Cultural Appropriation in SFF

I came across an interesting article about cultural appropriation in SFF. The article points out that many SFF movie franchises are largely white, but nonetheless freely appropriate from non-white cultures.

I do not disagree and will return to some of the examples it cites from Star Wars below. However, before doing so I want to touch on the opening quote attributed to Junot Díaz:

Look, without our stories, without the true nature and reality of who we are as People of Color, nothing about fanboy or fangirl culture would make sense. What I mean by that is: if it wasn’t for race, X-Men doesn’t sense. If it wasn’t for the history of breeding human beings in the New World through chattel slavery, Dune doesn’t make sense. If it wasn’t for the history of colonialism and imperialism, Star Wars doesn’t make sense. If it wasn’t for the extermination of so many Indigenous First Nations, most of what we call science fiction’s contact stories doesn’t make sense. Without us as the secret sauce, none of this works, and it is about time that we understood that we are the Force that holds the Star Wars universe together. We’re the Prime Directive that makes Star Trek possible, yeah. In the Green Lantern Corps, we are the oath. We are all of these things—erased, and yet without us—we are essential.

This is very well written and at first I found myself nodding along to it. I certainly don't disagree with the basic premise of the quote in general. But the more I think about it the more I think the specifics of the quote are wrong.

Is there no X-men without race? The mutants are depicted as the next stage in human evolution. Not quite a new species, since they can interbreed with humanity, and so the analogy to race is appropriate and is an obvious source of inspiration for the writers. But the fear of the mutants has similar parallels in the displacement of Neanderthals by Homo Sapiens, and the political and military response seems to have echoes in the Cold War Arms Race. So I am note sure it would not exist without race,

No Dune without chattel slavery? I don't get the argument here at all. I presume the human breeding refers to the breeding program of the Bene Gesserit. But in the novel, this program is focused on the nobility, and the sisterhood's plan to ensure the birth of the Kwisatz Haderach. If anything, Dune owes much more to Arabic culture in its depiction of the Fremen. But IIRC they are not whitewashed in the book.

No Star Wars without colonialism and imperialism? Well, there can be no empire without imperialism. But empires were not restricted to Western Europe, and not all empires involved white people subjugating brown people; empires and imperialism would still exist even without race in the picture.

No alien first contact stories without the extermination of Indigenous First Nations? First contact with an alien species was always going to be a major topic in SFF, and it is natural that in seeking to understand how this might play out that authors looked to stories of first contact between more advanced and less advanced civilizations from our own world.

Be that as it may, I do think there is some truth to the idea that many of these movie franchises are peopled largely by white actors and borrow pretty freely and without attribution from non-white cultures.

The article has two pretty clear examples of this drawn from the first trilogy (second chronologically) of Star Wars films. Both refer to the costumes and hairstyles of Queen Amidala.

 

The first shows that Amidala's hairstyle and headdress (and possibly other aspects of the costume) were lifted pretty closely from Mongolian royal regalia. The second shows Amidala's hairstyle closely mimicking the hairstyle of the Hopi Indians.