By Paul Nachman
05/30/2017
"Cultural appropriation" seems to be the Left’s hysteria
du jour, now that "microaggressions" is getting a bit passé. The latest festering example of cultural appropriators is the pair of white women from Portland who were entranced by the burritos they ate while vacationing in Puerto Nuevo, Mexico. When they got back to Oregon, the two managed to duplicate the recipe, so they opened a business to peddle their delicacies, but then they were hounded to shut it down by the furor over their imperialismo yanqui cultural appropriation.
But, as Scott McKay, writing at The American Spectator on May 25, pointed out, cultural appropriation goes both ways:
If you believe in cultural appropriation, I suppose you believe in giving African and Asian kids polio. Do the people who push that canard, like the social-justice-warrior nuts in Portland who shut down the business of two white women attempting to sell burritos from a food truck, recognize that it’s a two-way street?VDARE.com’s John Derbyshire made a point along the same lines back in February 2016, before "cultural appropriation" became the phrase du jour:At the end of the day, trading tasty recipes and a bit of local music in exchange for the Industrial Revolution, modern medicine, the internet and air travel, among other things, doesn’t seem like such a bad deal. None of these cultures which have been “colonized” by the developed world seem to be shrinking from it — it’s only university-educated losers in the West who have a problem.
The revealed preference of blacks everywhere today is to live in white societies, an implicit admission that they can’t create pleasant societies of their own and are dependent on other races for a decent living standard.Of course, when Third Worlders living among us culturally appropriate First-World-developed benefits, they often do so imperfectly, and this, too, generates complaints — of "white privilege." (See my "White Privilege": One Of The Stupidest Ideas Of Our Time.)
The McKay posting is a medley of brief observations, and part of his random musing about the Manchester, UK atrocity is also worth highlighting:
I am not Islamophobic. I am Islamofedup.Or we could say that Islamophobia and Islamodisgust are both natural outcomes of Islamoawareness.
Anyway, I hope Scott McKay will forgive me if he discovers how I've intellectually appropriated him here. Derb, too!
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.