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The cover of the upcoming summer issue features a middle class white American woman holding several items that represent work and family life in a multi-armed Hindu deity’s pose. I get the juggling metaphor, and the sour look on her face informs that she’s not too pleased with her conflicting situation. What I’m conflicted and not pleased about is the frequency with which American media and pop culture icons are co-opting South Asian religion to suit their aesthetic fancy.[bitch]
This cover reminds me of the Sotomayor cover that the National Review did (and that Abhi covered here). I’m conflicted in both these covers. On the one hand, neither cover excessively pokes fun at the religion but uses the iconography to express some deeper message they are trying to convey. I believe deeply that art should be given the freedom to express.
But on the other hand, can we really call the Ms. Magazine cover ‘art’? It is the advertising front page of a magazine for commerce. And truthfully, I am discomforted by the fact that Ms. Magazine caters to a middle class liberal white women clientele. Question is, would I have felt different if they had depicted a brown woman in the same image, or if it had been a different magazine? Probably.
It’s completely inappropriate to utilize Hindu iconography in this context, mocks the religion, and diffuses the imagery of its “true” meaning. When a cultural or religious symbol is used for marketing purposes by cultural or religious outsiders that fail to convey respect for and understanding of the intricacies of that culture or religion, it is offensive.[bitch]
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What we wind up with is more Orientalist perspectives circulating through movies, magazines and stores, more South Asians having to answer for an entire group of individuals about everything from food to yoga, and more ignoring national, gendered, class and sexual differences within the community…I also find it completely unacceptable for a feminist publication to blatantly marginalize women of color as a result of their appropriation of culture. It is a reminder of the divided nature of the feminist movement, and the continued tendency of white feminists to participate in the exoticization or “Othering” of women of color. [Feministing]
What does your gut tell you when you see this image?
I didn’t say they didn’t. In fact I said they did, and then explained why their appropration doesn’t result in the same level of outrage.
Its not that obvious, if you’re up on progressive thought. Many progressives will concede, though they may balk at he term “racist”, that blacks can be racist by the old goalpost, but not by the new. You see, racism is now a system of group privilege that advantages one race because of the subordinated position of other ones. So for the “others” to be racist is problematic, since being prejudiced, engaging in sterotyping or other activities normally thought racist is not enough. One must have power, or at least belong to the racial group in power. Without power, there’s no subordination.
So, for example, a TPM columnist explains to Newt Gingrich why his ataacks on Sotomayer are wrong. “”Reverse Racism” Doesn’t Exist And, If It Does, It Isn’t Racism,” he writes; “We do not, and should not, apply the same standard to the historic victims of hate that we do to those (usually the powerful) who have never suffered from it.” In this framework context matters; specifically the context of power and relations of domination. You see this thesis everywhere in this discussion:
Our very own Camille, for example, when explaining why appropriation of Hindu symbols may be OK in India but not the US writes: “It’s also not entirely accurate to analyze their use in the Indian context as equivalent to an American appropriation. In India, Hinduism outpaces all other faith communities as the dominant religion, and in many states, as the dominant cultural backdrop. The same cannot be argued for the U.S.”
The Bitch Magazine linked points out: “It’s completely inappropriate to utilize Hindu iconography in this context,… Westerners have a history of seeking to eradicate “Other” cultures and religions in favor of their own, and Ms. Magazine’s perpetuation of this ethnocentric process is shameful.”
One of the commentators at Feministing, complains that 2 readers who find no offense are:”analyzing the image itself without the context of an entire history of colonialism and racism that the OP is trying to point out here.”
Bitch magazine links to a black feminist (well, womanist, “feminism” is deeply entwined with white supremacy in her view) who, answering the objection that the intent was to display multi-taking explains: “I’m sorry, there’s just no other way to perfectly express this!” is a tool of the oppressor to preserve their privilege.”
So, to sum up, cultural appropriation is about what a dominant culture does to a minority one. This makes black appropriation of Hindu symbols problematic, though not quite off the hook. (but that’s a nuance that should be in racism 102, not 101).
Good turn around. But racism and sexiam aren’t mutually exclusive. A new term out there is Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza’s “Kyriarchy” which captures different levels of oppression. This is a holistic theory that recognizes there are intersecting structures of domination. So while my male privilege may have subconsciously informed my opinion of the Ms cover, your colonized mind, to use Fanon’s term, in turn subjected me to white racism…or so the theory goes.
True. But you can’t use a moral argument to defeat a metaphysical one. It may be insulting to women to say they are tools of the patriarchy, but that doesn’t mean they are not in fact tools. comprendez?
So, where does HBD (human bio-diversity) theory fit into all of this.
According to that, Africans have the most game and are natural PUAs, and Asians have the highest IQs but are the ones most lacking in game.
