Douglas Murray makes this point wonderfully: what's being wrongly termed "cultural appropriation" is what we used to recognize as cultural appreciation. Until about two minutes ago, a white lady wearing a kimono was perceived as liking and respecting Japanese culture.
Lovely: "The anti-appropriationists of today sound much like the anti-miscegenationists of the past, taking for granted that racial groups have clear borders and ought not be seen in public to combine." FAIR keeps exposing the racism in the "anti-racist" illiberalism.
And ironically, the word "woke" itself is a form of "cultural appropriation" by the movement's own definition, from Black culture in the 1960s or earlier, and in 2008 by Erykah Badu.
Best article I've read in 6 months...I'm always confused as to how Viking braids (not a white cultural majority) are culturally appropriated. Also, the only way you can have a "white" majority in power in the entire script is if you take all white cultures (English, Scottish, Irish, Scandinavian, Russian, Danish, etc) and make them all one group. There are distinct cultures that aren't recognized in order to call white people a majority. It's fallacy.
Dialogue should change to "cultural exploitation", I do think it is good when one is able to identify when a "dominant" culture is exploiting minority aesthetics for gross profit. Example being an AWFL opening up a Chinese restaurant shop and titling it "Me So Hongry" or something similar. This is offensive, at worst, on multiple levels and tasteless in every capacity. I don't think this situation is comparable to that poor woman who spent a decade in China learning how to speak the language and making their food, who turned around to write a cookbook about it and was mercilessly castigated online by people who otherwise could not care less about Chinese food any other day of the week. "Appropriation" doesn't adequately describe either of these situations. The former is exploitation, through and through. The latter is successful integration and sharing in respect.
And yet, how well would a restaurant called "Me So Hongry" do? Not every well I think, chiefly because it would be obviously recognized as what it was. Naming a restaurant after a phrase that is blatantly mocking the people it purports to serve? This would be a perfect example where "bad art" would extinguish itself almost immediately. No bank would lend such an establishment money to get started, they'd find no workers, and no city council would approve it either.
They "were" going to open with the name and due to push back changed the name. That was pretty much my point. They were free to use any stupid, racist, or misguided name they wanted. And yet if it was pretty much universally offensive beyond a small circle of adolescent-minded individuals then it would fail. Every business, especially a small customer-facing one, is entirely dependent on the good-will of customers and the surrounding society.
Anyway, this is less a case of cultural appropriation and more just old-fashioned ethnic stereotyping that is in very poor taste. It's also a kind of bizarre alteration of a famous scene the movie Full Metal Jacket, which took place in Vietnam, so the restaurant owner just seems pretty mixed-up all around.
Reminds me of that white guy who decided to open an ill-fated ersatz "Asian Fusion" restaurant called "Yellow Fever", apparently named after the Bloodhound Gang song. Yet all he had to do was Google "yellow fever", and within about 10 seconds he would immediately see why naming it that was such a failure. He canceled himself with his own stupidity, basically.
Franklin - Great article and agree with so much of what you wrote. As for Braswell who obviously has found this to be better paying than a real job. If we follow his thoughts, grasps for notions of ownership even as the history he describes rips them away. Why has Wonder Years been redone and why are we going to have a Black Redheaded Mermaid? KK blasted for corn rolls, Whoppie and so many others are wearing Blonde or red. He has started down that rabbit hole that could have no end.
Cinco DeMayo should not be celebrated by any races but Latino. St Patrick's day is only for whites. Electric guitars is only for whites as is country music. No Chinese food for you and especially cooking it. Gospel must be all Black choirs. No fortune cookie for you my man.
The stupidity of the money hustlers' actually knows no bounds. Should basketball and football, plus baseball only be for whites?
I prefer to think that society learns and grows from culture, regardless of the background. That is why the cries of cultural appropriations and reparations' strikes zero sympathy from me. Do we give reparations to all of the families of dead Union Soldiers or seek out the African Tribes that sold their own into slavery? No we just need to pick one country and say they did it. (Hell no I do not condone slavery. Which by the way is bigger than any time in history and old slow Joe only makes it worse.) Do we institute the police to ensure that no one can wear certain clothes or act a certain way? M&M should be prosecuted for doing rap.
