ndrosen

With Florida legislating against exposing children to drag performances, would it now be illegal to allow any minors in the audience at a production of Shakespeare’s As You Like It? If the producer does what would usually be done these days, and employs an actress to play Rosalind, it seems that her presence on stage disguised as Ganymede would be an unacceptable instance of drag. If the producer did what would have been done in Shakespeare’s time, and used beardless youths to play the female roles, a boy’s appearance as Rosalind would be drag. In the latter case, the juveniles playing girls would not be allowed to see each other on stage.

This doesn’t even make the short list of primary reasons not to be pleased with Ron DeSantis.

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.