Meanwhile, when it comes to race, it’s all about new artificial categories and enforced binaries. White people who pretend they’re black are committing theft. Heck, white people who cook non-white food or pay homage to non-white art forms are committing theft. Cultural appropriation is evil. But gender appropriation is something to be celebrated. Biological males can collect all the women’s track and field awards and that’s fine. But don’t you dare wear dreadlocks if you’re not black?
"Cultural appropriation" has to be THE dumbest thing the left has ever come up with, and that is saying a lot. How can someone who drives a car invented by a different culture and uses a cell phone invented by a different culture possibly be that obtuse?
My wife’s career was in a highly technical field tied to industry (“industrial hygiene”, to be specific).
The collapse of ’08, and the subsequent “selling of the farm” to China, pretty much destroyed what was left of our industrial base. And thus the analytical field my wife worked in.
She wound up working the last few years at our local University, in administration. Liberal Arts, humanities dept.
Hoo Boy. She hated working with those “liberal idiot professors”. But she, being a Christian and a professional, never let her disdain for them interfere with her professional relationships. And they held her in high regard — though they couldn’t figure her out (she prudently kept her political view close to the vest).
The Head of the “Black Studies” dept. was a middle-aged white guy (naturally), a northerner (“yankee”, ha) who probably had never spent a moment of his life outside the sheltered, hothouse, ivory tower of academia in his life.
They had a conversation one day in which my wife allowed that “Black culture is my culture, too”.
The prof was somewhat taken aback. My wife has a penchant for speaking her mind, and enjoys being provocative. The prof asked her to explain.
She did. She told him that growing up in a mid-sized Southern city, she had been around black people all her life. Went to school with them. Sang in the school choir with them. Worked alongside them. Interfaced and interacted with them in the marketplace. Listened to and loved their music (before it was hijacked and corrupted by the hip hop anti-music crap).
One of her best friends is a well-spoken black woman, roughly her own age. She speaks like a mid-westerner in a professional setting. But can, for effect, affect the ebonic dialect of her culture.
My wife can, too. She can sound exactly like the stylin’ ladies at Ebenezer Baptist Church. Or she can go redneck. She’s also got dead-on British, Indian, and Chinese accents — a trait of imitation shared by many intelligent, talented, and funny people.
To his credit, the prof — when my wife explained how “Black Culture” was also her culture — was thoughtful for a moment. and then he said “I never thought of it that way”.
The most hateful thing about our current era is how nuance and subtlety and richness and depth and complexity and meaning have been replaced by a dull, banal, mal-educated, brutal simplicity.