What is it, other than attention and money that people like Braswell, Jackson, Sharpton, and even those of other races want? I include other races as there are definitely enough white groups looking to play the same card, as are Latino groups and others. Try just being whatever country you are or if that doesn't work, move somewhere you feel better. Nothing ties you to one place in todays world. As for me; I prefer my mixed family and all of the friends from all races who bring so much to my life. Makes life so much more fun and interesting.
Peak insanity was reached when those poor ladies in Portland who were run out of town for making burritos out of their food truck. But then again, that was Portland, so its not like the women weren't forewarned.
I loved this sentence: "The correct descriptor, in this instance, is 'bad art'.” I get the feeling that the cultural appropriation argument is a way for bad [artists/comedians/etc.] to essentially just eliminate the competition within their particular lane.
Twitter post today, telling "settlers" not to share any information about the indigenous culture that an indigenous person may have shared with them or that they read somewhere because they did not own that info. They had to request permission to share it. Why even share information, publish art or anything with anyone outside your own culture? Why not communicate cultural info in the indigenous language that only her own people understand. I'm getting her post comes from a place of hate. Glad this wasn't a thing when Paul Simon did his Graceland album. It introduced a whole genre of music to a big market and I'm sure Ladysmith Black Mombasa aren't complaining.
Many good people were and still are furious with Paul Simon for breaking the anti-apartheid boycott of South Africa. Ultimately Nelson Mandela embraced Simon, but the argument lives on and the two sides will never really reconcile. There are the purists, and there are the pragmatists. I can see both sides. But there’s no denying that Simon understood the power of art and privilege, and used them to introduce South African pop music to the world at a time when its brilliant musicians were languishing at home. He followed his muse rather than politics. Ultimately history bore him out.
Ah, but many of the same people, particularly music people, who boycotted apartheid South Africa had little or no problem with Cuba's totalitarian dictatorship, which banned "decadent" Western popular music and even the music of major Cuban musical figures like Celia Cruz for being against the regime. In other words, righteousness can be rather, uh, selective.
That wasn't exactly the point of this article or of my comment, but you're not wrong. The "yes but" idealization of Cuba by North American leftists has always baffled me. Even last summer's protests, during which Cubans demonstrated for "libertad!" and for which crime people are still in jail, was downplayed or ignored by the left. Ideologically driven true believers see only what they want to see.
My point, which could have been more explicit, was that when the supposedly righteous are demonstrably willfully blind, not to say hypocritical, their righteousness is questionable and may be something else, like fashionable correctness or covert opportunism.
Yes, I get that. It's not a point "the supposedly righteous" will ever concede, because political correctness and ideology supplant objectivity and critical thinking every time.
But also, objectively speaking, apartheid was a terrible yoke for South Africans of color to bear, and it needed to go away. It took the suffering and determination of many people over a long period of time, including the 27 years Mandela spent in prison as the face of the movement, to bring about that absolutely necessary change. Nothing and nobody is pure in this world, but sometimes good things happen in spite of human corruption and imperfections.
The issue is not the nature of apartheid, but what's really behind people's positions and actions, which may or may not be as advertised. False virtue is repellent in principle, even if it can sometimes act to good effect.
Todays anti racist activists are fighting something thats not there any longer. Its become about unearned resource acquisition. Netflix doesn’t help. But the pendulum swings.
The idea of "cultural appropriation" the way it is discussed now is highly toxic and incredibly ignorant of human history as a whole. As I try to lay out here (https://twoplustwo.substack.com/p/of-black-mermaids-and-white-indians), the accusation of cultural appropriation seems to be working only in one direction and therefore reveals its hypocrisy. We should celebrate each other's cultures by making it accessible to everyone, not restrict it to skin color.
Thank you. Finally. We're in some kind of situation when a banal observation is ground-breaking. (Pardon the apparent back-handedness of the compliment; you seriously nailed it, man). Nina Simone's 1967 rendition of The House of the Rising Sun, originally a Scottish folk song, was rightly celebrated as a profound contribution to the Blues. I understand 'cultural appropriation' is assessed and adjudicated overwhelmingly in one direction, but just imagine the implications of Simone not being "allowed" access to this material and just how less brilliant the world would be because of it. That's the future but for the likes of you flipping the switches on these tracks. Well done.
Right! Historically everyone borrows from each other. And that’s good! Isn’t weird how we’ve gone from historical nationalism to globalism and now we seem to be shrinking back to nationalism on both the right and left!
