If you think Arc and Fever’s Shanghai Showdown was racist, get a grip

It’s celebrating a culture


Arc and Fever were forced to apologise for their event – the Shanghai Showdown. It was cultural appropriation, people complained.

The organisers picture Shanghai as “a place that offers so much excess, debauchery, mystique and exotic promise”, and assure students that “Chinese face paint will be on hand to ensure everyone looks the part for the oriental adventure.”

Where is the offence, I ask? I mean, clearly the promoters have muddled up Durham and Shanghai – excess, debauchery and mystique to me just sounds like any given night in Klute. Exotic though? Perhaps not, but given that the definition of exotic relates to foreign countries, I hardly see the problem with this description.

Cultural appropriation involves adopting aspects of a culture that’s not your own. Crucially, however, cultural appropriation is actually okay – so long as you don’t belong to a dominant culture which has “systematically oppressed” other cultures. Apparently also relevant are a few key principles – marginalized groups, institutional power, and privilege.

I can’t quite see how China, arguably the greatest power in the world today, is a culture under threat. We’re all equal under law, so the only thing holding anyone back from doing anything (like choosing to take pride in and express their individual cultural heritage) is self-control.

The point from critics of a night like this would be: “White people don’t ask to be born with privilege… what they choose to do with it is another story”. So, the take home message from this – white people have the most privilege (though a recent equality report might disagree), so they need to back off and stick to their white people stuff.

Why should Arc and Fever be for some reason unable to host what looked like a decent party just because they’re white: apparently the only people who can ‘appropriate’ culture. Cultural appropriation, like racism and sexism, has become a one-way street arbitrarily giving power to one group. In reality, sexism and racism work both ways.  Yes, history is important, but these are two distinct concepts and should not be confused.

Just another Arc and Fever night

In a similar vein, if you want to talk about respecting other cultures and cultural sensitivity then you can’t begin from such a biased starting point. You might remember it was Halloween the other day: a Gaelic festival. Have the Scottish and Irish not been oppressed by the English? Doesn’t that mean they’ve had their culture appropriated, despite being white?

We need to stop playing the game of oppression Olympics: a competition to see whose identity affords them to claim to be the victim of the greatest amount of oppression.

This is a farce. No one has a monopoly on culture – no one has the right to say “yes, that’s appropriate”, or “no, that’s not” (though the cultural authoritarians try). The reality is that celebrating and sharing culture is something that comes with globalisation, with social media and the internet.

Humanity has developed unique cultures, and that’s great, of course we should be sensitive, and of course we should be respectful: if the aim was to strike down the overtly racist and the malicious – everyone would be on your side. However, overwhelmingly the attitude is one of policing people’s behaviour for the most pathetically minor cultural references and shaming them into submission. Honestly, themed events at awful clubs in Durham are about as appropriate a target for this as London’s Cereal Killer cafe was for the anti-gentrification mob that attacked it this September.

The worst thing is, they’ve won. The event has actually been altered to accommodate for these ridiculous allegations. It’s now ‘Dance of the Dragons’ – a ‘mythical’ theme that certainly won’t offend anybody. There are genuine points to be made for respecting others’ cultures – but prejudiced and reductionist starting points do no-one any good. So please, party police, tone it down a little – some of us actually care about culture.