1. Rule of law and the insurance company subsidies.
2. Hostess Deep Fried Twinkies.
3. Are Indian outsourcers losing economic ground?
4. Why cultural appropriation is wrong; I mostly disagree but still worth a read.
Friday assorted links
Previous post: Racism without racists?
Next post: Hegel fashion phenomenology markets in everything
4) Not sure how that was worth the read, don’t take liberties with your erstwhile stellar credibility.
Are you new here? Tyler’s SOP is: (1) Link to an awful, nonsensical boilerplate lefty screed (2) vaguely state that he’s not on board with all of it . After all, he “leans libertarian.”
Yes, 4 is the usual racist bullshit.
Sorry for this duplicate.
Honestly, it can’t be said enough. This line of thinking is almost entirely garbage, divisve, and full of blind-spots.
““We want your stuff, but we don’t like you”- What the hell can this NOT describe? My friends who like BBQ and rip on the South: are they culturally approrating a neighbor that we defeated in a total war and occupied after manling the majority of their young men?
Probably not, because author doesn’t like them.
This entire movement is garbage: it sucks air out of the room, it makes relations worse, it results in depolicing, it polarizes politics, and it has no end game. I’m perfectly willing to pass single-payer if Dems promise to squash this pathetic race-baiting movement and salt the intellectual Earth so it can never come back.
It’s also based on conflating diverse groups of people into single collectivized groups.
Did Americans oppress the Chinese, or the Indians? Did Germans oppress S. America?
What about ethnic sub-groups? If we oppressed the Vietnamese, does that mean we oppressed all Asians? Does defeating and occupying Japan count as an act of racial oppression against Asians at large, including the Chinese?
Is a German-Italian white person whose parents immigrated to America in 1911 and live in New York an oppressor of Navaho people in Arizona? Are American Jews guilty of oppression? Do they count as white, and if not are they allowed to open Mexican restaurants?
FWIW, BBQ is an adaption of a native American cuisine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbecue
@Beta Guy, lol. You made my day 🙂
FWIW the notion that slow-cooking tough meat over a low smoky fire and seasoning it with a spicy sauce is somehow the invention of one particular group of human beings seems like nonsense to me. That’s like saying soup was invented by X.
Is this because Tyler is cowardly? Or because he is signalling … something?
I find his refusal to defend standard liberalism (which SHOULD be defended against far left and far right nonsense) occasionally baffling.
Yes, 4 is the usual racist bullshit. No interest whatsoever.
I’m no fan of the cultural appropriations accusation industry — don’t get me started on whether a particular race or culture has property rights over dreadlocks — but this movement isn’t going away, so those who disagree and want to push back against the movement need to at least understand where the other side is coming from, and this link was better than most things I’ve seen from hose who are upset about what they see as cultural appropriation.
Yes, it’s a one-stop shop representative of the nonsense you normally get in bite-sized portions. But is any of it actually food for thought? Not really, although perhaps that shouldn’t be expected from the source, which exists more to explain what some current dogmas are than to explain to a disinterested observer what assumptions & deductions lead to there.
To ask if it is “food for thought” is to miss the point; it is a kind of warfare and you are de facto going to be disarmed before the conflict starts.
To argue that Elvis Presley shouldn’t have played rock and roll because it wasn’t his music is utter stupidity. Everything is a remix, we are mimetic. Should Chuck Berry have not picked up a guitar because it was a instrument of Spanish culture?
I think the more important fact is that Elvis grew up in a rather poor family and there is no record of any of his ancestors having owned slaves.
Growing up poor in Mississippi might put one in contact with black culture in a relationship that isn’t one of oppressor to oppressed.
I’m surprised you think that is an “important” fact. If Elvis Presley had a slave-owning ancestor (which I guarantee we all do) it would have made a difference?
We all do not. I have an in-law whose entire family arrived in the 1920s.
That’s exactly my point, the majority of white America had nothing to do with slavery or segregation, not to mention the large numbers that actively fought both.
Are the descendants of John Brown culturally appropriating black culture if they start a hip-hop band?
It requires this wierd sort of collectivization of all white people as oppressors, which is unfair to white people who arrived in (say) Colorado in the post-slavery era, and it’s really REALLY unfair to white people whose ancestors actively opposed slavery.
If Elvis Presley had a slave-owning ancestor (which I guarantee we all do)
Yeah, I actually seriously doubt it. Unless you mean 2,000 years ago Roman slave holders, or something to that effect. Why not count slaves held by Ancient Egyptians at that rate?
Much of white America immigrated in waves of Irish-German immigration in the late 19th century.
Of the pre-existing population, half of the country was anti-slavery.