So, in the world of game and PUArtistry, blacks are the dominant group and yes, they work that to their advantage and totally alpha-ize everyone else right out.
No, I meant the straw man argument that you presented 😉
As such:
There can and often isa conflation of identity and behavior (racist comment vs. racist person), of systems/ideology/structures and people (racist hierarchy vs. people occupying particular positions in those hierarchies, etc.) However, the way that you’ve read these conflations in order to smear an entire group of people with politics you don’t like (through a pretty crass reading – dominant and domianted? it’s a spectrum and involves a lot of intersections), and then moved on to attempt to undermine any cultural critiques of racism or imperialism while simultaneously playing on people’s racism, is, well, kind of gross. I don’t think Said ever did that, and if he did, I would say the same thing about him. Why don’t you just let ‘progressives’ speak for themselves?
😉
duh. It is not hard to say that the same ‘standard’ should not be applied to people occupying different positions in a racial hierarchy in assessing their actions. When Nas says n*, that’s not the same thing as when Robert Byrd’s friends used to (see, I through in a Democrat to make you happy;) What it means is that participating in racism is exactly that – it’s supporting that which bolsters the racial stratification of people, negative stereotypes and the mode of thinking, and the idea of taxonomizing human beings on the basis of a pseudoscientific construction. But because racism and racist hierarchy exists, we have to deal with this reality by using our judgement (god forbid) rather than an arbitrary set of rules to determine what is and what is not racist. The question with this post is not just WHO (what institution) but WHAT (the image and where it fits in and what message), your own position, the position of the people who made it, the object, etc. All that put together. And then you use your judgement, which always has to be a bit humble, rather than making broad claims about what ‘progressives’ say about ‘blacks.’
However, kudos for finding some evidence to partially back up your racist argument (see definition above of what I mean by racist and see your own words for your full argument rather than your condensed ‘thesis’) and for learning well how to employ divide and rule tactics. It is a shame that in your critiques of progressive thoguht – which are in fairness sophisticated – you’ve chosen to engage in the backhanded support of power structures rather than an active critique of them that moves you towards radicalism. i’ll leave it at that.
what is an example of my smear?
I touch on intersectionality in 102, but since the numerous quotes I provide don’t really go there, I kept this explanantion on one plane.
I didn’t move on to undermione the ctitique. I touched on some problems, namely what we’re seeing on very thread–the unwillingess of the victim to be offended–but i also pointed out that this doesn’t necessarly undermine the critique, just probelmatizes it. But I suppose this is the cruz of the issue with you. Critiques of race theories are racist and you don’t really want to debate it, other than to label it racist.
I think its more playing on their anti-racism…the difficulty in critizing the group not in power adn how that could evolve into another form of condescenting racism as others (lamy #98) ponted out.
?
Because no one but me really understands what you’e saying
Yeah, thats more or less what i said in answering suki’s question.
well my “broad” claim of what progressives say about blacks is precisely what you said in the first sentance: that you have to take into consideration the position of power.
the problem is your definition of racist, “supporting that which bolsters the racial stratification of people” could also trap anti-globalization activists, fidel castro, yourself, and hugo chavez. the point being, identifying that which bolsters racial stratification is not obvious, its open to argument. but conversation with you always begin with premises set in stone. in that sense, you’re an ideologue…if i may label you.
thanks. but my critque (which i didn’t even offer in any significant way) is sophisticated but my construcion of the progresive argument is a strawman? okaaaay.
Radicalism as an end in itself?
Tearing down current evils in favor of new, unknown ones just doesn’t seem like smart policy to me, but I suppose for those who care it’s all about making things fair rather than making things work.
One would think that kind of utopian adolescent rebellious streak would have resolved itself before the end of your teenage years.
There are more important things to get agitated over than this silliness. Such as the facts that more than half of indians do not have electricity, potable water, sanitation facilities, enough to eat etc etc
Getting agitated and writing blog posts doesn’t fix those problems.
Word.
Also, the day Desis become PC is the day the world ends.
Even the PC ones are getting away with statements like: “I only date brown”.
Kya bukwus!?
….
All this, attributed to the vague and amorphous group of people called ‘Progressives’ who seem to be a small group- of postcolonial and postmodernist intellectuals.
To retract from the flame war for a second, to one of the more interesting points you raised, I think that the idea that some people (or really social groups engaged in similar activities) – may have methods that allow them a greater level of accuracy about some aspect of reality is relatively uncontroversial except when it comes to shattering sacred cows. This is in fact why condescension is the LEAST progressive attitude that a member of this group could adopt – at minimum in behaviour and at best in their soul. Just because you’re in an intellectual vanguard, that doesn’t make your politics different – or to paraphrase the quote i like – you can be two of the following three – intelligent, decent, republican.
