By Paul Nachman
01/14/2020
In mid-2016, I wrote a VDARE.com blog entry, "White Privilege": One Of The Stupidest Ideas Of Our Time, pointing out the logical disconnect between routine complaints about "white privilege" amid the ceaseless nattering about "diversity." I hadn’t previously seen this disconnect pointed out.
"Cultural appropriation" is another turd from the stinking swamp of Leftist "thought," and recently Matthew Stewart, an associate professor of humanities [egads!] and rhetoric at Boston University, made a parallel point about its built-in contradiction:
Another puzzling aspect of the cultural-appropriation focus is that it seems clearly to clash with another progressive imperative: the need to nurture multicultural appreciation. Multiculturalism has been a prominent cause among progressives for more than a generation, but today, admiration for other cultures apparently comes with a warning sign: look, but don’t adopt, lest you face accusations of “theft” or insensitivity.
[Multiculturalism, or Cultural Appropriation?, City Journal, January 3, 2020]
I collect pithy statements along these lines, and I might as well share some of the wealth. Here are a couple such items from commenters elsewhere on the Internet:
A white person eating a taco is guilty of “cultural appropriation” while the Mexican complaining about it on a computer is not.
And:
We are told "cultural appropriation refers to 'taking intellectual property, traditional knowledge, cultural expressions, or artifacts from someone else’s culture without permission.'"
So, uh, whom do I go to for "permission" to eat a burrito or play a sitar? Can anyone who’s Mexican or Indian grant the appropriate permission? Or do I need signoff from everyone in the given ethnicity?
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.