Moar 'false equivalence' from NY Times

[Jason]

Three Cheers for Cultural Appropriation
By BARI WEISS AUG. 30, 2017

Kendrick Lamar performing at the MTV Video Music Awards on Sunday. Credit Matt Sayles/Invision, via Associated Press
I haven’t watched MTV’s annual Video Music Awards since Bill Clinton was president. I was wearing a plastic choker and Alanis Morissette won for “Ironic.” But I wish I had tuned in this Sunday night. The award show was a veritable orgy — not of sex, but of cultural appropriation.

First up was Kendrick Lamar, whose backup dancers wore ninja outfits as they scaled a wall of fire. While the popular rapper went home with an armload of trophies, he was criticized for borrowing Asian dress. Later, Katy Perry, who just recently finished an apology tour for her previous sins of cornrows and kimonos, “snatched” off her long blond wig — a bit that was torn apart for caricaturing African-American women. Luckily for Ms. Perry, the floodlights lingered longer on her nemesis, Taylor Swift, who unveiled a new video that was immediately blasted for appropriating Beyonce’s “Lemonade.” Speaking of Queen B, I’m just waiting for the charge that she’s exploited Persian culture by naming her new daughter Rumi after the 13th-century Sufi poet.

And that’s just the rap sheet from a single night in pop music. Charges of cultural appropriation are being hurled at every corner of American life: the art museum, the restaurant, the movie theater, the fashion show, the novel and, especially, the college campus. If there’s a safe space left, I’m not aware of it.

The logic of those casting the stones goes something like this: Stealing is bad. It’s especially terrible when those doing the stealing are “rich” — as in, they come from a dominant racial, religious, cultural or ethnic group — and those they are stealing from are “poor.”

Few of us doubt that stealing is wrong, especially from the poor. But the accusation of “cultural appropriation” is overwhelmingly being used as an objection to syncretism — the mixing of different thoughts, religions, cultures and ethnicities that often ends up creating entirely new ones. In other words: the most natural process in a melting-pot country like ours.
...
It doesn’t help that at the very moment that white supremacists in this country are reviving Nazi-era ideas about the purity of blood, the left is treating culture as something just as immutable. Two can play at this dangerous game. Indeed, the left’s insistence on cultural partition makes nobody happier than Richard Spencer and his fellow travelers on the alt-right, who are expert at mimicking the left’s identity politics to give voice to their twisted ideas of national and racial segregation. Americans should think very carefully before engaging with a politics that bears an eerie similarity to the beliefs of the people that marched on Charlottesville, Va.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/30/opin ... ml?mcubz=1

This time it isn't Antifa.

[pErvinalia]

At least it's a nuanced comparison. And the author is right (about the racial vs cultural purity thing). That's not to say that there isn't some value in the concept behind the "cultural appropriation" thing. But I doubt many of the nutty left consider that.

This brings to mind a member from rd.net and ratskep who used to adopt that alternative extreme so much so that he didn't support Tibetan independence, because it suggests that one particular cultural identity is something to value over another. Can't remember his name, though. From memory he was fairly anarchist, so it's perhaps not surprising.

[Brian Peacock]

Every art work, high or low, appropriates something or other.

[JimC]

Apparently it's inappropriate to appropriate...

[rainbow]

Apparently it's inappropriate to appropriate...

If you in the West had starving people to worry about, you'd not be wasting time on 'cultural appropriation'.

[Svartalf]

Apparently it's inappropriate to appropriate...

I'm appropriating some asian style food tomorrow night, and nobody that tells me it's wrong will be heeded.

[pErvinalia]

I"m about to go and appropriate some Merkin!!

[NineBerry]

This brings to mind a member from rd.net and ratskep who used to adopt that alternative extreme so much so that he didn't support Tibetan independence, because it suggests that one particular cultural identity is something to value over another. Can't remember his name, though. From memory he was fairly anarchist, so it's perhaps not surprising.

Was it me?

[pErvinalia]

No, I've remembered his name. It was Quill. I seem to think he was Canadian, but can't be sure.

[rainbow]

Canadians can't be anarchist.

[Forty Two]

What the author states as the possible risk of cultural appropriation - that the white nationalists will do the same thing, and claim that their culture ought not be appropriated either - is not possible under the thought process of the hard left, SJW, cultural appropriation crowd. The reason is, that it's not ALL cultural appropriation that is wrong. It's appropriation of "marginalized" cultures, and a marginalized culture is whatever the progressives say it is.

White cultures are not marginalized, so appropriating it is not a problem. White people can't have dreadlocks and cornrows, but black people can straighten their hair. Black people can wear three-piece suits and tuxedos, but white people need to stop wearing hoodies and baggy pants and such. Japanese people adopting baseball is fine, but white people portraying geishas or Kabuki is not.

The unstated idea is that the progressive leftists wants to destroy western (read "white") culture precisely because is "colonial, patriarchal, racist..." etc. That's behind the movements at major universities these days to drop "white" philosophers, writers, and other figures from university course work. It's behind the one-sided attacks on cultural appropriation. It's why members of "marginalized" groups can be microaggressed against, but not white men.

[laklak]

I have no problem if someone wants to appropriate my culture. Just swab my asshole and smear it on a petri dish.

[Forty Two]

Your culture is patriarchal, racist, colonial, and oppressive, Lak.

[devogue]

Your culture is patriarchal, racist, colonial, and oppressive, Lak.

[mistermack]

Here in Britain, people are constantly stealing what's intrinsically American culture, and claiming it as their own.
Have they no shame?