Thursday, April 14, 2016

Cultural Appropriation

I wrote recently about White Privilege and explained what I think it is and why I think it exists. A parallel lament from our perennial whiners is "Cultural Appropriation", a phenomenon that posits that a person should not use the foods, clothing or other things from cultures he is not a part of. For example, not long ago a free yoga class at University of Ottawa was cancelled by the administration after complaints were received that the instructor was white, not Indian. http://www.metronews.ca/news/ottawa/2015/11/23/university-distances-itself-from-yoga-controversy.html

So it goes with any number of things. White people wearing dreadlocks? Sorry, no. White people owning restaurants selling non-white ethnic foods, er, no.

What progressives (white and non-white) seem to be doing is rebuilding walls between identifiable groups and promoting de-facto segregation. There are now "safe spaces" on university campuses where whites are not welcome. Yes, really. https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/3xhafz/oberlin_student_radicals_demand_racially/

I find all this very confusing. The same people who have promoted multiculturalism now seem to want to segregate cultures. I thought we were supposed to learn from our exposure to other cultures. After all, every culture is of at least equal value and people, particularly white people, need to learn from all the other much more enlightened cultures that abound on earth. I will confess that I have never understood what I was supposed to learn from an ill-educated Somali shepherd other than how to be a shepherd. Not one of my goals. Oh well.

Bill Whittle is, in my opinion, a brilliant and enormously talented man who has done us all the good turn of producing a video on the subject of cultural appropriation.

Enjoy.
https://www.billwhittle.com/firewall/appropriate

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