I had a different post planned for today, but I have to tell you about the dream I had last night.
First, as background—I have an incredibly rich dream life. I always have—I still remember dreams from when I was three years old. My dreams are often extremely detailed and vivid. Sometimes they have complete plots, like a movie. It has begun to fade a bit as I get older, but not much.
Last night’s was a middle-of-the-night one. I knew right away that I would want to tell you about it today, so I kept myself awake just long enough to commit the important points to memory…
I was in some large facility filled with people. It felt like a cross between an airport and a university—long corridors streaming with people, big open spaces, and rooms everywhere.
There was a whole part of the dream at the beginning that I have forgotten, which is too bad because I think it was pertinent to the rest. Ah well. My recollection picks up with me walking into one of the rooms to find a classroom filled with young children, teachers, and parents.
Three children sat in a row on three seats fashioned to look like small horses. Each was different. A teacher was standing just to the other side of the furthest horse and child, and the parents were standing about the room, watching admiringly.
I tuned into the teacher’s lecture just in time to hear her say,
“And that is why only Arabs should ride Arabians, only Native Americans should ride Appaloosas, and so on.”
My subconscious, apparently, is just as horrified by the monstrous concept of “cultural appropriation” as my waking mind is. Those who know me in real life know I am not shy about taking a stand, even in a crowded room full of people who disagree. That is exactly what I did in the dream.
I don’t recall exactly what I said, but it produced a debate among the families. Naturally, the teacher was unconvinced, but I did win over a family of four, and so they accompanied me out of the room.
The rest of the details are unimportant. We continued our conversation as we walked down a huge corridor teeming with people, and stopped in front of mass of people queueing up to travel somewhere.
Perhaps those people were looking to travel off-world, because this one is getting weirder by the day! And the radical left’s obsession with racial categories, and its evil doctrine of “cultural appropriation” are among its uglier aspects.
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.
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This is great. First hearing about your dream and dream life and then the subject of cultural appropriation. Back in the eighties I was painting pictures and photographing them and turning them into greeting cards which I sold to shops in Sydney. I had been doing Jungian sand play therapy which had reignited my creativity. I would paint dreams or paint from the unconscious. Meaning I had no plans for the painting except it emerge. Miracles happened! But in the painting of dreams, the pictures emerged with an aboriginal flavour. One day I got an order from a small shop near where I lived. I delivered the order. A few days later it was returned to me via post. No explanation. I called the shop and was told the owner didn’t want them. The owner was also an artist and part aboriginal. Though I didn’t get a direct explanation I realised I was considered to have appropriated. The thing is I was only particular about not manipulating my work with any style or technique. Being fifth generation Australian I too come from this land.I don’t have the gift of writing and articulating what’s behind such experiences and concepts like cultural appropriation so really appreciate this so much.
PS. My card business flourished mainly thanks to my husbands photos from our trips to National Parks. We are in our seventies but he is full time supplying his prints to outlets. I still paint but the cards ended a few years ago.
Very good. Like most bad ideas, cultural appropriation is a good idea applied in a stupid way (or applied by people who don't really understand it). The idea that there's something wrong with adopting aspects of other cultures in a demeaning way, or to ridicule them, or to enhance your own status at their expense, is not really disputed. It used to be called 'bad taste' or 'lacking in class' - but we don't do taste or class any more. Because people can't really handle the nuanced distinction involved ... or because people have a political agenda and this isn't really about culture at all ... this rather nice appeal to 'show a little respect guys, please?' gets turned into 'hands off my stuff!' and 'how very dare you!!!'