Manthia Diawara, a Malian writer, filmmaker, cultural theorist, scholar, and art historian, wrote this in his book "We Won't Budge" (an excellent read that documents his migration from Mali to France to the United States):
"The notion that you can leave one culture and walk into another without contaminating it or being contaminated by it is erroneous. Cultures are no longer that different from each other; they have lost to each other, and they have gained from each other. Although at a surface level, there are differences marked by color and physical characteristics, which are still capable of activating prejudice, at a deeper level the desire for modernity has considerably reduced the differences between people. What people want everywhere today - whether they are dressed in dashikis or three-piece suits, whether they claim to be authentic Africans or Europeans - is the shortcut to things that only modernity can give them. …Africa has lost some characteristics of its cultures, and gained some new ones. The same can be said about everywhere in the world today. Because of modernity, we can have anybody's culture at every corner of the world, and anybody can lose his or her own culture to a new one anyplace in the world."
The stand-out aspect of human success vs all other species is our ability to communicate, assimilate and adapt to new information. For millennia this mostly came in the form of visual observation, occasionally via written documentation. We delight in novelty, ingenuity and new ideas.
It's no exaggeration to say that nearly all human progress starts with a new Idea (whether original or observed), and then trying it out.
A pointless article and needless over-obfuscation of something that matters less than you think it does. If you're doing something that upsets someone else, listen to them - and try and do better.
Douglas Murray makes this point wonderfully: what's being wrongly termed "cultural appropriation" is what we used to recognize as cultural appreciation. Until about two minutes ago, a white lady wearing a kimono was perceived as liking and respecting Japanese culture.
Lovely: "The anti-appropriationists of today sound much like the anti-miscegenationists of the past, taking for granted that racial groups have clear borders and ought not be seen in public to combine." FAIR keeps exposing the racism in the "anti-racist" illiberalism.
Exactly. It’s white Wokeism that’s racist.
And ironically, the word "woke" itself is a form of "cultural appropriation" by the movement's own definition, from Black culture in the 1960s or earlier, and in 2008 by Erykah Badu.
Best article I've read in 6 months...I'm always confused as to how Viking braids (not a white cultural majority) are culturally appropriated. Also, the only way you can have a "white" majority in power in the entire script is if you take all white cultures (English, Scottish, Irish, Scandinavian, Russian, Danish, etc) and make them all one group. There are distinct cultures that aren't recognized in order to call white people a majority. It's fallacy.
Celtic cultures have been braiding their hair since time immemorial.
When River A and River B come together, we call the result a River. When Culture A and Culture B come together, we call the result a Culture.
Dialogue should change to "cultural exploitation", I do think it is good when one is able to identify when a "dominant" culture is exploiting minority aesthetics for gross profit. Example being an AWFL opening up a Chinese restaurant shop and titling it "Me So Hongry" or something similar. This is offensive, at worst, on multiple levels and tasteless in every capacity. I don't think this situation is comparable to that poor woman who spent a decade in China learning how to speak the language and making their food, who turned around to write a cookbook about it and was mercilessly castigated online by people who otherwise could not care less about Chinese food any other day of the week. "Appropriation" doesn't adequately describe either of these situations. The former is exploitation, through and through. The latter is successful integration and sharing in respect.
good comment.
And yet, how well would a restaurant called "Me So Hongry" do? Not every well I think, chiefly because it would be obviously recognized as what it was. Naming a restaurant after a phrase that is blatantly mocking the people it purports to serve? This would be a perfect example where "bad art" would extinguish itself almost immediately. No bank would lend such an establishment money to get started, they'd find no workers, and no city council would approve it either.
I hate to break it to you, but that place existed.
https://littlevillagemag.com/me-so-hungry/
And again: It really didn't.
They "were" going to open with the name and due to push back changed the name. That was pretty much my point. They were free to use any stupid, racist, or misguided name they wanted. And yet if it was pretty much universally offensive beyond a small circle of adolescent-minded individuals then it would fail. Every business, especially a small customer-facing one, is entirely dependent on the good-will of customers and the surrounding society.
Anyway, this is less a case of cultural appropriation and more just old-fashioned ethnic stereotyping that is in very poor taste. It's also a kind of bizarre alteration of a famous scene the movie Full Metal Jacket, which took place in Vietnam, so the restaurant owner just seems pretty mixed-up all around.
