Since we just did a post about Cher’s somewhat recent African American fan base and how Cher might situate in it, this is a good time to point out that no monolithic subculture is in agreement about Cher. There are gay men who don’t like Cher. There are African Americans who don’t like Cher. But I have noticed that as her profile is rising in African American subcultures, it’s descending for Native American subcultures. I’m not sure it was ever that huge there but…
Young online protests (from both white and Native American/Indian Nation people) are calling for her head these days because of the 1973 Half Breed costume Bob Mackie designed for her and for other occasions when she wore Indian-looking clothing out to Hollywood events. Native Stardust last year made a video collage of these outfits for a Facebook post, seemingly calling for what I’m not sure, anything from the shaming or the cancellation of Cher.
Cher has stopped using the Half Breed outfit in her live shows (itself a controversy to the Anti-Cancel Culture people) but this seems irrelevant to the rage warriors.
Before we launch into the arguments on the Facebook post, let me clarify my beliefs around Cancel Culture:
If you’re out there literally lynching people, the larger culture has an obligation to censor you and stop you by any means. But I do believe in a kind of online-lynching as well. This includes harassment, racist organizing, covert racist messaging. I believe these acts should be called out as well: outright cyber bullying based on race. It’s a hate crime pretty clearly.
The problem with our cancel warriors is that they combine lynchers with appropriators. And even appropriations come in a rainbow of flavors. Some people are exploiters and some people are supporters and allies. And supporters and allies often make mistakes. Or times change. Word definitions change. And I think in our current atmosphere of increased racial violence, it is crucial that we know the difference between all these things. Otherwise, all the outrage will become noise and it sort of already has.
We have to be unequivocal with the lynchers (and cyber bullies) but also offer room to apologize and change to the appropriators, which internet warriors are loathe to do. If you refuse to let anyone repair and reconcile, if you shun also the minor offenders, if you cancel without context, you are resorting to the same bad-faith arguments as your most villainous enemies use.
As they say, when fighting monsters, don’t become a monster yourself.
You have to step through complicated quagmires with fairness. And the rage warriors don’t want to see complexity because then they have to slow down. And they don’t want to slow down because they are performing morality for social points. And the social points come and go very quickly.
We’re not even coming to the table in the same way. And you can’t even argue with a bad faith argument.
In any case, rage warfare just makes the other side double down and entrench (since recovery isn’t even an option extended to them). So it’s not even helpful to the cause. It’s just makes more racists out of micro-aggressors.
Here’s the Facebook conversation:
Native Stardust (from NYC): Native look doesn’t mean Cher, or anyone else, is native and no she’s not entitled to wear native style headdresses that aren’t earned and that appropriate and perpetuate erasure of native culture. #native #indigenous #nativeamerican
[Hundreds of comments from many, many Facebookers then occurred.]
Me: This is a very sensitive topic, appropriation. Many points of view on this one, even in this thread. And Cher is an interesting case, especially in thinking about what her TV shows were doing in the early 1970s when there were zero representations of anything on TV that wasn’t super-white (Beverly Hillbillies, I Dream of Jeannie, The Brady Bunch). Her shows were trying to be multicultural. We see this very differently from 2026. There is a whole book on this with a Cher chapter, Off-White Hollywood by Diane Negra
And she does it in her movies. She won an academy award for playing an Italian women and she is zero percent Italian.
Robert: Mary, Sanford and son , Chico and the man. Flip Wilson show. Fat Albert. Harlem Globetrotters.. TV in early 70s wasn’t all white. Lone Ranger had tonto has a partner. The real McCoy’s there was an Hispanic hired hand. Bonanza had Hopsing. Kung Fu had some Chinese people in it. Green hornet. All the westerns had native in them.
Me: Robert, yeah that was in the 70s, too. I was talking about the late 60s. Those shows you mention were part of the same trend. Fred Silverman at CBS (in particular) wanted to end white “country” shows like Andy Griffith and appeal more to young people in cities. Which all the shows you mention (and the new CBS lineup of shows like S&C, Mary Tyler Moore, Bob Newhart, Flip Wilson) did do.
I know nothing about Western shows but those ended in the 70s too.
Sage: Mary McCray ew wtf is that
[I don’t know. I didn’t even respond.]
Brian: Mary, Jeannie should have been Middle Eastern.
Me: Brian, that would have been great. 60s TV casting was ridiculously white.
Anita: Mary, this is not about the roles she plays, she’s just an actress which doesn’t entitle her to pose as a native woman in costume, Indian women wore no such thing and shame on you people for giving her carte blanch
Me: I’m not giving her “carte blanch” – I believe this is a legitimate controversy. I’m just raising the complexities in the issue. Shame on you for assuming the worst about me.
