else, with each party losing an item in exchange for gaining another.  Particular political institutions and arrangements must be in place for cultural appropriation as a mode of cultural theft to be coherently criticized.  Only if the exchange of culture is unequal between parties and presupposes some restriction on the cultural expression of the minority by the majority is it intelligible.  

White Americans innovating upon African American music and dance is in itself should not be condemned unless it occurs in a context where African Americans are not allowed to express their own culture in a way that white American are allowed to express what they have appropriated from them.  Otherwise the appropriation is not a deprivation of the minority culture but merely an imitation or interpretation of it that expands upon it rather than restricting it.  Cultural appropriation may be fraudulent or deviant but it is not blatant theft unless it necessarily entails that once adopted by another culture, the original culture is unable to participate in their own traditions to the same degree.  There is no loss of a culture when it is practiced, worn or used by other people, even when done radically differently; it is simply an expansion of that culture or a redefinition of it.              

The threat of cultural appropriation is said to coincide with the pressure towards cultural assimilation into the majority culture.  People of color not only feel that they are being deprived of their culture as it is being made a commodity of white culture but that they must adopt white culture itself as their dominant form of expression, abandoning their more traditional community beliefs and customs.  A Chinese immigrant to America may simultaneously feel that their culture has been appropriated into parody through Chinese restaurants and television stereotypes while simultaneously feeling that they cannot authentically express Chinese culture as they received it because it is too exotic or offensive to conform to the stereotypes expected by Americans.  In making such claims it is crucial that one distinguish between white culture and the culture of people with white privilege.  White culture is synonymous with the ideology of capitalism and is the cynical denial of having a culture because every element of culture is a commodity that can be purchased and sold as a means of self-expression and empowerment without any measure of identification with it.  People of white privilege are those who are considered white and are thus in an advantageous position in society thanks to their rejection of identification with any particular culture in favor of a generic and cynical distance to any tradition except for the commodification and appropriation of other traditions.  

White culture is a threat to all cultures, even those who benefit from white privilege since the precondition for the privilege is the disintegration of their cultural identity.  What people of color rightly fear is the appropriation of and assimilation into white culture, not the culture of white people such as the Irish, Italian, and Jewish, etc.  It is not so much a conflict between cultures appropriating and assimilating one another, but between sincere cultural identities and an insincere commercialization of those identities.  Thus white people, insofar as they recognize that their privilege is predicated upon the repression of their own particular traditional heritages, are potential allies of people of color in their struggle against cultural appropriation.  It is not the identity of the appropriator that should be cause to offense, but the mode of appropriation.  It is too easy and too dangerous to fall into the trap of identity politics and immediately accuse a white person of oppressive cultural appropriation simply because they are white.  This unnecessarily antagonizes potential white allies whose white privilege affords them a degree of freedom that is practical to the struggles of people of color and can afford them a cultural space of appreciation not otherwise afforded to them when their culture is strictly segregated from the culture of white people.    

Being offended by the cultural juxtaposition of a white person for merely sporting dreadlocks or wearing Native American patterns is the reduction of ethics into aesthetics.  There is no moral consideration of the rights of the white person or the culture that they have appropriated to determine whether it was legitimate or not but there is merely the tasteless image of a white person adopting elements of another culture considered inappropriate for them.   This represents a slippery slope towards racism since it judges one superficially based on their racial and cultural identification regardless of how they value or respect other cultures.  Ironically, this insistence on cultural purity from the corruption of white appropriation mirrors the concerns of white bigots who fear that people of color are infiltrating their culture.  This is also reminiscent of other-obsessed fundamentalism insofar as it is overly obsessed with the other’s culture and rather than maintaining a focus on the significance of one’s own traditions; what is considered important is that white people do not engage with the culture of people of color not that people of color have their culture acquire greater exposure or that it be positively received and reinterpreted in other cultures.  


When white people ignore the significance behind an element of another culture, or make claims of false claims of authenticity for profit, or when they appropriate symbols of resistance to depoliticize them, then they are no longer allies because they are reinforcing the oppressive commodification of culture.    This reactionary strategy of closing of interaction between one’s culture and others is unlikely to preserve itself and far more likely to only reinforce stereotypes, exotification and fossilization of the community further through lack of exposure.  Communities must be willing to endure the transient trauma of appropriation, accommodation and assimilation between their culture and others if they are to maintain relevant to their contemporary contexts.

Insofar as the white privilege of cultural appropriation is a reflective of white culture, then the appropriation of culture from people of color appears to be without problem.  To claim that it is problematic would require that elements of one culture appropriated by another be abandoned to the exclusive right of their original community.  To fail to do so would be hypocritical for it would require one culture, white culture, to abandon the appropriation of other cultures while allowing all of those other cultures to continue in their appropriation of one another.  One could only claim that items incorporated into white culture are not white if the concept of cultural theft makes sense, and since it has been argued previously that it does not absent a direct relation to oppression, one cannot determine the limits of white culture from outside of it.  Only white people can determine what white culture is, just as only people of color can negotiate the limits of their own culture.  

If white culture is expansive and inclusive of minority customs and creations then all the better for it, assuming that such expansion does not require the original culture to disavow ownership .  If white people started to wear the kimono or bindi or keffiyeh while recognizing that these originated in other cultures and are still significant to them, then there would not be a contrast between mundane white culture and exotic non-white cultures but degrees of participation in cultures, with white culture being on the periphery of experience.  What is offensive is when a white person attempts to be a non-white person by means of adopting stereotyped behavior and costume, even if such behavior is meant to be flattering.  Another culture is not a costume; it is not something that one “puts on” as if the underlying universal was white culture.  A white person may appropriate and even participate in Arab culture, as I do with my Syrian girlfriend and her family, but I will never be Arab and it would be offensive if I attempted through over-identification to act as if I were.       

The binary opposition between a people of white privilege majority and a people of color minority is ironic since it reproduces the logic of commodification inherent in harmful practices of cultural appropriation.  This is because it reduces a cultural item to a commodity devoid of significance beyond signifying the cultural community itself just as a capitalist commodity is a symbol of expression for the individual consumer.  This produces a further binary between cultural significance and cultural representation, the former being the meaning and significance of any given practice or artifact to a community and the latter being the practical or material form it takes.  

Those in power conscientious to the perils of cultural appropriation do appropriate minority culture to the extent to which they internalize the significance of these rituals and artifacts but they do not practically or materially express this since they understand it to be offensive.  The individual who refuses to wear a bindi or participate in belly-dancing out of the fear that it will be offensive to the Hindu or Arab communities respectively, stands halfway within each culture; they have appropriated an understanding of the bindi or belly-dancing as of exclusive significance to each population, and in identifying themselves as outside of this population, refuse to participate in their customs.  This is paradoxical since the interpretation of the bindi or belly-dancing as such arises from within its own local culture, but the refusal of each makes apparent that one stands outside the culture as a contradiction to it. 

What cultural assimilation discourse often overlooks is the possibility of people of color commodifying their own culture.  This doesn’t have to simply be examples of people of color selling their culture in order to economically sustain itself in an increasingly globalized capitalist economy.  This already presupposes that the cultural item is devoid of sacred significance and thus can be traded like any other profane item in a market economy.  So even if Indian women are not buying and selling bindis in a capitalist economy, they can still understand the bindi without any relation to the sacred as a mere aesthetic commodity for their own self-expression.  Indeed, this process of commodification is what allowed people of white privilege, the Irish, Jewish, Italian, etc., to be considered white and occupy a position of power in society.  By divesting themselves of cultural signifiers that distinguished them from those who already possessed the privilege of white identity, they too could be incorporated into white identity.  And while some people of color may never be considered a white person, they may nevertheless commit the same sacrilegious commodification of their cultural heritage.  

