I Can't Even Begin

I don't even have anything to add to this, but ... wow ... I'm ... what is there to say? This is where I'd normally come up with some sort of clever outlandish comparison, but there isn't one that can compare while staying remotely plausible. We've got the inappropriate appropriation of an exploited and (depending on how you want to look at it, previously) oppressed culture by an element of the culture which did the exploiting: that's pretty run of the mill. Neither is the fact that the appropriations are, apparently, not very good or accurate (I really wouldn't know, personally), but what I can't really begin to wrap my head around is that DeBeers isn't merely an element of the culture which exploited the "African" culture whose art is now being haphazardly and inexpertly appropriated; it was a major agent of the exploitation! In its corner of Africa, DeBeers was THE agent of exploitation! And this isn't past exploitation - I mean, whatever you want to say about the way European-Americans interacted with the Native Americans, and whatever you want to say about the current state of Native American societies as a result, we're not still going around violating treaties and destroying villages and giving them smallpox.

The capstone, of course, is that the medium in which this appropriation is being effected is the very fucking material for which much if not all of the horrific exploitation was done. Okay, I've got an analogy. DeBeers "celebrating" the spirit of Africa by producing these diamond-studded replica-mask jewelry pieces is like if:

We imagine that Hanes was founded by a conglomerate of powerful American slave owners (in actuality, it was founded in 1901 in North Carolina, so Hanes undoubtedly did benefit from share-cropping, so this part at least doesn't have to be totally fictitious). Now imagine that Hanes decided it was going to celebrate the spirit of African Americans' considerable cultural influence on the USA by producing a commemorative line of T-shirts with images of generic and stereotyped African Americans doing things like playing a saxophone or catching a football or dicking around with some peanuts. And these T-shirts were going to be made from ACTUAL COTTON which was hand-picked by ACTUAL SHARECROPPERS who are ACTUALLY SHARECROPPING TODAY. How fucking unbelievable and, frankly, unacceptable would that be? That's what this is.

Wow.