I Want You to Culturally Appropriate As Hard As You Can
It's the right thing to do.
Back in April, I wrote a piece on the craven perversity of the left’s doctrine of ‘cultural appropriation.’ I am going to share the important parts of that piece below, and I want you to really think about it. Read it, and realize just how wicked it is to assail someone for “culturally appropriating.”
Then go out and do all the cultural appropriating you can…
Put some Bulgarian folk music on the stereo, don a pair of lederhosen, make a stack of French toast and Belgian waffles, cover ‘em in Georgia peaches, and pair it with a margarita and a Cuban cigar.
Because telling people that they are not allowed to learn and adopt from other cultures is just plain evil.
Yes, I said evil. Think about it…
Humans are an ultra-social species. All the progress we see around us required human cooperation—choosing to interact and trade rather than hiding in the trees and occasionally clubbing others and taking their stuff. Yes, some people still use the latter strategy, but most do not. If most did, we would not be where we are today.
So go back to the beginning. We were ultra-social, but only within the smallest of kin-bands. Then we widened that circle just a little. The river people started trading with the hill people. Larger clans formed. Then tribes, chiefdoms, city states, and ultimately, the large, multi-ethnic nations of today.
At every step along the way, we have been “appropriating” each other’s “culture.”
You put a barb at the end of your fishing spear? Wow, yeah, that must work way better!
How did you get that color blue? What the heck is “woad”? I want some!
What do you call it—penicillin? I’ll take 3,000 cases!
Everyone benefits from everyone else’s discoveries. Everyone benefits from everyone else’s cultures. The internal combustion engine may have first been made by one genius person, but it also depended on previous inventions and discoveries—and the sharing thereof!—by many others from many different cultures. Contributions were made to the Enlightenment from philosophers and thinkers not only from many lands, but from many different time periods.
To attack any aspect of this natural human process—to say that it is wrong for people of different cultures to share—is evil. Plain and simple.
And this evil doctrine immediately raises so many obvious questions (or at least it should):
How granular do we get when defining a discrete “culture”?
Do we just go with the major racial groupings? Do we divide by country? By ethnic group? By tribe? Those can get pretty granular. Are the Iceni no longer allowed to trade with the Catuvellauni? Must the hill people forever stay in the hills? Must they stop using the spear-fishing techniques they learned from the river people? Are only white people allowed to use penicillin? Or only Scots? Or only people who can trace their lineage back to the same clan as Alexander Fleming?
Is there anything that can be traded back and forth among people, or is everything off limits?
Can I no longer put pepper on my food?
Do we apply the doctrine uniformly?
Does this apply to everyone equally? Do we tell the world’s most famous cellist, Yo-Yo Ma, that henceforward he can only play traditional Chinese instruments like the erhu? Do we have to check to see whether the erhu is Chin or Han in origin?
Or, is it only white people who are not allowed to “appropriate culture”?
What if it is a white person whose grandparents worked in a mining camp in Peru, and who grew up in Lima? Must she stop cooking the food she’s always cooked, speaking the languages she’s always spoken, and wearing the clothes she’s always worn? What “white” culture should she then adopt? English? German? Italian? Are the people around her “white”? Does a Peruvian of Spanish extraction who speaks Quechua have to stop?
Racial purity
How do we figure out who is what? What if someone is born of a black mother and white father? What culture must he stick to? What if someone is 1/8th Hopi, 1/8th Mexican, and the rest “white”? Do we apply racial purity tests? Do we have to dig even deeper, to find out whether the Mexican part is more Spanish or more indigenous?
Do we bring back the one-drop rule? If so, for whom? Is it to check to see if anyone is even “one drop” white—and thus not allowed to “appropriate”? Or to see if a person is “one drop” of another racial or ethnic group, and thus exempt? Or do we just judge people by what we see on their skin?
If the concept of cultural appropriation is supposed to apply to everyone, it is profoundly anti-human.
If it is only supposed to apply to whites, it is dangerously racist.
Either way, if the Devil himself were trying to think up evil new ways to sow chaos and hatred, cultural appropriation would be on his list.
Note: I have been for several weeks, and will continue to be for several more, involved in a project that is consuming my my every thought and most of my waking hours. Consequently, I have not been able to write quite as much, or in as much detail, as I normally do. Please be patient with me—this project is well worth it.
In the meantime, I will do my best to keep content coming.
I've been called a wigger, a redneck, and everything in between. I'm just a product of my environment and make no apologies for any appropriation that may have occurred.
You are completely right; the forbidding of cultural appropriation is evil and also idiotic and counterproductive. The people who are most hurt by its enforcement are often minorities who wold like nothing better than to sell their culture’s food, music, etc. to anyone who appreciates it, no matter their culture. Have you ever had anyone give you any halfway defensible reasons for why we should not appreciate and benefit from other cultures?