Would Apache run into trouble?

[RayL]

(Let me make it clear this is tongue in cheek)

You may have seen in the news that Washington Redskins (an American football team) are in trouble because they use the head of a Native American chief in a feathered headdress as their symbol. This is seen as 'cultural appropriation'.
You may also have noted the pressure in cinema and theatre to select people of the same race as the character they play (Othello by a black actor, for example).

If The Shadows recorded Apache today, would the name run into trouble?
And would they need to get in a chinese musician to play the chinese drum?

[Didier]

Then they should also have problems with "Geronimo" !

[artyman]

And do they get a horse to play Mustang

[alanbakewell]

And Lord help 'em with "Flingel Bunt".

[Derek Mowbray]

Some people take offence at anything these days, i believe that The Shadows played there first solo gig at The Colston Hall in Bristol. I suppose that will have to be airbrushed from history.

[Teflon]

To be fair, "I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Arthur" would be bang on trend today. So far ahead of their time

[JimN]

(Let me make it clear this is tongue in cheek)

You may have seen in the news that Washington Redskins (an American football team) are in trouble because they use the head of a Native American chief in a feathered headdress as their symbol. This is seen as 'cultural appropriation'.
You may also have noted the pressure in cinema and theatre to select people of the same race as the character they play (Othello by a black actor, for example).

If The Shadows recorded Apache today, would the name run into trouble?
And would they need to get in a chinese musician to play the chinese drum?

Listen carefully, I shall say zis only once (though I have had occasion to point it out many times elsewhere, in the past)...

Shakespeare's eponymous character, Othello, is abso-bloody-lutely NOT black!

By that, I mean that he is not a negroid. He is a caucasoid from the Mediterranean coastal area of Africa, and is described by the playwright in the dramatis personae for the play as "the Moor". That term was used in Elizabethan England to refer to someone we would nowadays call an Arab or a Berber and in a wider sense, is in the same racial group - the caucasoid - as all Europeans as well as North Africans and natives of the Middle East and of South Asia. Tudor English had a quite separate term for the negroid division of homo sapiens: the blackamoor.

This modern heresy stems purely from the fact that Sir Laurence Olivier played the character as a sub-Saharan African in the 1955 film in which he took that part.

There is one other Shakespeare play in which a Moor is portrayed: Titus Andronicus, in which the character Aaron appears. But he too is an Arab or Berber. Despite the fact that Shakespeare used the term "dark" (and various synonyms) as an insult passed from one European character to another (often in the comedies, eg "A Midsummer Night's Dream") is simply a reflection of the fact that at the time, lightness of complexion and blonde hair was seen as more attractive than a darker complexion and dark hair. It's just a measure of what was seen as more sexually alluring (my guess is that that hasn't changed as much as some might think).

Other than Aaron and Othello (and Aaron's child in "Titus..."), it is possible to be fairly certain that there are no non-European characters of any description in Shakespeare's plays and certainly no sub-Saharan Africans.

[Ian Miller]

Crumbs!

[JimN]

I'm going to add to this. The question of whether the character Othello was supposed to be "black" (in the modern sense) can only be correctly considered with a proper background knowledge of how the term "black" was used as a descriptor of other people in Shakespeare's time (it did not mean then what it means now).

Even in the play "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (in which every character is a European), one Athenian male says to an Athenian female: Away, you Ethiope!. In saying that, he is not suggesting that she is an African. He is merely expressing the view, common and normal in Tudor society, that those with the fairest skin and the blondest hair were the most desirable, with others being very much in the "also-ran" category by comparison. There is any amount of commentary on this aspect of Shakespeare's language if you look for it. Here's a good place to take a quick look:

https://www.reddit.com/r/shakespeare/comments/6avks8/is_midsummers_hermia_black/

Yesterday, I came across this question and answer on the Quora website; I'll quote it:

Question:
Was King Charles II of England, Scotland, and Ireland black?

Answer:
I know why this question has come up. When Charles was on the run from the Parliamentary army after his father’s defeat, there were Wanted posters put up around England asking people to alert the authorities if they saw him. One of these posters described him as:

a tall, black man more than two yards high

In the English language of the 21st century, the assumption is that someone described as ‘black’ will be of recent African ancestry and have dark brown skin. The thing is, that’s a relatively recent usage, dating back only to the 1960s [my emphasis - JN]. The word didn’t have that meaning back in the 17th century.

Back then, describing a person as ‘black’ could mean either that he had black hair and dark eyes, or simply that he was dressed in black. Even as late as the 1950s in Britain, a popular author could describe someone as ‘a black man’ and mean only that he was dressed from head to foot in black robes — his skin colour was irrelevant, and in fact not even visible to the person describing him:

‘These black men,’ said the landlord lowering his voice. ‘They’re looking for Baggins, and if they mean well, then I’m a hobbit. It was on Monday, and all the dogs were yammering and the geese screaming. Uncanny, I called it. Nob, he came and told me that two black men were at the door asking for a hobbit called Baggins.’
— J R R Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings.

This is not to say that the word ‘black’ was never used in English to describe a dark-skinned person prior to the 1960s: but not as the standard term or label.

In the case of Charles II, he was called a ‘black man’ because his hair was black and his eyes dark brown. That’s all. Dark blond or brown hair is most common in Britain, so black hair stood out as distinctive.

Stephen Tempest
MA Modern History, University of Oxford (1985)
Answered June 6

[Tab]

Brilliant, Jim!
Nothing to do with 'Apache' but emphasises that we perceive and judge everything in today's terms.
Must re-visit Shakespeare again - never liked him much at school!

A modern Shakespeare might have said 'if music be the food of love, switch on'