While this process could be traced back to white colonialism and imperialism and the intrusive pressure to conform to capitalism, it is nevertheless true that the commodification of a culture may be in place before white people even begin to engage in the cultural appropriation of it.  If people of color are to resist the appropriation of their culture as commodities of capitalist fetishism and the cult of individual self-expression, then they must be responsible in ensuring that the significance of their cultural items remain explicit.  If there is no longer anything particularly sacred about the bindi in South Asian culture itself, then the adoption of it by white people as a token of beauty is of no significance since there would be no misrepresentation of it.  To insist otherwise would be simply bigoted against white people adopting elements of other cultures.

Cultural appropriation and representation is inarguably offensive when done to explicitly mock another culture, particularly what it considers religiously sacred.  When people wear black face, dress as Arab terrorists or Native American savages for Halloween or draw the prophet Mohammed of Islam in an insulting manner (I see nothing inherently offensive in drawing Mohammed as such given that it has some pious precedence in the history of Islam itself), there should be no room for debate that these practices are done with the explicit intention to demean and demoralize another community for the empowerment and amusement of one’s own.  

Also offensive are false claims to authenticity or ownership of items outside of one’s own culture; non-Native American artists passing off imitation art as authentic Native craftwork is one of the clearest examples of cultural appropriation since it does deprive a minority community precisely because an item is falsely claimed to be from that community.  I have often heard Arab Palestinians accuse Jewish Israelis of appropriating their cultural cuisine and claiming it as their own, i.e. hummus and falafel are Israeli and not Arab.  But to be honest, I have never heard a Jewish Israeli make this claim, and for them to do so would be absurd; the closest approximation came from an Israeli whose family came from Morocco and thus Middle Eastern food considered Arab cuisine was indeed part of her cultural heritage and not a mere invention of colonialist reinvention.  Nevertheless, the fear of the oppressor appropriating another culture and claiming it as theirs is real and finds its precedent in the very real theft of land and wealth by colonialism and imperialism. 

But cultural appropriation is not only done to mock or discredit another culture but may naively if not sincerely be done in an effort of solidarity with that culture.  White allies of oppressed minorities should not fetishize superficial identification with the suffering of such minority cultures.  By claiming to represent them, or worse yet, be a person of color “on the inside”, white liberals run the inevitable risk of misrepresenting minorities through offensive stereotypes.  Unfortunately, such fetishism often arises out of the discourse of cultural appropriation and white privilege itself.  White privilege and the ideology of capitalism it is associated with are infinitely reflexive, able to appropriate or commodify opposition to itself.  

Capitalism can sell Che Guevara or punk leather jackets to self-styled political radicals because they believe they are rebelling against the system they are actually buying into. So too are people of white privilege capable of idealizing the victimization of people of color and turning it into a perverse form of humility.  This ritualized form of self-deprecation is symptomatic of white-guilt ridden liberals who, in a desire to appear legitimate, attempt to cultivate an aura of personal oppression to measure up against the actual oppression of people of color.  Cultural appropriation cannot be justified when it remains superficial and ignorant or indifferent to the actual struggles of people of color.    

When symbols of resistance to colonial and imperial appropriation are themselves appropriated by the oppressor, the offense is particularly intense and absurd.  For Palestinians and those who support their interest of national autonomy, the traditional keffiyeh scarf has become a struggle against Israeli occupation and oppression (and unfortunately equated with the terrorist elements of said nationalist movement).  If Israeli settlers appropriated wearing the keffiyeh in the West Bank it would undermine the potency of the symbol for their cause(compare this strategy to Kanye West’s wearing a Confederate Flag decorated jacket to mock and strip the symbol’s association with the oppression of African Americans).  

Similarly, white people in general are often criticized for wearing the keffiyeh not only because they wear it simply as a depoliticized fashion accessory but because they can wear it as such without being labeled terrorist sympathizers.  Thus it is offensive not merely because the commodification of the keffiyeh into form of self-expression strips it of its revolutionary significance but those that do wear it for political purposes cannot do so freely without being accused of supporting violence and terrorism even though its cultural significance extends beyond such associations.  For this reason, white allies of oppressed people of color should be free to assimilate items of their culture into their own in order to give them wider representation in society insofar as those wearing them do not contribute to or reinforce those forces that oppress them to begin with.  Even if a white person wears a keffiyeh merely as a fashion accessory they are at least providing a depoliticized context for it that allows those that are wearing it for political reasons to do so incognito and thus avoid immediate identification and accusation of being (supportive of) terrorists.  People will still be free to understand the keffiyeh as a symbol of solidarity for Palestinian nationalism. 

Cultural appropriation is said to be problematic when it occurs in an unequal exchange between an oppressive majority culture against an oppressed minority culture.  Presumably this is because the supposed abstract theft of culture mirrors more concrete and traumatic imperial and colonial thefts of land, wealth, and the freedom and lives of their fellow people.  So when a White American appropriates African American or Native American culture it can be seen as reproducing the history of their oppression despite often appearing to be naively benevolent in intention.  But if this reproduction is to be normative, it must bear some immediate relation between the act of appropriation to the history of oppression; the act of appropriation itself must serve to reinforce oppression or coincide with it.  

If the instance of appropriation does not reinforce oppression, however, then the offense is merely emotionally and historically contingent to the victim; anyone can be offended by the appropriation of their culture by some minority for some historical offense by a member of that identity as history is replete with examples of some people oppressing one another.  This merely warrants pragmatic politeness towards those overly sensitive to the history of intercultural violence; if I know my Indian friend is sensitive to history of white colonialism in India, I would probably not wear a t-shirt with the Hindu god Ganesha on it.  But if I knew my friend had no such sensitivity, I would not be concerned since my shirt presumably has no connection to misrepresenting, discrediting or oppressing Hindu Indian culture.  

But to believe that one can condemn freely condemn another person for participating in their culture merely because at some point in history a member of that person’s culture oppressed a member of one’s own culture is simply racist and contrary to the ethic of criticizing cultural appropriation as a form of racist oppression.  There is a bias in cultural appropriation critiques to overemphasize of a narration of oppression; because the history of cultural relation is one of oppression one should resist the temptation of appropriation.  But history is not simply the remembering of the past but also the recognition of the future.  If one wants a future of mutual cultural respect one needs to focus on the narration of cultural cooperation and appreciation not oppression and appropriation.  And the initiation of such a narrative can be located in the act of cultural assimilation itself; by exchanging and experimenting with one another’s culture, we are engaging in creative cooperation, not restrictive oppression. 

Cultural appropriation is not beneficial if you do nothing to confront the injustices facing the culture you have appropriated from.  If you claim to care about the native culture, buy from within that community and make the effort to understand its history and its struggles.  Respect for other cultures necessities sensitivity to the significance, source and similarity of any cultural item.  One must question whether one’s adoption of it is done out of solidarity or whether it is merely out of mockery, fraudulence, or vanity and whether it was acquired freely from the community or whether its adoption was made possible by, and reinforces, the oppression of said community.  

Criticism of cultural appropriation must be personalized to understanding the relationship the individual has to the cultural item since cultural boundaries are indeterminate and subject to revision.  The significance of any cultural custom or artifact is also subject to revision so one must be willing to admit that a given item may have multiple interpretations and need not be restricted from acquiring more.  Members within a culture are just as capable of commodifying their own traditions as those outside of them and the way to combat this is to insist on the continued significance of these sacred rites and customs.  And if someone misrepresents or mocks some traditional form of knowledge, or custom or artifact then they liked do not understand it and it is their loss; they have deprived themselves access to the significance of one’s own culture, but one is still capable of enjoying its significance among one’s own community.

When People of White Privilege Were Not White

There was a time when neither the Irish, nor the Italian, nor the German were considered white.  They were simply the Irish, Italian and German.  And yet, I, the descendent of these peoples, am white.  This is equally problematic for anyone with Spanish, Greek, Turkish, Arab, Persian, Armenian, Russian, Polish, or Jewish ancestry, etc.  When I was at university, I loosely participated in the Arab culture club (which is where I met my girlfriend), and an important issue for them and other Middle-Eastern and North-African student groups was getting people from these regions a separate demographic on survey material because the majority of current surveys categorize such people as “white” or “Caucasian”.  When a friend of mine from Tunisia came to visit me at university and I told her about the culture club’s petition and she was surprised that American Arab’s did not consider themselves white.  She considered herself white, and while in America most people assumed she was white as well, albeit they thought she was Russian.  But I digress. 

