Martial Racism

It is important to me that people from the cultures specific martial arts come from have access to those martial arts. As a communitarian and amateur ethnologist, I despise a uniform world of big box stores and cultural uniformity. Cultural diversity not only creates innovation to help mankind as a whole, it makes life far more enjoyable than it otherwise would be.

Studying the martial arts of other cultures helps us appreciate those other cultures, actively working against racism. Beyond that, two of the Asian martial arts masters in my area that I know in my area, who I have tremendous respect for, both have at least one instructor who is white. Thanks to cultural appropriation, these Asian Martial Arts are here for these Asian Martial Arts masters.

A major annoyance of mine is people clinging to the cultural origins of each martial art, as if "Budo, the ancient  martial arts of Japan" was some how functionally different from "Kung Fu, the ancient martial arts of China." NO one ever did "Budo" or "Kung Fu," that is a far broader reference than what any one individual ever actually experienced. You can say a person trained in "Kyokushin Karate" or "Choy Lay Fut" for example, and then culture actually matters, because it was specific Japanese people who passed on the art Kyokushin, and specific Chinese people who passed on Choy Lay Fut. These specific people operated with specific cultural values, and that history matters.

But the fact is Choy Lay Fut, regardless of cultural circumstances, is far more similar to Kyokushin, than Choy Lay Fut is to its rival, Wing Chun. Furthermore, Kyokushin is far more similar to Choy Lay Fut than it is to the more popular form of Karate, Shotokan. To suggest that Choy Lay Fut is functionally related to Wing Chun simply because they have a shared culture (or Kyokushin to Shotokan,) THAT is a cultural stereotype, THAT is martial racism.

For example I am interested in a certain type of grappling, the sort of grappling Aikido aspires to, the type of grappling you see in Muay Thai, Sumo, Tai Chi and Viking Wrestling, where people work on takedowns from the clinch, without going to the ground themselves. Many if not most martial arts consumers are also interested in that. But a conversation about this was recently mired when someone wanted to start talking about "Chinese Grappling," as if Chinese Wrestling and Tai Chi had the same objectives because they shared cultural origins, ignoring that Muay Thai, Sumo and Viking Wrestling aspired to the same thing as Tai Chi - particularly problematic since some martial arts like Choy Lay Fut have adopted certain Tai Chi practices as a way of getting better at these kinds of takedowns. He was able to avoid admitting an entire functional range of martial arts techniques existed by throwing up a smoke screen of martial racism.