 You may feel free to point him or her to this essay if you so desire, but reviewers who leave not-reviews are probably not ready to hear why they are a bad idea.  However, their own medication is probably also under review.

Say "thank you."  Always say "thank you."  ("Thanks" is also acceptable.)


My thanks now go out to you, gentle reader, for following me through this essay.  I hope it has been enlightening, or at least amusing.  May you always find good stories to read, and good people to read your stories.

It's been a few months, so it must be time again for the meta to revolve around to racism, cultural appropriation, and other jolly topics that keep us chatting.  While the most recent flux of conversation has been surrounding a certain famous author's mea culpa, and a less famous author's "you're interrogating my text from the wrong perspective," this latest iteration has been brewing at least since the announcement of the (all-White) casting for the Avatar: The Last Airbender movie.  (Peaceful protest planned for this Saturday in Philadelphia for all interested.) http://aang-aint-white.livejournal.com/1820.html

Short form: cultural appropriation is STILL not cool. 

What does that mean?  Well, in its simplest form, cultural appropriation means looking at another culture (even one that's ostensibly a subculture of your own) as an uninvolved spectator, mining it for nifty and shiny things you particularly enjoy, then presenting these in your work as a way of being "deep," "relevant" and/or "meaningful" without taking the time to understand the nuances of the culture or the meanings these things already had within that culture.  It's a teenaged Caucasian American girl wearing a red dot on her forehead as a fashion statement.  It's casting David Carradine as a Shaolin monk.  It's distilling thousands of years of history and culture and love and hate and humanity into a tiny Noble Savage mold and pouring out plastic NDNz for the White hero to learn from about living off the land before he Gets the Girl and Saves the Day.

It sucks, really.

And it doesn't mean that people from one culture (or gender, or lifestyle, or orientation, or anything else) can't or shouldn't write people from another.  They should.  We should.  But it means extra work.  It means learning those nuances, even the painful ones.  It means having to look at the world around you without the comfortable glasses you get to wear when you're in the majority (or just in charge) that filter out the really crappy things about where we are.

We will start with the example of gender.  Now, most creators and writers for our shows and books and movies are male.  Note that I'm not saying that's a bad thing, simply a fact. 