Friday, April 15, 2016

'Cultural appropriation' is "how all art works: by riffing on, remixing, reinterpreting, reviving and re-sharing influences from the past."

Here's Why I'll Be Wearing a Native American Headdress Next Halloween - Breitbart: "It’s hard to overestimate how stupid the doctrine of racial and cultural appropriation is, because for one thing it’s how all art works: by riffing on, remixing, reinterpreting, reviving and re-sharing influences from the past. I almost don’t need to make this point, it’s so obvious, but here are a few questions for the idiots penning furious editorials at places such as Salon and Slate: Should the Rolling Stones have been banned, because their music was so heavily influenced by black blues artists, including Muddy Waters? Should Wagner’s Rienzi be banned from German opera houses for drawing too heavily on Jewish composer Meyerbeer? How would you go about deciding which Mariah Carey songs to ban? (Is she “black enough” to have released that “Loverboy” remix?) And what on earth do we do with Madonna and Lady Gaga?  So desperate are they for things to be cross about, social justice warriors and third-wave feminists are moving in on these sorts of questions, drawing depressingly predictable conclusions. Witness this psychotic screed–published in TIME, no less!–demanding that gay men stop acting like black women and “appropriating female black culture,” whatever that is.  That piece caused uproar–rightly so–among gay men, who asked how the author, a rich girl at a good school, dared to question the “struggle” they had gone through and how they chose to assemble the package of influences that comprise modern gay parlance and culture. Ordinarily, I’d be laughing at a left-on-left bloodbath like this: there’s nothing more entertaining than the Oppression Olympics."


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