Many Americans worry when the defining features of one group are used for commercial purposes by another.
Identity politics defines our age and is scattered through the nation’s history. A nation spread across a continent is bound to be divided into regional and social allegiances, even though these social anchors often trigger thoughtless comments and lasting resentments.
We are all complicit. Thinking in terms of one’s own community first is a natural impulse. But inevitably sensitivities can be stepped on when ‘outsiders’ adopt or imitate another group’s practices and traditions. This is a familiar issue with the names of the Washington Redskins and the Cleveland Indians. Are these sports teams entitled to use native American symbols? Is the use of key words and symbols an inherent complement to the first Americans, or a commercial gambit the teams are not really entitled to? Legal entitlement is one thing. Cultural entitlement is less definitive, if no less involving. As with so many linguistic issues, applications of a group’s lexicon or symbols are almost always subject to different understandings. And in these days when nerve endings are more exposed, the appropriation of any group’s names and artifacts can raise eyebrows. In our climate of discontent, even viewing a mainstream Hollywood film from a previous decade can make us queasy. Why are there only African American actors in 50’s comedies playing maids or butlers? Why was the lead in the popular Charlie Chan series given to a Swedish American?
What may seem like acts of empathy or flattery to one person can be another’s example of expropriation.
No short essay can do this subject justice. But the questions we might ask are still valuable. While Americans in the 21st Century are more open to claims of “cultural misappropriation,” we are still search for the outer limits of this kind of critique. Who gets to be an authority on Thai or Mexican food? Who gets to be a French chef? Likewise, did George Gershwin and DuBose Heyward step over the line to write the iconic black opera, Porgy and Bess? I’m glad they did. But was the story of the impoverished residents of Charleston’s Catfish Row theirs to tell? In its time (1935) Porgy was a daring extension of a tradition-bound form. But what may seem like acts of empathy or flattery to one person can be another’s example of expropriation.
We can all cite less cosmic examples of cultural infringement. When I was a visiting professor years ago I can remember my chagrin when otherwise wonderful British colleagues greeted me with an over-the-top “Howdy Partner!,” delivered in a theatrical Midwestern drawl. Minor stuff for sure; I suppose I could have responded with a fake Lancashire accent. But what would be the point? I would have preferred a greeting in their own voice.
The image of an American melting pot has begun to yield to the realities of a rising tribalism. This idea was behind Pete Wells’ concern in a recent New York Times review of a restaurant built on the side of an old recording studio. The decor featured lots of images of African American recording artists like Stevie Wonder, even though none of those performers apparently recorded at that 10th Avenue location. This made Wells “uncomfortable.” “Stevie Wonder will always be cool,” he noted, “but a restaurant dreamed up by real estate developers doesn’t automatically become cool by putting him on the wall.”1
Is there a legacy–a history, an origin–that is a community’s property, but not necessarily the culture’s?
This issue raises the question of what constitutes fair use of a group’s symbols. Does the existence of a common language within the culture extend to the words and images associated with a specific sub-group? Or is there a legacy–a history, an origin–that is a community’s property, but not necessarily the culture’s?
In a famous essay the journalist Walter Benjamin considered a related problem: the difference between original works of art and the sometimes convincing copies made of them. “The work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility” raised better questions than answers. But he did make the point that an original retains an “aura” that will always make it different and special, even while it may be cheapened by its copies. Our age has simply pushed the discussion forward to the moral question of whether those outside an exploited group have the right to use elements of the group’s legacy.
However one feels about a particular case, the viability of the idea of ‘offensive misappropriation’ is a clear indicator that bonds to specific communities may now be stronger than bonds to the culture. That’s surely one reason the idea of “tribalism” has become the word of the moment in discussions about current American attitudes.
We are the species that ponders, muses, worries, fears, wonders, hopes and ruminates. It follows that we are also wired to make estimates of another’s state of mind based on almost anything they to say.