To return to the flame war:
This part of the disagreement is my fault. I missed a key sentence in one of your original paragraphs and I ended up believing you were holding a different view than you are. Apologies.
However, the charge of being an ideologue is absurd in my opinion. If I am an ideologue, how exactly are you defining my ideology, because i would like to know waht it is. I just don’t think someone else’s opinions offered without any substantiation on a blog are evidence. This isn’t social science – it’s an internet conversation and to the extent that I’m changing my opinions it has to do with how I read the space, the comments from others, etc.. (which is not very progressive to point out, as I noted above, but then, I’m not very progressive sometimes- nobody’s perfect).
And yes – any or all of those people may intentionally or unintentionally commit racist actions, among other things – they’re human beings in a social world. That’s the whole point – beyond self-definition- of all these discussions about what cooption or image or presentation is or is not racist right?
What’s confusing about this? To take an extreme example, It’s not like Karl Rove is stupid – he’s a bit of a genius at short term (emphasize short term) political strategy, or so i hear – but that does’t make him a ‘progressive’ – being politically decent and being intelligent are not synonyms, just like being politically less decent and being stupid are not synonyms. It’s probably actually just a classist assumpti0on, actually – and I think at the heart of the false populist argument that was offered about what ‘progressives’ do or do not do and how they think they constitute an intellectual vanguard. there are, in fact, many organic intellectuals, people with genuinely democratic values, and toher things.
If you were to argue that the group that currently labels itself ‘progressive’ in the United States can be rightly criticised for a variety of standpoints that it broadly might be said to hold – e.g. a lack of internationalism – then I would agree. But that’s not what you’ve done – you’ve mounted a critique on the social group that is leftmost in the mainstream in a very rightwing climate, and did so apropos of nothing – which leaves you where? When you attempt to characterise this one group with the equivalent of ‘elitist’ (okay, you said ‘intellectual vanguard’ but you didn’t seem too averse to putting words in people’s mouths) without taking into the context and more importantly the potential, the structural limitations, and the possibilities beyond them, then you end up sliding into a postmodern malaise that deactivates people rather than mobilises them. If you’re not in fact engaging in a very very very mild form of redbaiting.
Okay, I admit, that was really good 🙂 But I wouldn’t call myself ‘progressive’ except in a strategically essentialist kind of way. 😉
Attempting to infantilise radicalism and radicals is one of the common strategies that people use. The accusation of lack of realism is also common. But if you actually read someone like Wallerstein or Marx or some parts of the New Testament or try to figure out how to change the world or how it works, you quickly realise that dismissing radicalism – of many varieties – as not serious is a mistake. The only thing that’s not serious is lack of seriousness – and this can come just as easily from the IMF or the Obama Administration or Manmo han Singh as it can from Marxists or Christian socialists or Buddhist socialists or whoever.
It’s amazing how many people here don’t get it.
In the context of Ms. magazine and the feminist community at large, it is inappropriate to flippiantly use a sacred image of a minority community to express a point GIVEN that the feminist movement has largely ignored women of color or treated them as exotic others. Ms. magazine grew out of the second wave of the feminist movement (e.g. gloria steinem) and has been extensively critiqued for focusing on mostly white middle class issues and marginalizing other voices. IN THIS CONTEXT, the image seems ill-advised and ignorant.
When I was in college, I ran a feminist student group (I am a second-gen Indian woman). I was instructed by our national affiliate, a major feminist organization, to recruit students to stand in head to toe burka on campus and hand out literature describing infractions against women in Afghanistan. I was absolutely appalled that they would use their western feminist lens to have a cultural artifact as a stand-in for an entire culture all the while degrading the cultural object. It was ignorance and cultural elitism, and it’s rampant in western feminists circles.
I see the same thing in this photo and it makes me sad for how exclusive the feminist movement can be.
In my experience, assuming good faith and correcting misunderstandings politely is infinitely more effective at curtailing ignorance than the hectoring, scolding, and browbeating tone of the article cited in the OP.
Yes, most of the feminist movement (and most minority movements in the US in general) is really bad about using their own self-referential lens to view everything to the exclusion of all others. We have an empathy deficit in this country. We can’t fix that by being just as incorrigible though. The shrill ones who run those things will always ignore you, but the vast bulk of half-interested supporters can usually settle on the reasonable middle if you educate them.
Yeah but I’m a minority Indian Hindu feminist woman and I’m not bothered by it. In fact, I think it promotes my culture quite well.
