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kleinbl00  ·  3121 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: When White Poets Pretend to be Asian

White guy achieves success by pretending to be a minority: outrage at the white guy

White woman achieves success by pretending to be a white guy: outrage at the system.

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Art cannot be decontextualized. PERIOD. That's the discussion here. Poetry cannot be evaluated free of the author and context because poetry is reliant on metaphor. Urinal at the airport: a place to piss. Urinal at the Tate Modern: Marcel Duchamp.

Movies are a little easier because they're supposed to be commercial. Same holds true there, though. I've got a short film. Me and my buddy spent about $30k and maybe 3 years on it. It played at a bunch of festivals and I'm proud of it. But I know a girl with a short film that played at more festivals than mine. She made it in a weekend using pipe cleaners. It's stop motion. It's 8 frames per second. It's 3 minutes long. But through graphic representation, it is made abundantly clear that the pipe cleaners (which aren't anthropomorphic, by the way) are lesbians. Which means her pipe cleaner movie played every gay festival there is, and there are a lot of gay festivals.

Can I make a lesbian pipe cleaner movie? Sure, but nobody is going to feature it at a film festival. I'm not a lesbian. I'll say this: I've advocated casting Asians in a number of other short films because then you get to play the Asian film festivals and they are also numerous. I'll also say this: there have been more economic opportunities presented to two white guys with a $40k short film than there have been to a lesbian and her stop-motion pipe cleaners. In the context of "commercial Hollywood" there are more opportunities for me - by far - than for her. In the context of recognition of works by underrepresented minorities, I have zero goddamn business making lesbian pipe cleaner movies.

The outrage at the pseudonym speaks to the stakes. A poetry anthology that celebrates "The Best American Poetry" should select the "best american poetry." A poetry anthology aimed at "promoting works by women and people of color whenever possible" should promote the works of women and people of color. Sherman Alexie got called on his bullshit for moving the goalposts.

THERE's the outrage: minorities have a legitimate beef that the goalposts are almost always further away for them. Non-minorities have a legitimate beef that fringe publications often favor minorities and it's unfair to hide bias. I once submitted to a film festival (and paid $50, I might add) that decided after the fact that they were only going to show films about the suffering of Native Americans. Fine. I have no problems with a "Native American Suffering Film Festival." Just make it clear that you're going to hold one before asking me for $50 to consider my sci fi film about russian cosmonauts. I didn't get my money back, by the way.

These problems always come up when we argue that there's no context to art. Michael Hudson changed the context of his art and it changed its reception. Sherman Alexie was evaluating art using one context and presenting it as another and he got caught. All of this happens in the context of the context-free nature of art and once again, art is revealed to be about provenance.