We know humans have rich inner lives, and that values and concerns are indirectly signaled to others in what we say. There is a sub-textual ‘meta-language’ that is embedded in the thoughts we express. Expression naturally reveals residues of the mind in motion. Not surprisingly, our skill at “reading” each other turns out to be one of the crucial markers of a person’s social intelligence. State-of-mind inferences are what make discourse possible. Our estimates usually mean that we can adjust to meet an interlocutor half way.
Wikipedia.org
Our skill at ‘reading’ others is a crucial attribute, separating humans from other species, even smart robots. We might expect that Alexa, Siri and their counterparts will be able to answer truth-based questions. But we are usually going to come up with blanks if we look for signs of some sort of inner life.
This is why interiority is such an interesting idea.
A robot can be programmed with words that mimic feelings; it can also be programmed to have a kind of synthetic past. But ask Alexa what kinds of topics are most difficult to discuss, and we are probably going to get some version of it’s programmer’s interiority. Shift toward the stuff of everyday human life–feelings, experiences, a sense of self–and machine intelligence begins to founder as a pretender to the human mind.
We routinely act on the belief that we are mostly transparent to each other.
All of this is a useful reminder of how much we depend upon what is sometimes called “theory of mind” to infer mental states in others. The trigger is almost always our statements and their accompanying physical expressions: even simple cues like frowns or smiles. These are enough to turn the mysteries of another into estimates of apparent needs and aspirations. For example, if a friend tells us that someone we both know seems “on edge,” it’s entirely possible that the rhetorical signs of that state were inferred from statements ostensibly about something else. We assume there is a meta-language even in the most prosaic forms of rhetoric. What we sense is easily passed on in similar statements like “She seems lonely,” “I think he lacks self-confidence” or “She says she’s fine, but she doesn’t seem fine.” In short, we use the evidence of another person’s words to fill in a larger picture of their preferences and predilections. And while this is not psychoanalysis, it is a survival skill for a species that lives in communities.
All of this means that we act on the belief that we are partly transparent to each other. We count on our inferences to build out the bonds we seek with others. To be sure, most adults maintain a screen of privacy that can seem impenetrable and not easily inferred. In addition, our inferences can be wrong. Friends can surprise us with unanticipated feelings or reactions we didn’t expect. Even so, the daily business of making estimates of what others are thinking demonstrates a kind under-appreciated mindfulness.
And yet. . .
A Trump Caveat in Four Questions
Most of us are somewhat opaque. We keep a great deal behind a scrim that decreases our revealed vulnerabilities. We know more of our successes than we might say. We sense our fears, but suppress the impulse to speak about them. We rein in the rampant narcissism that once flourished in childhood.
But what happens when a person lives their life in a cognitive glass house? An absence of self-monitoring can mean that elemental needs, fears and resentments are likely to be on display with technicolor vividness. No inference-making by another is required; the person is psychologically naked.
This rarer form of what might be called “interiority at the surface,” is evident in the psychic transparency of Donald Trump. Even if we set aside his politics, it’s apparent to most Americans that obvious needs for status and affirmation float to the top of everything he says, like bubbles rising from the bottom of a pool. He’s the rare leader who has grown to adulthood seemingly unaware of the near-total display of his core motivations. To be sure, the surface bluster is convincing to some. Yet there is a far more common counter-narrative of something amiss just underneath, a chronic vulnerability made worse because he lacks awareness and self control. Without doubt, many chronic self-promoters can be blind to their obviousness. Even so, the problem of Trump’s externalized interiority poses stark questions for him and citizens alike:
Does he not notice that his words so obviously betray his needs and fears?
Has he never found reasons to admire the stoicism and mental discipline of John Kennedy, Martin Luther King or John McCain?
Is there ever an impulse to lash out that’s worth suppressing?
And should it always fall to ‘minders’ and citizens to worry about a leader who presents himself to the world as hopelessly insecure?
In a more usual case we will have to infer aspects of a person’s inner life, and that living with a certain degree of grace means keeping a filter in place between private resentments and public words.
What may seem like acts of empathy or flattery to one person can be another’s example of expropriation.
Is there a legacy–a history, an origin–that is a community’s property, but not necessarily the culture’s?