Bija Mantra Yoga was meant to be shared and spread beyond physical borders. It’s a blessing.
well yeah, progressives are as diverse as conservatives but my central thesis represented a fairly common thread, i thought. so much so that i think your comments on this thread more or less fall within this category, although you object to the dominant/dominated binary, prefer more intersectionality, and aren’t comfortable with post-modern relativity of the extreme represented by say Said. I really wan’t trying to pigeonhole all progressives with a radical thesis but if its more accurate to refer to the offended party as postcolonial postmodenistists, then I’m happy to concede the point
I know. I teach yoga.
well, there’s a few things you do, like assuming bad faith in your opponent, that reminds me of the peculiar epistemology that allowed marxism to descend into a closed system of thought. that and a tendency toward Chomskish conspiracy theories. i’ll elaboratesome other time with examples.
but on this thread i was struck by the certainty of your views in regards to my arguments being racist. i in turn would balks at calling your views racist becuae they support “that which bolsters the racial stratification of people” even though i think they do because i recognize you don’t think that (ie, you’re arguing in good faith) and that the point is debatable.
granted, we have to set our premises somewhere but where you set them allows for an unusually narrow spectrum of acceptable opinion.
What’s wrong with the picture?.
I have heard this phrase used in English a lot.
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2009/02/09/f-quantum-computing.html
where the islamic idea of Mecca being the ideal place is appropriated. Is it offensive?. I don’t think so.
I guess it has to do with how much free time “politically correct” people have to go and find imaginary offences all over the world.
Mantra, avatar, and pundit are commonspeak in the English language now too.
Let’s not forget the popularization of “tantra” and Kama Sutra, two glorious Indic memes that would have been lost to the rest of the world if not for “appropriation”
YO.
NI.
They’ve actually popularized a very narrow and frequently misinterpreted understanding of both.
Really? Who would’ve thought?
I’d say from the Kama Sutra there is not much more than the positions that one can interpret or popularize for contemporary culture, because all of the other stuff is reflective of another era (and specific culture) and doesn’t compute nowadays, even in India.
“how bloody insulting to blacks and everyone else.” They can’t think for themselves?”
Manju: “True. But you can’t use a moral argument to defeat a metaphysical one. It may be insulting to women to say they are tools of the patriarchy, but that doesn’t mean they are not in fact tools. comprendez?”
i certainly do comprendo, manju. I do now. But you’d think they make those tools more compliant if the makers are so powerful.
It still makes for an interesting read for those of us who have an interest in history. Beyond the sexual positions it details other factoids about family structure and norms regarding personal hygiene. It’s a book with a much more holistic look at sexuality and marital relations than the “compendium of sexual positions” image it has in popular culture.
As for Tantra, that’s a whole discipline and school of philosophical thought of which lasting longer in bed is a rather minor and ancillary facet.
Yes Kama Sutra is an interesting read. But there’s not much in it that is of practical use in today’s world other than the positions.
RE: tantra.
Authentic Indic tantra has nothing whatsoever to do with female pleasure or multiple orgasms. In that sense, the Western appropriated “tantra” is much more female friendly and congruent with the times. I think Indian male tantrics would do well to take heed.
The conflation of Tantra with Kama Sutra is another Western fabrication, but again, it bodes well for women so we can’t knock it.
Not really. I think that you tend to argue in bad faith, but I don’t think everyone does. I also think that American political spaces, including South Asian ones, are to the right of most political spaces in the industrialised world at least, if not the whole world. Which is one of the reasons why my opinions come across as narrow and why my opinions actually are (or at least have been) more narrow than they might otherwise be. However, my perception of this conversation is of a forthrightnbess from you that I haven’t perceived in the past – I don’t know whether that’s from my side or yours, but anyway, thank you or apologies, whichever is more appropriate. To elaborate on my apology above, I missed a key line in your paragraph on the treatment of race and power (where you said you agree with understnading subjective positioning) which is what led me to think you ewre making a much blunter and more bad faith critique than you actually were, so again, apologies.
However, I would suggest that if you’re going to make broad characterizations about groups, you do as you did at the end and be very specific about the group of people you’re talking about. I need to do the same more often as well (e.g. libertarianism vs. conservative american libertarianism).
Speaking of ‘hands’ anyone heard of the ‘Hindu pushup‘?
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In Bengali language, traditionally a matriarch, (a wife, mother of many, daughter in law of, grandmother a large family) known for her graciousness, nurturing qualities and hard work is often referred to as a dasha bhuja, or ten handed one, which is also a name of Durga. Thus the imagery of the superwoman with ten hands is not without any connection to hindu culture. In fact it is part of the language and as such this imagery is not offensive at all. Hindu gods and godesses are part of the vernacular, daily life, intimate in a way Judaic GOD heads are not. The hindu worships the god as a lover (Krishna), baby (gopal), whore (Ramakrishna and the tantrics) illicit lover (radha), terrible awe (Kali). A little magazine cover is nothing to get your dhoti in a knot!
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