IBARW: Cultural appropriation in fanfiction

[thuviaptarth]

I was going to try to write a post on how I've tried to deal with issues of cultural appropriation in my work, and how I'm pretty sure I've failed several times, and why, and how to do better, but it's, um, hard. And painful. And not done.

So instead, I will point you to sparkymonster's That Voodoo You Do, about an SPN RPS story in which winterlive casts extrethuvia white boy Jared Padalecki as voodoo practitioner. sparkymonster says, "The best summary I can give is: "cultural appropriation of voodoo = angst and sexy times."

winterlive responds to sparkymonster's patient and detailed commentary with:

as you've heard in your post, this isn't the first story i've written in a culture that isn't my own. in the WisCon panel transcript you linked to, the panelists talk about how difficult it is to write what you don't come out of, but how boring fiction would be if that's all we could write. i feel like i have a decent handle on what makes for racism in prose - you've helped me learn a little more about it, for which i thank you, because i was raised to believe that racism is something ugly and awful. but i'm not ashamed of writing this story, or monogatari, or any cultural crossover i've done. because every time that i did, the care i took with the research let me learn more about that culture and grow to love it a little more. and i'll never be sorry for that.

Well, that's just fucking AWESOME for you now, isn't it? I mean, enabling the personal growth of white people is just what the cultures of people of color are all about.

Comments

[liviapenn.livejournal.com]

I really need to make a post about Making It All About White People. Because it's super, super important to make every conversation about race, actually about white people, and how it affects them, and how the conversation must be tailored to their needs, their comfort level, and their particular interests. Even better if you can subtly imply that fandom IS white, because of course all these people COMING IN and IMPOSING their alternate (racialized!) points of view on US WHITE FANS are outsiders and not truly part of FANDOM. Because fandom is for white people! Let's make it all about us. I really don't think enough people have really grasped this point.