[That was this morning.]
How can you separate Cher acting in movies from acting on television and “the roles she plays?” Cher is an actor when she plays an Italian but a transgressor when she sings as a Native American? No variety show in the history of anything was ever about realism. However, you can argue variety shows did carry forward inappropriate liberties taken from Vaudeville. (But I don’t think that was Anita’s point.)
The issue is just larger than a male American headdress. “Indian women wore no such thing.” This is a larger issue of Cher wearing afro wigs, Cher wearing geisha dresses. I have heard tsk-tsks from white people about those things too. And I’m sure these other instances of Cher’s costume appropriation bother Asian and African Americans, as well.
So I’m sorry Anita. It almost certainly has to do with all these roles she plays.
And it’s mostly young people who are taking issue, young people who didn’t live through the racial context of television in the 1960s and 70s. Which is why Cher wasn’t a target then but is one now.
Later in the thread Vernon said, “What if Cher’s attire brought attention to the native culture and people started to learn about their history and plight which created an understanding and connection.” Someone responded by saying maybe it just reinforced sexual fetishization of Native American women.
Bring attention to something versus fetishizing native women is always something we need to talk about. The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour in 1973 might have unintentionally done that when two things crisscrossed to perpetuate a problem. Cher in cultural clothes combined with Cher wanting to assert herself sexually. I would argue strenuously that this was always her idea (and her co-conspirator, Bob Mackie) and not the idea of Sonny (who wasn’t all in for it because this was his wife) or the show’s idea (the show censors also fought it). Cher fought for her right to wear Bob Mackie’s clothes. And those clothes always showed off a lot of skin.
But there’s also complications here with representation, because Cher has been a sexy pirate on an album cover, a sexy farm girl on another TV show, a sexy roller-derby girl in promotion. (Growing up in California, this is probably the only organic sexy outfit she could don). These types of women are commonly fetishized as well. And it sounds ridiculous to insist Cher should only be allowed to be a sexy Armenian. And then the Armenians could protest. After all she didn’t grow up in Armenia or even in L.A.’s Little Armenia. Would she need to prove DNA blood quantum or acquire a sort of Armenia tribal card? If you know anything about these things, you know blood quantum and tribal membership are themselves controversial ideas in the American Indian Nation community (see the booklist below).
And then there’s the problem of degree.
In talking with Mr. Cher Scholar, he mentioned the Hollywood pressure to hire actors who are the same gender, ethnicity or sexual orientation as their characters in the productions, as close to the character in casting as possible as to not make anybody in the audience mad. Which has proven to be thorny, too. (Color blind casting is the opposite impulse but that makes essentialists angry, too.)
Taken to the logical conclusion, you wouldn’t be able to play a rape victim if you had never been raped. You wouldn’t be able to play a soldier if you had never been a soldier. Our own personal lanes are so narrow, it would make the art of acting completely moot. The actors whole point is to get into the skin of somebody else.
The same goes for writers. And models. And singers. And artists who pull in techniques from other cultures. And then birth ancestry is just one way to look at your past heritage. Some people believe in other kinds of lineage, like past lives that exist outside of their own family systems.
Then there’s the problem of artistic sympathy and support. Sebastian Barry just published a book from the point-of-view of an American slave. (He is Irish.) Although not having read this book, I have to say I agree with giving Sebastian Barry the opportunity to write outside of his lane. This is what I had to say last week on Facebook:
Writing is as much about process as it is a business. Writing about people from different backgrounds than your own (or different genders) builds empathy. Or at least attempts to do that. Even when you get the details wrong or screw something up. It’s good for writers and it’s good for their unsympathetic readers.
Although it’s definitely not fair when white writers get more money and better publishing deals when telling stories about people of color or women than minority writers get for similar stories, this is an economic and publishing issue more than a writing issue. Writers should keep trying to involve the full world in their work and not shy away from all the hard things.
We are self-segregating and this is bad. If writers feel they are not allowed to write about a variety of people (or anyone outside of their own narrow lanes of birth) or cook away from their birth culture or play music or wear clothes or whatever it is, people start glamorizing their own groups and they start villainizing all the other groups and racism increases and here we are. If we can’t share culture, we devolve and villainize. We need to keep up the practice of understanding each other and that is what writing is.