Much of the rhetoric surrounding criticism of white privilege operates with an indefinite understanding of what white even means, and thus any such critiques are questionable.  This allows liberal activists to construct narratives of oppression from white privilege and attach them to individuals and institutions freely without investigating if such things are indeed “white.”  This I believe is ironically, itself a predominantly white liberal privilege, which I have discussed in greater detail in previous essays.  It is the privilege to co-opt the critical rhetoric of people of color to establish one’s status in a hierarchy against other white people, be they fellow liberals or conservatives.  White liberals may appear to be advocating in the interests of people of color but their activism doesn’t extend beyond mere rhetorical maneuvers to shame other white people for their supposed privileges.  When these privileges are not recognized, it is alleged that this is just further indication of the absolute extent of white privilege.  And when white identity itself cannot be identified, this confusion is also reflected as further proof of its absolute ideological influence.  The indefinite understanding of what white privilege is allows those participating in its discourse to utilize its rhetoric to perpetuate their own white privilege while appearing to be opposed to it.  Just as I have criticized privilege discourse in previous essays in order to produce a more coherent critique of white privilege, here too I will attempt a deconstruction of white identity in order to more clearly identify white privilege and power so to better undermine it.

White identity is a relatively recent historical construction, emerging out of the Anglo-Saxon colonization of North America.  Initially, only Anglo-Saxon colonists considered themselves to be white.  Before the colonization of America, the genocide of the Native Americans and the enslavement of Africans, the English had succeeded in the colonization, enslavement and eventual genocide of a significant portion of the native Irish population.  The English saw the Irish as simple savages in need of colonization to deliver culture to them.  Without it, they remained idle, violent, and stupid, rooted in their primitive customs and superstitious religion.  Ireland was turned into English farmland which eventually contributed to the wretched Potato Famine, killing millions of Irish natives and causing millions more to flee elsewhere, mostly to America.  When the Irish arrived in North America, they were seen as little better than pale-skinned Negroes to other European colonists.  The Irish were dehumanized by being depicted as inherently criminal, drunk, and superstitious to the comic amusement of American society.  Irish immigrants and freed African Americans slaved lived and labored together in the slums of northern American colonies competing for the same low-wage, low-status jobs.  

Though the Irish were certainly discriminated against the most, the European servant class in general was economically and politically on par with imported African slaves; this was especially so if the condition of their servitude was indentured.  Concern that lower-class Europeans would unite with African slaves in rebellion, motivated upper-class European landowners to expand the white racial identity, providing political privileges with it.  If the economic oppression of lower-class Europeans was obscured by membership in a pan-European identity, then they would be less inclined to betray those within white fraternity and more likely to politically support the economic interests of the upper-class.  Starting in the Jacksonian Era of the early half of 19^th century, citizenship criteria changed from being distinguished by wealth to being identified as white, uniting Northern Europeans together.  Adult males, regardless of wealth, could vote and own land, so long as they were considered white.  By the early 20^th century this identity included the Irish; Irish immigrants were gradually incorporated into white identity as they occupied positions of power over African American slaves and laborers and supported the racist politics that kept racially discriminatory laws in place.  In the mid-20^th century white identity had expanded again through the New Deal struggle against the Great Depression and the conflict of World War II.  With such expansion, diverse peoples such as Italians, Germans, Polish, Jewish, and Russian would be considered white.  White identification afforded one access to land through land grant acts, better education through GI bills, and better employment outside the confines of Jim Crow laws.    

Inclusion into the white race was only made possible by minorities abandoning historical identification with signifiers of their cultural heritage.  Minorities who maintained the clothing, customs, rituals and languages of their native cultures were more resistant to being accepted into white identity.  They were seen as foreign, and in the case of Catholic minorities such as the Irish and Italian, subject to the conspirational influence of the Catholic Church of Rome.  Only by abandoning overt displays of their cultural heritage and representing the dominant Anglo-Saxon culture of American society were minorities able to become white, and made them gradually forget the history that there was a time when they were not white.  Although the ideology of white identity may have entailed a substitution of, for example, native Irish culture with colonial English culture, it is no longer that simple.  The average American understanding of Irish or Italian culture, even for those within the communities themselves, is an impoverished parody of itself.  Irish culture has been bastardized into neo-pagan pseudo-Celtic mysticism, and representations of alcoholism and domestic violence.  Italian culture is synonymous with the mafia, or more recently, and arguably more embarrassingly, Jersey Shore.  These are inarguably racist stereotypes, and there are equally demeaning caricatures of Jewish, German, Russian, Greek, and, now especially, Arab Americans as well.  What is remarkable is that although these people may variously benefit from white privilege, the racist caricatures of them emerge out of white supremacy themselves.  This makes sense if a person is only capable of being white to the extent to which they suppress the stereotypical cultural elements of their heritage that may mark them as a member of a specifically unique culture with its own history.       

If white people are to effectively confront their white privilege in order to combat white supremacy, they need to understand that white privilege harms white people themselves, and not only people of color.  What this requires is a rehabilitation of white identity before it was understood through the cultural appropriation of colonialism and capitalism.  Before white people were white, they were a variety of other peoples with unique cultures, such Irish, Italian, or German, who themselves were assimilated through cultural appropriation into colonial capitalist interests of European elites.  White culture was previously defined in opposition to non-white cultures, to justify the colonization and exploitation of the latter by the former; might made right and non-white made white.  But concerns over the stability of such colonial exploits necessitated that minorities be incorporated into the identity of the European capitalist upper-class through the mutual appropriation and suppression of their unique cultures.  Only to the extent that white Americans maintain a detachment from their original cultures are they capable of maintaining the collective delusion that they are members of a white culture and not subject to an oppressive ideology of whiteness. 

Ironically, white Americans lament the supposed genocide of their white culture and have pride in an indefinitely defined forgotten white heritage but it is the ideology of white identity itself which has resulted in ignorance and supposedly impending extinction of particular white cultural identities for Irish, Italian, Jewish, Polish Americans, etc.  This is dangerous because the lamentable desire to reconnect with one’s lost cultural heritage can lead one to ignorantly defend white supremacy politics that only perpetuate the oppression of the very cultural narrative one desires to recover.  Thus the tragic loss of culture made to white supremacy is appropriated to perpetuate support for the continuation of white hegemony itself, reproducing the tragedy again in a vicious cycle. This reflexive displacement of victimization is an essential quality of white privilege and capitalism; when counter-cultural criticisms are leveled against either, their rhetoric and aesthetics are appropriated into white identity and capitalism and commodities, thus perpetuating while one is deluded into thinking one is opposing it.  Capitalism consumed communism to only regurgitate it in order to sell t-shirts of Chef and books on Marx to white liberals.  So too has white supremacy collapsed Irish identity into Celtic symbols, appropriated by conservative white supremacists, to defend their lost culture without realizing that the history of white supremacy is itself to blame.     

Despite the power of white privilege, such privilege is predominately legitimated through narratives of victimization, both from white conservatives and white liberals.  The former takes the form of a defensive white pride described above which appropriates items of culture long-since dead to commodification by the interests of white colonialism and capitalism to ignorantly support those very forces.  The latter takes the form of a self-deprecating white guilt and suppression of minority cultural expression subsumed into white identity.  Believing that any celebration of “white” culture is a celebration of its oppressive legacy, white liberals ironically perpetuate the legacy of white hegemony by paralyzing white people against recovering their heritage.  Thus they are forced to appropriate symbols of other cultures for their resistance against capitalism and colonialism, which of course, mirror capitalist and colonialist appropriations of those cultures.  Thus white conservatives and liberals alike are ironically united in their belief in the inferiority of their white identity; liberals just believe that this is deserved because it is inherent and inevitable while conservatives believe that it is due to non-white people of color seeking revenge for past atrocities committed in the name of the white race.  Either way, white privilege is maintained by identifying cultures appropriated into white identity as white and allowing no resistance to reverse this trend of appropriation and oppression. 