Miso Hungry would've been better.
Reminds me of that white guy who decided to open an ill-fated ersatz "Asian Fusion" restaurant called "Yellow Fever", apparently named after the Bloodhound Gang song. Yet all he had to do was Google "yellow fever", and within about 10 seconds he would immediately see why naming it that was such a failure. He canceled himself with his own stupidity, basically.
Franklin - Great article and agree with so much of what you wrote. As for Braswell who obviously has found this to be better paying than a real job. If we follow his thoughts, grasps for notions of ownership even as the history he describes rips them away. Why has Wonder Years been redone and why are we going to have a Black Redheaded Mermaid? KK blasted for corn rolls, Whoppie and so many others are wearing Blonde or red. He has started down that rabbit hole that could have no end.
Cinco DeMayo should not be celebrated by any races but Latino. St Patrick's day is only for whites. Electric guitars is only for whites as is country music. No Chinese food for you and especially cooking it. Gospel must be all Black choirs. No fortune cookie for you my man.
The stupidity of the money hustlers' actually knows no bounds. Should basketball and football, plus baseball only be for whites?
I prefer to think that society learns and grows from culture, regardless of the background. That is why the cries of cultural appropriations and reparations' strikes zero sympathy from me. Do we give reparations to all of the families of dead Union Soldiers or seek out the African Tribes that sold their own into slavery? No we just need to pick one country and say they did it. (Hell no I do not condone slavery. Which by the way is bigger than any time in history and old slow Joe only makes it worse.) Do we institute the police to ensure that no one can wear certain clothes or act a certain way? M&M should be prosecuted for doing rap.
What is it, other than attention and money that people like Braswell, Jackson, Sharpton, and even those of other races want? I include other races as there are definitely enough white groups looking to play the same card, as are Latino groups and others. Try just being whatever country you are or if that doesn't work, move somewhere you feel better. Nothing ties you to one place in todays world. As for me; I prefer my mixed family and all of the friends from all races who bring so much to my life. Makes life so much more fun and interesting.
Exactly. It gets bizarre very quickly. And profoundly myopic. It’s almost like Wokeism wants to retreat into new cultural Jim Crow.
It’s revenge not parity they seem to want.
Agreed
"Cinco DeMayo should not be celebrated by any races but Latino."
You mean Mexicans exclusively? Even in Mexico it's only celebrated in one place.
Peak insanity was reached when those poor ladies in Portland who were run out of town for making burritos out of their food truck. But then again, that was Portland, so its not like the women weren't forewarned.
Right! I lived in Portland for a minute back in 2010. Very segregated city. Very white-centric. Very much as the show Portlandia demonstrates.
Could explain why it seems like the antifa "Testing and Proving Grounds".
Kidding? Insanity
Kidding? Yes, but about the "peak"part...........
I loved this sentence: "The correct descriptor, in this instance, is 'bad art'.” I get the feeling that the cultural appropriation argument is a way for bad [artists/comedians/etc.] to essentially just eliminate the competition within their particular lane.
Twitter post today, telling "settlers" not to share any information about the indigenous culture that an indigenous person may have shared with them or that they read somewhere because they did not own that info. They had to request permission to share it. Why even share information, publish art or anything with anyone outside your own culture? Why not communicate cultural info in the indigenous language that only her own people understand. I'm getting her post comes from a place of hate. Glad this wasn't a thing when Paul Simon did his Graceland album. It introduced a whole genre of music to a big market and I'm sure Ladysmith Black Mombasa aren't complaining.
Many good people were and still are furious with Paul Simon for breaking the anti-apartheid boycott of South Africa. Ultimately Nelson Mandela embraced Simon, but the argument lives on and the two sides will never really reconcile. There are the purists, and there are the pragmatists. I can see both sides. But there’s no denying that Simon understood the power of art and privilege, and used them to introduce South African pop music to the world at a time when its brilliant musicians were languishing at home. He followed his muse rather than politics. Ultimately history bore him out.
Ah, but many of the same people, particularly music people, who boycotted apartheid South Africa had little or no problem with Cuba's totalitarian dictatorship, which banned "decadent" Western popular music and even the music of major Cuban musical figures like Celia Cruz for being against the regime. In other words, righteousness can be rather, uh, selective.
