Here are a few thoughts on cultural appropriation:
1. Racists don’t like cultural appropriation.
Racist prefer their own culture, and don’t wish to appropriate ideas and styles from other cultures.
Note that by ‘cultural appropriation’ I mean appropriation motivated by respect for the other culture. I’m not referring to cultural ridicule, which racists might well be interested in doing.
2. Collectivists don’t like cultural appropriation.
Here’s Brian Morton:
Susan Scafidi, a professor of law at Fordham and the author of Who Owns Culture? Appropriation and Authenticity in American Law, defines it as “Taking intellectual property, traditional knowledge, cultural expressions, or artifacts from someone else’s culture without permission. This can include unauthorized use of another culture’s dance, dress, music, language, folklore, cuisine, traditional medicine, religious symbols, etc.”
Obviously, it’s infeasible for entire cultures to give permission to individual people. Even worse, opponents of cultural appropriation don’t care about the views of the “victimized” culture. When told the Japanese are not at all upset when Westerners wear kimonos (just as we don’t care when they wear business suits), they respond that this fact doesn’t matter. All that matters is the feelings of ethnic Japanese people living in the West with post-graduate degrees. In other words, the feelings of people who have appropriated Western culture.
3. Economic nationalists are hypocrites on cultural appropriation.
Western life has been immeasurably enriched by the importation of Asian cuisines, which are vastly superior to the “meat and potatoes” cuisine that boomers like me grew up with. This cuisine was stolen from Asia with no compensation. And yet economic nationalists moan and complain that Chinese theme parks use women dressed up vaguely like Snow White, with no compensation to the Disney Corporation (which of course stole Snow White for its films, with no compensation to the country that first produced the charming character.)
Indeed the key inventions that allowed Europe to rise to a position of supremacy in the world (gunpowder, the compass, paper and printing) were all stolen from China with no compensation, and Western economic nationalists feel no sense of shame over that fact.
But Snow White? Those evil Chinese are stealing our property! Cultural appropriation! Unfair!
PS. I recommend Morton’s essay.
HT: Gordon Hanson