For what it’s worth, the Half Breed dress is a drawing ultimately. It is a fiction, an idea of Cher as a vague American tribal warrior more than it is a non-Indian person exploiting a real culturally-imbued regalia used by a prior person from another culture. Again, a matter of degree. Is it the feathers? What if those feathers are not real feathers? (And who qualifies to own the feathers?) What if you add Hollywood bling to the design? Obviously the dress was not trying to be traditional. It was not trying to pass off as something legitimate. It was trying to allude to a the power of Cher.
But it very well could be said to sexualize female American Indianness in the process of Cher being Cher. And that could have unintended consequences for Native American women who still perform ceremonies in their lives.
But then that is about the headdress and not the other suede shirts and jewelry and headbands Cher also occasionally wore.
I’m just saying it’s complicated. And online warriors (wearing their own illegitimate headdresses of warfare) do not want to partake in the complicated conversation. They have two buckets: good and evil. You’re either one or the other.
And I’m not convinced it’s entirely a politically left/right spread here. Liberals can be ineffectively shrill and clueless in their rule-making un-scalability to be sure but I have worked over the years with quite a few “maliciously compliant” right-wingers who will performatively support a system they don’t believe in at all and do so with such strict compliance in order to make the system or the new rules seem untenable in order to cause those systems to fail and the very act of considering other people’s feelings seem ultimately ridiculous and impossible.
It was one of my current co-workers (also a current practitioner of the ruse above) who alerted me to the phrase “malicious compliance.” We often have a mix of both of these people in any “correctness crusade.”
But that doesn’t make any of them morally right. It just makes good conversations harder to have.
I don’t think appropriation is comprised of two buckets. It’s complex. Appropriation can be exploitive and too many times has been. It can also be good-faith attempts to understand each other.
Cher’s ethnic appropriations are way larger than her use of male warrior clothing, as Negra’s book meticulously outlines and as any TV variety show historian would point out.
Tim Curry put it very well when talking about The Rocky Horror Picture Show:
“Look beyond the end of your own nose, just briefly. Please.”
1970s television context is this: I’m pretty, pretty sure The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour was not trying to exploit ethnicities. Until World War II, Sonny (as a Siscilian Italian) and Cher (as a vaguely looking ethnic person) would not have been considered white in America. Cher has her own scary story about United States border patrol trying to refuse her entry back into the country when she was under 10 years old because she looked Mexican and the rest of her family looked so blonde and white. I’m sure Sonny and Cher were sensitive to racism. I’m also pretty sure the writers and producers were trying to show the beauty of other cultures (in American and around the World) as an anecdote to white American television of the 1950s and 1960s. And all through the powerful female vehicle of Cher and her ethnic vagueness.
That I’m a Cher fan makes me immediately suspect in this conversation even though I am not a “carte blanche” fan, to use Anita’s term. Real “carte blance” Cher fans would take umbrage to hearing me being described that way. I’m way to critical for them. I’m not “carte blanche” enough!
Being a “scholar” of the subject also gives me zero credibility. Just watch me out there pointing out A.I. pictures of Cher on socials. People are committed to their willingness to believe themselves over everybody else.
I’m ultimately more of a fan of fairness and navigating racism in America in productive ways. Rage and cancel culture has only seemed to exacerbate racism for the racists. Therefore, I see it as a failed strategy.
Battle lines being drawn.
Here is Cher singing “For What it’s Worth” (on the cover again wearing a fringe suede top and a bandanna). Cher has spent her whole life being judged as the most and least authentic person in the room from day one. Is she a real hippie? Should she be singing a Buffalo Springfield song in a Muscle Shoals studio? Should those unique musical sounds be coming off a Cher record?
And yet those who have worked with her categorize her as the most authentic person in the room. This further complicates her dynamic.
There are endless circles of being, presentation and ideas about who is allowed to do what, wear what, etc. Cher is a lightning rod for these kinds of culture struggles. And the Internet is full of people making outrage (possibly for their own benefit) to keep those culture struggles in play instead of actually envisioning productive ideas for a collective national future.
Should we keep having the conversations about appropriation? Definitely. Should we read up on other tribal and identity concerns of this American community. 100%. You can “do you own research” and find plenty of online lists on where to start with Native American literature. But here are my current favorites:
- There, There, the hugely successful novel by Tommy Orange exploring the lives of American Indians in urban cities
- Birding While Indian, a poignant memoir by Thomas C. Gannon
- The Only Good Indians, a brilliant horror novel by Stephen Graham Jones
- The memoirs and poetry by Joy Harjo
- The novels of Louise Erdrich and Leslie Marmon Silko
- Experimental poetry by Layli Long Soldier and James Thomas Stevens