That wasn't exactly the point of this article or of my comment, but you're not wrong. The "yes but" idealization of Cuba by North American leftists has always baffled me. Even last summer's protests, during which Cubans demonstrated for "libertad!" and for which crime people are still in jail, was downplayed or ignored by the left. Ideologically driven true believers see only what they want to see.
My point, which could have been more explicit, was that when the supposedly righteous are demonstrably willfully blind, not to say hypocritical, their righteousness is questionable and may be something else, like fashionable correctness or covert opportunism.
Yes, I get that. It's not a point "the supposedly righteous" will ever concede, because political correctness and ideology supplant objectivity and critical thinking every time.
But also, objectively speaking, apartheid was a terrible yoke for South Africans of color to bear, and it needed to go away. It took the suffering and determination of many people over a long period of time, including the 27 years Mandela spent in prison as the face of the movement, to bring about that absolutely necessary change. Nothing and nobody is pure in this world, but sometimes good things happen in spite of human corruption and imperfections.
The issue is not the nature of apartheid, but what's really behind people's positions and actions, which may or may not be as advertised. False virtue is repellent in principle, even if it can sometimes act to good effect.
Fuck that noise. Absurd. We need to take Wokeism down. It’s time.
Wokeism is literally sleepwalking into tyranny.
Todays anti racist activists are fighting something thats not there any longer. Its become about unearned resource acquisition. Netflix doesn’t help. But the pendulum swings.
Agreed! My writer friend always reminds of that: pendulum.
You should check out and subscribe to my Substack 🤓
Did it
Fantastic!
Fantastic post, thank you!
The idea of "cultural appropriation" the way it is discussed now is highly toxic and incredibly ignorant of human history as a whole. As I try to lay out here (https://twoplustwo.substack.com/p/of-black-mermaids-and-white-indians), the accusation of cultural appropriation seems to be working only in one direction and therefore reveals its hypocrisy. We should celebrate each other's cultures by making it accessible to everyone, not restrict it to skin color.
That’s the problem with ID politics and Wokeism: History no longer matters. Facts no longer matter. Science is passé (so 2015).
Indeed, it is a "post-truth" world now to them. But in the real world, facts > feelings.
Thank you. Finally. We're in some kind of situation when a banal observation is ground-breaking. (Pardon the apparent back-handedness of the compliment; you seriously nailed it, man). Nina Simone's 1967 rendition of The House of the Rising Sun, originally a Scottish folk song, was rightly celebrated as a profound contribution to the Blues. I understand 'cultural appropriation' is assessed and adjudicated overwhelmingly in one direction, but just imagine the implications of Simone not being "allowed" access to this material and just how less brilliant the world would be because of it. That's the future but for the likes of you flipping the switches on these tracks. Well done.
Greece/Rome/Christianity! Darn culturally appropriating Christians.
Right! Historically everyone borrows from each other. And that’s good! Isn’t weird how we’ve gone from historical nationalism to globalism and now we seem to be shrinking back to nationalism on both the right and left!
Manthia Diawara, a Malian writer, filmmaker, cultural theorist, scholar, and art historian, wrote this in his book "We Won't Budge" (an excellent read that documents his migration from Mali to France to the United States):
"The notion that you can leave one culture and walk into another without contaminating it or being contaminated by it is erroneous. Cultures are no longer that different from each other; they have lost to each other, and they have gained from each other. Although at a surface level, there are differences marked by color and physical characteristics, which are still capable of activating prejudice, at a deeper level the desire for modernity has considerably reduced the differences between people. What people want everywhere today - whether they are dressed in dashikis or three-piece suits, whether they claim to be authentic Africans or Europeans - is the shortcut to things that only modernity can give them. …Africa has lost some characteristics of its cultures, and gained some new ones. The same can be said about everywhere in the world today. Because of modernity, we can have anybody's culture at every corner of the world, and anybody can lose his or her own culture to a new one anyplace in the world."
The stand-out aspect of human success vs all other species is our ability to communicate, assimilate and adapt to new information. For millennia this mostly came in the form of visual observation, occasionally via written documentation. We delight in novelty, ingenuity and new ideas.
It's no exaggeration to say that nearly all human progress starts with a new Idea (whether original or observed), and then trying it out.
A pointless article and needless over-obfuscation of something that matters less than you think it does. If you're doing something that upsets someone else, listen to them - and try and do better.
Really, it's that simple.
Perfectly stated. Thank you.