White identity was once understood positively through opposition to and exclusion of non-white peoples supposedly lacking in culture, it is not predominately interpreted negatively by the appropriation and inclusion of non-white cultures into itself.  The commodification of non-white cultures maintains the illusion of a stable white identity by investing it with new material devoid of more particular cultural significance which can be reconstituted as universally white and only nominally representative of a minority culture.  Anyone can enjoy white culture by buying Irish beer on Saint Patrick’s Day, while remaining ignorant of how Irish culture has been simultaneously oppressed and commodified; the appeal of the product is its supposedly Irish identity, but it is an identity devoid of any historical attachment to the struggles of the Irish people.  Having no exposure to their native cultures beyond these commodity parodies, white people come to invest in the exploitation inherent in capitalist appropriation of other cultures: the cultural appropriation of capitalism becomes to only appropriate culture to them.  There is no white culture beyond this celebration of cultural appropriation, exploitation and oppression; any traces of particular “white” culture such as the Irish, Italian, or German, only persist as commodities in its service or as authentic symbols of resistance to it.  The form of racism that white supremacy takes is more absolute that any specific cultural imperialism that seeks to supplant a native culture with its own; white supremacy even negates the culture of those in power, rendering it just another commodity to be exchanged for another representation of power.  Thus, even while the ideology of the white race emerged out of Anglo-Saxon colonialism, even a specifically English culture has been appropriated into another caricature of itself.  

White conservatives claim to be color-blind, to see individuals, not racial communities, but whenever there is any mention of white privilege or cultural appropriation, they organize around their white racial identity to oppose their supposed victimization.  When white privilege is acknowledged and criticized, white conservatives become anxious and claim reverse racism against affirmative action programs.  When the appropriation of the cultures of people of color is acknowledged and criticized, white conservatives become frustrated and claim reverse cultural appropriation when people of color participate in white culture.  But they mistake the ideology of a white race for the cultures that have been suppressed and erased by it.  One cannot be racist against an ideology that professes to ignore ethnic or racial distinction, and one cannot appropriate a culture that is nothing but a culture of appropriation.  This is why white people so often deny the very existence of white identity, not out of opposition to it, but precisely because identifying would allow it to be opposed and criticized.  Because white identity is defined by its privileges, the elimination of those privileges would eliminate white culture, and hence white people are pressured to justify or ignore oppression in order to preserve their nominal cultural identification.  Having already distanced themselves from or forgotten their unique cultural heritages, the dissolution of their white identity would leave them with apparently leave them with nothing to identify with.  Hence the anxiety of white people to honestly confront white privilege without being compelled to appropriate forms of cultural resistance from people of color.   

When white privilege is typically critiqued, it is framed as the privilege inherent to being white.  But whiteness itself is not an inherent identity, but is an ideology of historical contingency, emerging in the interest of colonization and persisting and expanding through the cultural appropriation of capitalism.  This deconstruction of privileged white identity should not be construed as suggesting that white privilege itself doesn’t exist, simply because white people do not exist.  White people do not exist, but white privilege does, insofar as one is labeled as white.  Not all “white” people receive the supposed benefits of white privilege, and this is not simply due to the fact that privilege is intersectional with other dimensions of advantage or disadvantage such as class or sex.  It is because those with power do not accept them as truly white, while people of color without power are anxious to ally with them because they appear to be white.  The identification of whiteness has never simply been about skin-tone but has predominantly focused on one’s proximity to those already in power, measured against one’s suppression of any cultural heritage and opposition to those identified as non-white.  Thus those who would otherwise be considered non-white, but who suppress any overt cultural identification as a non-white stereotype are able to benefit from white privilege, but it must be maintained that such privilege has its costs to one’s cultural identity.  This is why the Arab students at my university did not want to be identified statistically as white: it suppressed their unique cultural identity even if it may have afforded them some associative benefits.

Privileges do not emerge out of one’s white identity spontaneously but the label of whiteness creates relative institutional advantages.  I say relative, because to be labeled as white can indeed be a disadvantage in those contexts where one is most likely attempt to resist white power: liberal activist and academic communities.  Being labeled with white privilege by such activists and academics can be alienating and oppressive, especially when one does not identify with the privileges of white identity purchased at the expense of the suppression of one’s cultural heritage.  I am reluctant to call myself a white American because my Irish, Italian and German heritage has suffered under white racism.  I am aware that my Irish, Italian and German heritage is haunted by its share in the horrors of racism against people of color and I cannot compare the suffering of these cultures to what they have contributed to against the communities stolen out of African for capitalism or the native cultures of America massacred through colonialism.  If I am to now be called white, it is only because my forebears had to suppress their culture in order to escape their oppression from white people.  This is the struggle of white liberals like me who are self-conscious of how white identity has been constructed over history, but find themselves mutually ostracized from both white conservatives who oppress culture in the name of an empty white identity and white liberals who suppress culture against oppressive white power.  Against these two fundamental misunderstandings of white identity and privilege, I recognize my white privilege and deny my white identity: I am not a white person, I am a person of white privilege, and I am proud, not in white power, but in the power of cultural resistance possible only if people of white privilege remember back to a time of before they were merely white.              

Subversive Speculation of the Future of Scientific and Fantastic Fiction

          In a previous essay, "Tolkein and the Reality of Fantasy's Failure With Racism", I confronted the fantasy genre’s tendency towards racist caricatures of marginalized and exoticized people through fantastic cultures and races.  Reflecting upon that writing made got me thinking about the complexity of the fantasy genre itself and its ambiguous if not antagonistic relationship with science fiction.  This essay serves as a correction of that arbitrary literary distinction and I hope that my critique will not only enable the genres to be better understood but to expand beyond their current constraints to do what the genres were meant to do: create entertaining and enlightening fantasies.

          Both fantasy and science fiction are included within the speculative fiction genre, a wider genre of suspended disbelief.  The New Weird writer China Mieville, a personal favorite of mine, distinguished between the genres structurally in terms of impossibility and I think that is a useful format to follow.  So we can consider speculative fiction to deal with that which is impossible.  Within this we can make a distinction between what he defined as the not-yet-possible or the never-possible; the former belonging to science fiction and the latter to fantasy fiction.  Similarly Rod Serling defined the distinction as science fiction making the improbably possible while fantasy fiction making the impossible probable.  Science fiction is interested in narratives built upon the speculation of scientific knowledge in a consistent and continuous manner.  By contrast, fantasy fiction indulges in narratives based upon imaginative and magical mythologies, often discontinuous if not in contradiction to our scientific and historical knowledge.

          Starting from this stereotypical understanding of each genre we can construct contrasting expectations for the surface setting and narrative each will take.  Science fiction involves a confrontation with the consequences of actualized speculative science such as artificial intelligence, the colonization of other planets, extraterrestrial communication, virtual reality or time travel.  Fantasy includes a conflict between good and evil, fate and destiny, with magical powers, divine beings, and fantastic creatures.  Science fiction is futuristic and progressive while fantasy is medieval and conservative.  The former not only occurs in a scientifically and technologically-advanced future continuous with our present world but resolves its conflicts by advancing technology or knowledge even further.  The latter, fantasy fiction, typically occurs in a world historically disconnected and politically more primitive than our own and resolves its conflicts by restoring the current political and cosmological status-quo  through the recovery of some forgotten artifact or restoration of some lost royal bloodline.

