Cultural Appropriation

[ndrosen]

Lately, we’ve been hearing idiocies along the lines of “You aren’t allowed to wear a sombrero if you aren’t Mexican, you’re not allowed to do yoga if you aren’t Indian, you aren’t allowed to drink miso soup if you aren’t Japanese, etc.”

Before yapping about cultural appropriation by progressive crybullies became a thing, I read a letter in the Washington Post by a grand pooh-bah of the Council of Conservative Citizens, formerly the White Citizens’ Council, responding to the paper’s coverage of his organization. He asserted that Western culture was the product of whites (for the most part true), and could only meaningfully be carried on by whites (horsefeathers). I remember wishing I could meet him, and tell him that “race” is not the same thing as culture, and that blacks whose ancestors spoke African languages, or yellow-skinned immigrants from East Asia and their descendants, could write worthy books in English, make contributions to physics, a science, in modern times, developed by white Europeans from Buridan through Newton and Einstein, etc.

The White Citizens’ Council no longer dominates Dixie, thank goodness, but the inane ideas of this remnant Southern gentleman have infected people who would claim to be woke anti-racists; this is not the first time that bad old ideas have been repackaged as the bright, progressive thing. I especially reject and abhominate the doctrine that an author cannot write about people of a culture other than her own. If she attempts to do so and gets it wrong, portraying foreigners or fellow countrymen from a different walk of life doing things they would be unlikely to do, and thinking thoughts which they would not plausibly think, she can legitimately be criticized for that, but the whole notion that it is wrong to step outside one’s own narrow bounds and commit “cultural appropriation” should be laughed out of respectable society.

Comments

[litalex]

Well, in the US at least, white people is the most powerful group and their culture is seen as the default. So anyone attempting to make their mark has to partake in it. But other cultures are more marginalized and that's where cultural appropriation come in, as the dominant culture is trying to take over. I don't think it's that different from why black people are 'allowed' to use the N-word, but any other group using it is bad.

[brainwane]

Hey, so, I think this is a bit more complicated than you are seeing it as; perhaps sometime when we get to meet in person, we can talk about it?

[ndrosen]

Perhaps there are complications, and I agree that one should not be gratuitously rude about someone else’s culture; if we happen to meet, we may discuss this further. I do think, though, that it is not a sin to learn from other people’s cultures; the human race could not have made such progress as it has if different societies had not learned from each other’s philosophy, technology, and cuisine.

[kk1raven]

I think there are genuine issues with cultural appropriation, but I find the idea that an author can't write about a culture other than their own to be ridiculous. How that author writes does matter though. Whether authors who are part of that other culture are being silenced is important as well.