THE American left have a seemingly endless capacity to come up with bad ideas. And, because of the inordinate cultural power they wield, their bad ideas have an annoying tendency to trickle down from the academic institutions where most of them originate into the population at large and become widely adopted — from the rarefied atmosphere of the faculty lounge, as it were, to those struggling to make ends meet in the workplace lunch rooms of low-wage America — although whether these bad ideas are absorbed by ordinary people through fear or fashion, it is hard to say. I suspect the former.
Take, for example, the morally disordered idea that only white people can be racist, an easily refutable idea that originated in academia and thus bears the collegiate stamp of approval. You’d be surprised by how many people buy into it, or pretend to. It has even made writers like Robin DiAngelo, author of White Fragility, and Ibram X Kendi, author of Antiracist Baby (yes, that is the title of the book) very rich people indeed.
Other bad ideas include the highly divisive concept known as ‘white privilege’. No reasonable person, and certainly no one with any knowledge of American history, would deny that black Americans have been horribly discriminated against in the past and often denied the rights of citizenship. First the horrors of slavery and then the violence and humiliations of Jim Crow, to say nothing about the evil of lynching and laws against miscegenation. But to claim that being white-skinned affords you permanent privileges in this era of affirmative action and DEI policies is simply preposterous and an insult to those whites who have lost out on opportunities to less-qualified members of a protected class.
It has also damaged black culture by encouraging Americans of African descent to see themselves as permanent victims, thereby helping them to rationalise their failures or lack of success. Anyone with eyes and ears and a brain in his or her head knows that blacks and other minorities (Asians excepted) receive preferential treatment in all sorts of areas of American life.
Believe me, as a retired teacher I know whereof I speak. I well remember colleges and universities, often in the Ivy League, reaching out to black and minority students with offers of scholarships and other incentives before the students had even applied to the said institutions. Most were the sons and daughters of prosperous African immigrants and have been raised in intact families. The real lack of privilege experienced by black Americans is to be found in the ghettos of Democrat-run cities where about 80 per cent of black children are raised in fatherless homes. Everyone knows this to be true, but few are prepared to acknowledge it for fear of being labelled — yes, you guessed it — racist.
But surely one of the stupidest and lamest ideas to emanate from the deranged American left must be the concept of cultural appropriation. Indeed, it is such a bad idea that it is hard to believe anyone accepted it in the first place.
According to Wikipedia, that unimpeachable font of wisdom and truth, cultural appropriation ‘is the adoption of an element or elements of culture or identity by members of another culture or identity in a manner perceived as inappropriate or unacknowledged. Charges of cultural appropriation typically arise when members of a dominant culture borrow from minority cultures’.
It all sounds rather impressive, but if you actually look at how it is applied in the real world, it comes across rather differently.
Young middle-class white kids are publicly shamed for having dreadlocks. White women are also castigated for wearing those large hoop earrings that are deemed to be the preserve of Hispanic and Latina women. (Gosh, how I hate these reductionist racial and ethnic categories!)
Silly, I know, but even yoga is now in the crossfire, being designated cultural appropriation when those who are not Hindus, Jains, Sikhs, or Buddhists practise it, and has even been condemned as ‘a form of colonialism’ when done purely for health reasons.
And then there’s the appalling case of Keziah Daum, an 18-year-old schoolgirl criticised online for wearing a traditional Chinese dress to her prom in 2018. It was this case, I suspect, more than any other that brought cultural appropriation to the attention of the American public at large.
I must say Miss Daum looked very elegant in her beautiful dress and received many compliments on it during the evening of the prom. So, as young people are wont to do these days, she posted a photo of herself wearing the dress on social media. A self-described Chinese American student started the ball rolling when he or she shared Daum’s post on Twitter with the caption ‘My culture is NOT your g—— prom dress’. He or she then added: ‘For it to simply be subject to American consumerism and cater to a white audience, is parallel to colonial ideology.’
At the time, that post was retweeted over 41,000 times. Soon, references were being made to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and the cruel internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War, historical events I doubt Keziah had been taught in high school. Poor young woman, all she wanted to do was stand out at her prom, an important rite of passage for most American teenagers, but a rite now fraught with many dangers of the cultural sort.
There was a time, until quite recently, when imitation was considered, in the words of Oscar Wilde, ‘the sincerest form of flattery’. Alas, no more. In our morally disordered Western world it is now considered a form of theft. A few years ago I was invited to lunch by a former student from the Dominican Republic. She was accompanied by her black American boyfriend, a friendly enough chap, but who became most uneasy when I expressed my love for Elvis Presley, who, he claimed, had grown rich and famous by ‘stealing from black musicians’.
Of course, cultural appropriation only goes one way. It’s only when those dreaded white people do something that is primarily associated with non-whites that anyone chooses to feign outrage.
As far as I’ve been able to tell, no one has ever complained about all those female Asian string players that are represented in large numbers in orchestras in Europe and North America, not to mention great classical virtuosos like Yo-Yo Ma, Lang Lang, Midori Goto, and the great conductor of the Boston Symphany Orchestra, the late Seiji Ozawa — all of whom make or made good livings playing Western classical music by the likes of Mozart and Beethoven. If we apply the rules of cultural appropriation to them, they are just as guilty as those young white folk who think it a good idea to wear dreadlocks. How dare Yo-Yo Ma, born to Chinese parents in Paris, play Elgar’s magnificent and quintessentially English Cello Concerto? Mind you, he plays it awfully well.
Like many of these bad ideas, the origins of cultural appropriation are not entirely ignoble. Presumably, no one wants to go back to the bad old days when white entertainers, and occasionally black, performed in blackface in order to ridicule and caricature Americans of African descent — that is, besides the occasional former prime minister of Canada or ex-governor of Virginia.
Perhaps John Cleese put it best when he opined that ‘political correctness has been taken from being a good idea, which is let’s not be mean in particular to people who are not able to look after themselves very well’, until it transmogrified into an exercise in Orwellian speech and thought control.
Jazz originated in the American South and its early practitioners were black Americans who drew upon the sufferings and humiliations of living under Jim Crow, many of them directly descended from slaves. But it became an art form practised and celebrated throughout the world.
On a personal note, I am proud as an expat Englishman that Shakespeare has been translated into practically every language spoken by mankind and performed universally.
So let us, for God’s sake, go back to the time when cultural borrowing was not considered theft but flattery. And cultures, demographic groups, individuals, and entire civilisations learned from one another, thereby adding to the stock of human achievement and enriching the lives of civilised peoples everywhere.