          The subversion of this literary binary between science fiction and fantasy fiction begins by showing that the surface plot and setting stereotypes do not following from the structure underlying them.  I think that one could transport the surface tropes of plot and setting relatively intact from one genre into another without destabilizing its structural integrity or needing to superfluous postulation of some genre hybrid.  Science fiction explanations of the world are continuous or at least compatible with our own scientific understanding of the world and a large amount of the appeal of the genre revolves around how rigorously it extrapolates from current scientific theory to justify its speculative elements.  Fantasy is different in that it is more or less discontinuous with our scientific understanding of the world if not explicitly in contradiction to it through its re-appropriation of outdated pseudo-sciences like alchemy or invention of supernatural magic systems.  Science fiction worlds are identifiable as historically related to our world either in the near or far-future or as an alternate history that deviated from our history at some point.  Due to the typical inclusion of supernatural elements like magic and gods, fantasy is not historically related to our world even when it appears to be set in an alternate historical period.  Science fiction narratives have a history that can be traced back to a period of our own world’s history while fantasy fiction narratives have their own world history or supernatural doppelganger histories of our own non-magical world history.  Science fiction represents a possibility of our world as an actuality while fantasy fiction represents a world impossible for us but actual to itself.

          The distinction between science fiction and fantasy becomes more complicated when one considers the relatively recent emergence of sub-genres such as urban fantasy or steam-punk.  In such genres, fantasy tropes such as magic, gods or supernatural creatures such as elves, fairies and vampires are introduced into modern settings such as Victorian London or modern New York.  Insofar as these stories contain supernatural elements I think they are un-controversially fantasy stories because the supernatural as a force that contradicts our scientific understanding of the world mark a clear discontinuity with our world.  Even if it is set in a city called London, it is clearly not the London of our world insofar as we do not understand magic as an intelligible part of our world, of which London is a part.  But insofar as the steam-punk genre does not include supernatural elements and is set in a world historically connected to our own I think it is acceptable to label it as science fiction and not fantasy fiction.  What is crucial is the element of historical and scientific continuity with our world: the advancements in Victorian steam-technology must be explained compatible with current scientific understanding and plausible for the Victorian time-period.  Were anachronistic technological advancements such as robots to exist within the time period that could not be explained or produced in accordance with the scientific understanding of the Victorian era, the narrative would fit within the fantasy genre, even if it lacked supernatural explanations for the existence of said robots.

          Science fiction has a historical prejudice towards the future and fantasy fiction towards the past.  Actually in the case of fantasy this isn’t really intelligible in most cases, as most fantasy has no historical continuity with our past but is a unique world in itself or resembles our present as is the case with urban fantasy.  Regardless, these historical prejudices can be quite comfortably reversed.  A story set on foreign planets with aliens and robots meditating on time travel could be recognized as fantasy fiction while a story in a pseudo-medieval world with dragons and trolls could be considered science fiction.  George Lucas’ Star Wars is a good example of fantasy fiction appearing in a setting typically reserved for science fiction because its history is not represented as our future, it includes supernatural magic such as the Jedi and Sith Force and it doesn’t concern itself with scientific plausibility.  The speculative fiction story set in a pseudo-medieval world with dragons and trolls can be considered science fiction, albeit pulpy science fiction, if it is recognizable as our world, and the dragons and trolls are explained as evolutionarily continuous with other life (dragons are pterosaurs that managed to survive the extinction of dinosaurs and trolls are related to Neanderthals).  What matters is how the world presented in the text is understood in relation to our world and how such an explanation for the world arises within the text itself.    If the world of the text has a historical relation to our world and its explanations are continuous and compatible with our understanding of our world then it is science fiction.  Whenever the history and explanations of speculative elements deviates from our world and is explained in accordance to its own history, pseudo-science or systematic magic, it is fantasy fiction.

          There has been some considerable debate over whether or not a narrative can lack magic or the supernatural and still be considered fantasy fiction as opposed to some other ill-defined genre of speculative fiction.  I believe that a story could indeed dispense with such supernatural elements and still be considered as fantasy fiction.  What is important to the distinction between science fiction and fantasy fiction is the continuity of the former with our understanding of our world and the discontinuity of the latter with our understanding of our world.  Supernatural features such as magic, gods, and miracles represent an explicit departure from such continuity but it is not the only form such departure can take.  A story set on island nations fighting off plague-spreading sentient fungus beings would be fantasy fiction insofar as the narrative has no recognizable connection to our world or our understanding of it.  But if it was set on a future Earth flooded due to global warming struggling against the fungal plague, then it could be science fiction because such a setting is continuous with our Earth in the aftermath of global warming and presumably has a pseudo-scientific explanation for the fungal plague, perhaps a mutation of the fungus Ophiocordyceps unilateralis like in the popular video-game The Last of Us.

          It is just as legitimate whether science fiction can do without science in the narrative and still fit within the genre, although to my knowledge such a debate has not really occurred among genre enthusiasts.  I think that a science fiction story can dispense with scientific explanations and still fit within the genre more or less, although such a fit will not be explicitly apparent.  What is important is that the narrative and setting of the story is continuous with our world and at a minimum compatible with our current understanding of the world.  But such compatibility with our current science need not itself be presented scientifically, it need only not explicitly contradict it.  In the medieval science fiction story with dinosaur-dragons it would make little sense to explicitly state that they had evolved from dinosaurs as if the theory of evolution was not common knowledge, or even privileged knowledge at the time given the state of science at the time, or lack thereof.  But one could implicitly work the connection into the narrative by saying that priests had collected bones from different layers in the earth, more or less in resemblance to the dragons they were familiar with and were beginning to question whether they had changed over time.  If science fiction can write about time periods prior to the emergence of the scientific method, and I think that it can, it makes little sense to define narrative explanations of the world in scientific terms.  But it strikes one as absurd to say that one can write science fiction unscientifically, and for this reason I will conclude this essay by suggesting a revision to the dichotomous labels of science fiction and fantasy fiction.

          There is space for ambiguity as to whether a given narrative can be defined as science fiction or fantasy fiction.  This occurs when the context of the world is neither recognizable as explicably continuous with our own nor precludes its possibility of being so.  I think any fantasy story devoid of the supernatural can conceivably fall within this categorization.  Consider a story set on an exotic world where humans live under elven overlords in a mountainous feudal kingdom threatened by swarms of dragons.  Such a story is apparently fantasy fiction as it has no continuity with our world or our understanding of it.  But later in the story it is revealed that humanity colonized this world as part of a space-faring empire originally descended from Earth and the elves and dragons are aliens which superficially resemble those of Earth fantasies.  Sounds more like science fiction now.  If science fiction is the genre of the not-yet possible and fantasy fiction of the never-possible, then such an ambiguous narrative could be labeled the not-yet-never-possible because it has not yet been closed off as violating the continuity with our understanding of the world.

          But our understanding of the world, even when mediated through the stricture of the scientific method, is subject to dramatic and destabilizing revision.  If the genre of science fiction is dependent upon continuity with such a worldview, then when this worldview is disproven, the narrative of the story lacks continuity with our world and ceases to be science fiction.  This is the fate of many, and possibly all, science fiction narratives to some extent as necessitated by the progress of scientific understanding: the science fiction of today is the fantasy fiction of tomorrow.  In ironic anticipation of this, consider speculative fiction set in an apparently science fiction world with the intrusion of inexplicable forces unintelligible to us.  Returning to our ambiguous narrative above, consider that further into the story it is revealed that the colonization was a response to the supernatural destruction of Earth by God’s angels because humanity had turned from worship of God to the idolization of science.  Later on it could be revealed that these angels were merely a more-advanced alien species utilizing technology that manipulated physics beyond our understanding so that it appears supernatural in nature.  Now we seem to be possibly back into the genre of fantasy fiction.  So on and so forth.

          This tension can be used to enhance the narrative through mystery insofar as it is never certain whether the world is continuous with our own and whether it can be exhaustively explicable according to (scientific) principles we will find intelligible.  A fantasy fiction can always be revealed to have a scientific explanation and a science fiction can always have forces which transcend explanation according to scientific principles as well as depend upon scientific principles which will eventually come to be understood as fantasy.  In line with previous thinking we can label this ambiguity of the speculative fiction genre as the never-not-yet-possible because it can never be definitively understood as a speculation which will remain or come to be explicable continuous with our scientific understanding of reality or whether it will elude such comprehension and continue to be perceived as supernatural.  A good speculative fiction narrative has to be plausible even if it is fantastic in nature and especially so if it is scientific in nature.  This plausibility arises out of the correspondence between the narrative of the text and the world of the text; when the narrative arises predictably out of the available knowledge of the world it is plausible, and when there is contradiction the story loses plausibility and the power of escapism which makes speculative fiction such an appealing genre.    If the narrative of the medieval science fiction story explains dragons as evolutionarily related to dinosaurs, you also need to explain how the theory of evolution itself arises out of a world ignorant of such a theory.  If not, the juxtaposition of a scientific narrative with a pre-scientific world will be jarring to the reader.  This is part of the challenge for writers challenging the hegemony of strict genre labels, and makes writers that effectively do so all the more impressive.

          I do not consider this a flaw of the model I am proposing but rather an advantage of it. It allows is to be comfortable with the tendency of science fiction stories to cease to be properly scientific and come to resemble fantasy as does it allow us to understand fantasy stories such as folklore and mythology as pseudo-scientific insofar as they are naively consistent with our current scientific understanding of the world.  Our narratives are subject to revision relative to how we understand our world in relation to the text and how those within the narrative of the text understand the world itself.  Science fiction and fantasy fiction as part of speculative fiction operate along a continuum between the ideals of familiarity and creativity.  Pure familiarity would replicate our world and pure creativity would be unintelligible to our world; both are impossible ideals insofar as any reproduction of this world is an idealized reduction of this world and any creativity of another world involves extrapolation from this world.  As a general rule, science fiction would tend towards what is more familiar than fantasy fiction since the former is continuous with our understanding of this world while the latter is not: it would be much harder to justify a human being turned into an insect in a science fiction narrative than it would be to do so in a fantasy fiction narrative.  This is the very appeal of subverting the narrow understanding of genre labels: the challenge of being able to think of fantastic imagery scientifically and to think of scientific scenarios as magical.  Not only do science fiction and fantasy fiction texts change genre labels throughout the history of our world, but our understanding of the text’s genre can change within the text itself depending on the form and content of its narrative, subverting our expectations again and again and forcing us to think more critically and creatively not only about the confines of the text but our world as well.

          Science fiction and fantasy fiction are not absolute and mutually exclusive genre labels but are two theoretical perspectives of the narrative relative to how we theorize the world of that narrative to be continuous and explicable with our theoretical understanding of our own world.  Although I think the genre label of any given story to be relatively stable across time, we must at least admit of the possibility that it can change and such stability is a contingency largely maintained for marketing advantages.  Genre labels are convenient ways of marketing a book in relation to other popular works to similar works to a particular demographic; it is hard to sell a book defined as fantasy-yet-possibly-science-fiction-but-eventually-fantasy.  But insofar as we are thinking theoretically in terms of genre, we can see the ambiguity and fluidity of these labels as well as their insufficiency.  What we need is a modification in our description of these genres.  Natural and supernatural fiction appears to be appealing but fantasy is not strictly defined by its inclusion of the supernatural, only by its discontinuity between the world of the text and the world of the reader, of which the supernatural is only the most explicit form.  Rational and irrational fiction is also appealing, but I think the latter is a pejorative used by science fiction genre enthusiasts against fantasy fiction unjustifiably; fantasy fiction is not irrational per se, it simply does not abide by a rationality bounded by the world of the reader and operates according to reasons internally consistent only with itself.  Fantasy fiction can be just as systematic and critical as science fiction, but it has its own system as it does its own history.

          Hypothetical fiction and fantastical fiction is a superior distinction between the two genres.  Science fiction does not necessarily have to do with science per se, but it is certainly structured by it insofar as it extrapolates from current scientific theory to form an imaginative world or makes historical changes to our world and contemplates the hypothetical consequences of such an adjustment.  Science fiction is science fiction not because of its content but its methodology just as fantasy fiction is fantastic not because it necessarily deals with the chimerical and magical but because it creates its world purely from the unconstrained imagination of the author, unbounded from the limitations of the author’s own world.  For too long in the history of speculative fiction have the hypothetical and fantastical fiction genres labored under the burden of their aesthetics, ignoring the underlying structural distinctions that make them unique genres and allow them to think more creatively from within that framework.  Hypothetical fiction doesn’t have to be constrained by the limitations of space opera battles, alien invasion, time travelers, or robotic revolutions and fantasy doesn’t need to find us again and again with magical monsters, feudal kingdoms, dark lords, and divine quests.  I think an increasing amount of speculative fiction authors are aware of this possibility, and are being imaginative enough to explore its implications by writing work that exists outside the binary of science and fantasy fiction.  The best example of this is the emerging and mutating genre of the New Weird, of which China Mieville is master.  Incorporating high and low fantasy, science fiction, horror, super-hero, dystopian, apocalyptic, post-apocalyptic, alternative-history, and steam-punk genres, the New Weird is continually reimagining the limitations and excess of the fantastical fiction genre and it is time for hypothetical fiction to join in that conversation.  Any of these genres can as previously considered can be contained and combined within hypothetical or fantastical fiction depending on how the narrative of the text understands its world and how the reader of understands the relationship between the world of the text and  their own world.

          I began this essay by following China Mieville’s distinction within speculative fiction between the not-yet-possible of hypothetical fiction and the never-possible of fantasy fiction.  I then expanded it to accommodate the horizons of the not-yet-never-possible and the never-not-yet-possible; the former belonging to the possibility of science fiction stories which are discredited scientifically and become pseudo-scientific fantasy fiction and the latter corresponding to speculative fiction which cannot be confined within either genre label definitively but always exists in the twilight of each, open to interpretation.  To a certain extent, I think all speculative fiction is the genre of the not-yet-never-possible because neither we do not understand ourselves and the world around us exhaustively nor can we understand the world of speculative fiction texts in that way nor can the narrator’s within the texts themselves.  All literature is escapism to some extent, and speculative fiction especially so, but all the more powerful for it.  We escape our world into the world of the text, to return to our world, to see ways in which our world could have been and could still be through hypothetical fiction and to see the mystery and fantasy we have forgotten in our world when juxtaposed with other unique worlds through fantastical fiction.  There is always the possibility of the impossible becoming probable and the probable becoming possible and each being reversed both within the world of the text and our own world.  Speculative fiction allows us to creatively and critically understand ourselves and our world by confronting the improbabilities and impossibilities of our lives through hypothetical and fantastical literary narratives.  

Tolkein and the Reality of Fantasy's Failure With Racism

          With the help of my girlfriend I have recently been rehabilitated into appreciating the fantasy genre.  Before her, my only exposure to fantasy came from Rowling and Tolkien. I had read science fiction literature too, but because I consider it a genre distinct from fantasy and because I see it less impacted by what I am to criticize in this essay, I need not mention it in any more detail.  The first book I read in my recovery of fantasy was the Silmarillion by Tolkien because I considered epic fantasy to be the essence of the genre, and I understood the Silmarillion to be the epitome of epic fantasy.

          This was a poor choice to reintroduce me to the fantasy genre because in reading it, I realized how Eurocentric and orientalist Tolkien is.  Whether this was due to my sympathy for the political revolutions of the Middle East and North Africa, or it was my interest in Islamic philosophy and theology, or my countless friendships with Muslim and Arab Americans (of which one is my girlfriend), I cannot say, though I am sure all had an influence on my reception of his epic.  In reaction I began to search out other works of great fantasy and it soon became apparent to me that much, if not most, of the literary tradition Tolkien had inspired had inherited his Eurocentric and orientalist mythology and made it essential to the fantasy genre.

          This essay is a confrontation with that legacy of fantasy which exoticizes and literally demonizes minorities and the immorality and hypocrisy involved in doing so.  I believe that this tendency can be traced back to Tolkien’s writing and will thus devote my attention to his work, though it extends past the writing of Tolkien and becomes less forgivable as it does so.  Before I explore the racism of fantasy world-building in the Tolkien tradition of epic fantasy, let me first make clear that I do not believe Tolkien was personally a racist.  He certainly wasn’t a racist in the sense appropriate to his times given that he praised the Jewish people and had great sympathy for the mistreatment of Africans in their native continent by colonialists as well as equal disdain for racism towards Germans and the racist ideology of German Nazis and their anti-Semitic sympathizers.

          That is not to say that by today’s standards Tolkien could be viewed as a benevolent racist with condescending and exoticized impressions of people of color.  But that is not the point.  I am not interesting in criticizing Tolkien himself as a racist, malevolent or benevolent, but in critiquing the racism inherent in his fantastic fiction.  Even if Tolkien himself opposed racism consciously in his person, he embodied it unconsciously in his writing, which has been continuously reproduced in those inspired by his Middle Earth mythology.  His literature transformed the fantasy genre and its continued relevance and popularity makes a critical analysis of it necessary.  The implicit racism of fantasy is not merely detrimental to people of color, but it is detrimental to the imaginative and progressive potential of the genre itself.

          In the mythology of Middle Earth, racism, like morality, is a matter of literal black and white and with racism and morality being mutually reinforcing to the fiction.  The good races of humans, elves, dwarves, hobbits and wizards are near universally represented as fair Europeans while the evil races in service to Sauron are men of the South and East, Southron and Easterlings, paralleling Arabs, Africans and Indians, or sub-human creatures of troll, goblin and orc of dark complexion and slant-eyed.  In and of itself, the tendency for fantasy to create unique ethnicities and races (i.e. species) distinct from humanity is not any more problematic than the tendency of science-fiction authors to imagine species of alien distinct from humanity.  The problem is when the fantasy author homogenizes race around morality absolutely, such that to be an elf is to be inherently predisposed to do good and to be an orc is to be inherently evil.  This is especially problematic when the ethnicity or race parallels a historical ethnicity, especially one that has suffered or continues to suffer radical discrimination and oppression.

          It was a flaw of Tolkien’s work that the majority of the evil forces came from the regions of East and South, from cultures strongly resembling African, Middle Eastern and Indian people, and that the entirety of these cultures was represented as evil.  Even more flawed is his description of orcs, in particular the sub-species of uruk-hai, as slant-eyed, repulsive Mongol-types.  The historical cultures of Africa and Asia have had to struggle with colonialism and imperialism justified through demonized or romanticized orientalist ideologies and that legacy is reflected in the literary politics of much fantasy literature.  The dark skinned people of the East and South are represented as exotic, ignorant, enigmatic, immoral or even inhuman in ways that that parallel historical racist ideologies.  Creating a fictional parallel to Asian or African cultures is not merely acceptable but beneficial for both the people and the genre but only insofar as such fictional representations are sufficiently culturally diverse and not morally homogenous so as to subvert offensive stereotypes.


          Although Tolkien’s literature has examples of good people or races turning to evil, the fall of the Numenoreans for example, there is the utter absence of evil races finding redemption.  The only way to deal with evil peoples is to kill them, and this usually involves killing the entire population of them.  This inequality is typically repeated in epic fantasy with the trope of good characters being corrupted by the evil lord and evil characters, if not whole races, needing to be slain because they are incapable of being accepting what is good.  Evil is thus not only pervasive but pathological and the solution to it is perverse; because the evil can corrupt the good and the good cannot convince the evil to abandon their immorality, the good can only maintain moral purity by eliminating all those deemed evil.  It is a moral duty to seek the extermination of orcs and goblins, trolls and ogres, because they in turn seek the extermination of the more fair and noble races.  However, their motivation for such wanton bloodlust remains inexplicable and enigmatic amounting to nothing more than the identification of their race with evil incarnate.

          One may object that we are here speaking of orcs and ogres, not mere men, and that for the former morality is essential while for the latter it is incidental.  That is to say that an orc cannot be good and still be considered an orc but a man can be good or evil and still be considered a man (one may even go so far as to say that for a man to necessarily be good or evil is not to be a man at all.  This response is uninteresting because the idea of a person, human or orc, as inherently evil is incoherent; evil is an intentional act with motive and meaning but if the being is innately evil then its actions are not motivated by evil intentions but merely by instincts that ape what we consider evil.  This lack of intentionality makes it impossible to identify with the motives of such people and it is precisely the power of evil to parody that which is good and to rationalize itself as an instrument of that good, that makes it such a threat to morality and such a tragic source of conflict in literature and history alike.  Without the contingency of evil being dependent upon corrupt motives, one cannot empathize with one’s enemies and one cannot struggle to comprehend the lessons of moral conflict and the narrative collapses into self-serving and impoverished ideology.

          Epic fantasy has a tendency to be inconsistent in its racism, and all the more racist for it.  On the one hand, fantastic races such as orcs and trolls are considered inhuman.  But on the other hand, such races are able to reproduce with humans (or other fantastic races) to produce half-breeds who are viewed as a corruptive degeneration of the more noble and pure half of their ancestry.  For example, in Tolkien the uruk-hai are born of the union between man and orc, with orcs themselves being a union of corrupt elves.  Even though elves, men and orcs are considered different races, they are able to produce offspring with one another. This inconsistency between labeling another being in-human (and in the case of races like orcs, sub-human), yet having fear and disgust over it producing children with a human is a parallel to historical racism.  There has been a tendency to vilify people of color as sub-human animals while also being anxious and hateful of unions between them and white people.  This irrational category of in-human human parallels the irrational fear and hatred of the racist themselves.  The race is a threat both because it is inhuman and incapable the moral and racial purity of humanity but also because it can infiltrate this humanity.  This returns us to the justification and celebration of genocidal warfare popularized in epic fantasies against inhuman species: because the inhuman is inherently immoral and cannot be integrated into society, but can infiltrate society and spread its corruptive influence through breeding, it must be exterminated through righteous violence.

          A modest effort to provide some diversity in the fantasy genre has been to create cultural parallels between minority races in history and literature.  However, such parallels have a tendency to be inadequate or inconsiderate.  One on hand, cultural diversity might manifest superficially as simply a mere difference in skin tone while still retaining the same Eurocentric culture; on the other hand, such multicultural representation may be fetishized into exotic and oriental stereotypes.  The Southron and Easterlings in Tolkien are of the latter sort as are the Dothraki of Martin to a less offensive extent.  An extreme example of this tendency would be the association of the appropriated historical culture with a fantastical in-human or sub-human race.  Elves may be given a semblance of Native American civilization or goblins may have a Mongol aesthetic.

          People of color who have already had their cultural identity and historical narratives marginalized and manipulated by those in power; they are appropriated into commodified parodies or incorporated into the ideological narratives of their oppressors, if not erased entirely.  In this effort to historicize fantastic literature we equally fantasize the history of already alienated peoples; in an attempt to humanize our monsters we demonize a people even further.  People of color who have already had their cultural identity and historical narratives marginalized and manipulated by those in power; they are appropriated into commodified parodies or incorporated into the ideological narratives of their oppressors, if not erased entirely.  When this imposition is superficial, the effect is quite obviously de-humanizing and doubly so. Such superficial imposition of cultural diversity is doubly offensive for not only does it reduce the historical culture to token tropes of ritual or aesthetic but it also refashions it into the culture of some in-human race. Yet the dominant white cultures of the genre continue to parallel the dominant white cultures of history, free from association with the inhuman and monstrous despite the often inhumanely monstrous consequences of their racist imperialism.

          Some further object to racist accusations of the fantasy genre by insisting that this is the way the world was back then.  Back when? When dragons flew the skies, dwarves mined the depths, and wizards amused the masses with magic? This is yet another irrational inconsistency in the racist strand of fantasy fiction.  It both parodies reality as a justification for its offensive stereotypes but escapes reality to act out the appalling logic of those fantasies: Middle Earth is British mythic fantasy and at the time the Ottoman East was an existential threat to the West, but its fine to label the Easterlings indiscriminately evil because they are not really Ottoman Turks, and after all, and it’s just fantasy anyways, so the enjoying the literary slaughter of them is morally inconsequential.  Such orientalist readings operate by oscillating between reality and fantasy where convenient when criticized but the incoherence is evident.

          One need not make a historical critique of this response by showing that the conflict between East and West was not a class of civilizations and still less a cataclysm of monumental good and evil or that history is not monumental and fixated on feudal medieval Europe but encompasses other empires and epochs too.   One need only point out the obvious reality that fantasy literature is not about historical realities but fictional fantasies.  When one writes a fantasy narrative, the world building is not, and should attempt not be, in explicit dialogue with the historical realities of the author (even though there may be allegorical parallels) but instead it should be in conversation with the history of other fantasy writings.  Tolkien’s Middle-Earth has little relation to the history of medieval England than it does the fantasies and romances popular in Medieval England and when Martin or Meiville write their contemporary grim or weird fantasy epics, they are converting and subverting the literary tropes and genre expectations popularized by Tolkien far more than they are doing so with modern history itself.

          Given this one may still be indifferent towards such fictional discrimination and insist that it is merely just fantasy so it is not truly racist; they aren’t Arab, they are Haradrim, and they aren’t African Americans, they are ogres.  Even if the parallel is superficially related to appearance and geography only, the parallel can nevertheless be offensive.  If Haradrim are universally portrayed as dark-skinned primitive tribesmen from the East who worship an evil false god in Sauron, that is enough of a parallel to cause warranted offense to people of Middle Eastern or Indian descent.  Then consider how monstrous races like orcs are also associated with supposedly primitive and oppressive cultures.  Multiply that trope again and again in authors who follow the moralistic cosmology that Tolkien originated and you have a history of people of color being discriminated against in fantasy literature.  This would not be a problem if it were not a pervasive tendency in much of fantasy literature; one could perhaps enjoy a book featuring pale protagonists fighting against dark-skinned demons from the South if this was a limited example of a diverse and imaginative genre but unfortunately it is a recurrent narrative of fantasy.  

          This is a particularly painful irony given that the escapism fantasy is criticized for has been rendered futile for the oppressed; seeking to escape the abuse of their identity in reality through the solace of literature, they see the same racist stereotypes represented in the genre with the most potential to directly confront and subvert the racist fantasies of that haunt our history.  A black boy humiliated by his white class-mates may seek to escape from his oppressive situation by contemplating on the struggles of a young boy in a fantasy world, only to find that the only black characters in the story are evil foreigners, if there are any black characters at all.  It is symptomatic of white privilege to be able to escape into fantastic literature and easily find empowering examples of people who parallel one’s own culture and it is representative of racism to find the same negative associations between dark skin, foreign customs and moral evil as one finds in the ideologies of racist politics.

          The association of racism with fantasy isn’t just offensive to the minorities it implicitly insults but undermines the fantasy genre itself.  Fantasy is already considered a sub-literary genre merely because of its intrinsic imaginative potential, and is accused of indulgent escapism.  I think the very name of the genre itself, fantasy, is revealing when one contemplates its relationship with implicit racism.  Fantasy literature is just that, a fantasy that we indulge in, and these indulgences are revealing of our mindsets.  Someone who takes oblivious pleasure from a narrative dominated by xenophobic aristocratic pseudo-Europeans struggling against evil dark-skinned and sub-human hordes in order to restore the feudal status-quo, is complicit in allowing literature to perpetuate the oppressive ideologies of history, if not unconsciously supportive of such oppression.  This is the failure of Tolkien and his ilk: even if they speak out against racism, their literature enables it because it parallels the orientalizing and dehumanizing aesthetic fantasies that oppression depends upon.  Fantasy that reproduces such systems of oppression in its world-building is at best uninteresting and at worst irresponsible.

          Fantasy can be relevant to reality, not because of its fidelity to history but in spite of it; fantasy is most progressive and transformative when it confronts the crisis of history without being confined by the identities and ideologies that cause them.  When one reads a fantasy epic about the struggle between elves and orcs, one can bypass their inherent prejudices to better contemplate moral and existential ambiguities that would be less transparent if the narrative was based around a perspective they were predisposed towards. But when one starts to notice that all the elves are white and noble and from the civilized West while the orcs are universally dark and primitive from the exotic and evil East, such potential is lost.  The appeal of the fantasy genre is the simplicity and beauty of its cosmological economy; the world can be built around moralized aesthetics to create a hyper-symbolic universe (where dark literally represents evil and light good for example); but this is also its great danger insofar as certain people fall outside of this mythic order (i.e. dark skinned people reading it find those similar to them identified as evil by skin-tone alone).   Fantasy provides an escape from the constriction of our own cultural narratives and expectations so that we may return to reality with a better appreciation for those of others as well as our own.  Fantasy has the greatest potential to confront and contradict oppression against racist oppression so it is all the more offensive when it is just another means to perpetually interpret them as Other.

          What is to be done to empower not only marginalized people of color, but the marginalized genre of fantasy itself? One should be aware that not all fantasy writers are guilty of such abuse, and I have my hopes that writers are becoming increasingly aware of the moral inadequacy of the genre’s world-building and are being proactive in correcting it, with some sub-genres being more vocal than others.  Urban fantasy, steam-punk and new weird writers such as China Meiville, Max Gladstone, NK Jemisin, Ian McDonald, Neil Gaiman, David Anthony Durham, Daniel Abraham, and Ursala K Le Guin write for, if not from, marginalized identities and their empowerment within and through literary fantasy.  Fantasy is a predominantly white genre, and whether this is the cause or the effect of its tendency towards aestheticizing racism I am not certain, but I am certain that because of its inherent white privilege it is the responsibility of white authors to be more active in addressing this perversion of their genre’s potential.  White authors are published easier and more successfully than minority authors and are better received by fans and thus they have more potential to transform the genre for a wider audience.  But this means dealing honestly with racism in their literature.  Just as ignoring racial identities perpetuates the oppression of people of color and only reinforces white privilege, so too does stripping fantasy of racial conflict ignore the reality of it within history as well as the genre.  A fantasy narrative devoid of racial tension and misunderstanding equally lacks dramatic interest and moral relevance.

          Racism should be both more explicit in fantasy worlds but equally more openly confronted and contradicted.  If elves are to hate orcs universally, then their prejudice should be more obviously an ad hoc rationalization and it should be undermined over the course of the narrative by exposure to orcs that defy the stereotype of their racist rationalizations (i.e. if elves hate orcs because they are cruel, should an example of an orc sheltering a lower class elf from the abuses of an elf aristocrat).  If orcs are fated to be evil, give them enough moral complexity to make a reader empathetic to their motives even as they expressly oppose them; the orcs have been confined to a ghetto of their former civilization by the xenophobic elves and now slaughter elves indifferently at any opportunity because they feel that all of elf-kind is complicit in the collapse of their orc civilization.

          Historical parallels to reality should be sensitive to minority cultures, and if representative of said cultures , they should not follow insulting stereotypical and intersectional binaries; the race with a Native American aesthetic should not be red-skinned sub-human tribesmen and the Arab analogy should not be confined to bearded and veiled theocratic terrorists.  Expand and exchange customs and costumes to create something identifiable but individual; have orcs be pale-skinned and sophisticated, with an East-Asian steam-punk aesthetic and have them situated from the North while the elves are a dark-skinned, sea-faring empire from the East with cultural similarities to Aztecs or Mayans.  This makes the world both familiar and free; there are identifying similarities to history but they are divorced from prejudicial associations between physical appearance, moral decency, cultural sophistication and technological innovation that would otherwise confine your narrative.  With these sorts of suggestions in mind, I think we can better appreciate the progressive elements of fantasy literature and use it to perpetuate positive and creative representations of marginalized people of color that have otherwise been largely absent from the history of the genre.