In the south, it was really only rich families that owned slaves – maybe 5-10% of the population. That’s only a few generations ago. So there is no way that the vast majority of white America has ancestors that owned black slaves in the US. We’re probably talking less than 2-3% of the present daywhite population in the US have any kind of recent slave-owning history.
The whole business about Elvis is garbled.
First, Rolling Stone notwithstanding, no one but an idiot thinks Elvis invented rock’n’roll, and “the media” have not claimed otherwise. Most people who know anything about the subject know it originated with black musicians. Elvis certainly did.
Second, is that any reason not to like Elvis, or other white rockers? I don’t see why.
The valid point in the article is that we should recognize the origins of the music, which is to say we ought to recognize facts. Further, I think it is fair to say that many of the originators were not able to cash in, and that racism certainly had a lot to do with that. Should we pin that on Elvis? I don’t think so.
I think the fair point is that Elvis made millions while the black artists who invented the sound are forgotten. It’s unfair, but that’s not Elvis’s fault. If he hadn’t popularized rock-n-roll, they would be just as forgotten, probably more so. The problem is not the “cultural appropriation” of black music by white people. It’s the unfairness of OTHER white people for not recognizing the original artists and only recognizing the white adopter.
The real marginalization is how the SJW-outrage complex is increasingly vacuuming up every gifted minority into pointless pseudo-intellectual activism. The black woman who wrote that article is clearly intelligent and articulate. She should have become a doctor, entrepreneur or engineer. Instead the university system has fetishized intellectually talented minorities, and is almost universally diverting them into social activism and/or X-studies departments.
When young black girls look up for role models they’re not going to see self-made, successful, contributors to society. They’re going to see angry, alienated, resentful people who’s only mission in life is to shriek and harangue about endlessly trivial grievances. It’s really become nothing more than a modern plantation system perpetuated by the academic hard-left.
There’s plenty of black people in professional occupations outside of academia. Le’ts not exaggerate the percentage of minorities who end up adjunct professors in the social sciences.
Just to point out there are 1.8 million baccalaureate degrees issued every year in this country. About 9,000 are issued in victimology majors. A great many black youth are severely disoriented in the civic and political realm. Not many are trying to monetize their disorientation. About 190,000 blacks were awarded bachelor’s degrees in 2013. “Area, ethnic, cultural, gender, and group studies” of which victimology programs are a subset, accounted for 0.6%. The tops were business occupations (22%), nursing and allied trades (11.5%), social sciences (8%), psychology (7%), public safety occupations (6%), communications (4%).
The issue might be more acute at elite universities. I wish I had better data on this but I’d suspect that underrepresented minority students at elite university tend to cluster in the “social justice” majors more often than at places like Florida State.
@Art Deco. Interesting. And certainly not like the figures at the university I work. Where did you find those numbers?
On the substance, you are certainly right that the victimology students, in any ethnicity, are a small minority, though a very vocal one. But I wouldn’t agree that they are a subset of “Area, ethnic, cultural, gender, and group studies”, rather a superset. In addition to most students in these majors, social science also tends to have a high concentration of “victimologists”, and then many other literary disciplines (for an example I know well, in the departments of French literature, people doing “francophonie”, understood as literature of French ancient colonies, tend to be really of this type, and they represent a growing percentage of the whole domain).
It’s in the Digest of Education Statistics. There is also spotty data on subsets of the foregoing categories. In 2014, 1.86 million bachelor’s degrees were awarded. The number in the named disciplines was as follows:
Peace and Conflict Studies: 464
Anthropology (exc. explicitly physical anthropology): 11,024
Sociology: 31:600
Urban Studies: 1,044
History: 31,106
Social Work: 30,519
Community Organizing and advocacy: 1,754
Human Services, general: 7,272
Social Science / Studies teacher education: 1,117
Bilingual / multi-cultural education: 227
Education, misc: 3,915
Ethnic studies: 140
Black studies: 639
Amerindian studies: 228
Latino studies &c: 496
Asian-American studies: 120
Women’s studies 1,357
Other victimology: 732
I added history because the condition of American history is a scandal. Not so history in general. In sum, the foregoing account for 6.6% of all baccalaureate degrees awarded. The explicit victimology programs account for 0.2%
I’ll take this sort of bs seriously when they take on Islamic and Chinese and South American cultural appropriation from the times when they were busy raping, pillaging, conquering, and in the case of the Aztecs and Mayans, likely committing genocide because we don’t really know about those groups that they totally displaced.
The danger is that what is now ridiculous becomes law of the land in a few years, as with most of the PC bs that is now the default yet which was laughed off 25 to 40 years ago.
First of all, the Chinese were isolationist until Mao, so I’m not really sure what you’re talking about. Second, Islamic cultural appropriation happened a long time ago and now is one of the most conservative and non-adaptive cultures on Earth. There isn’t really a point to telling dead people what to do. Third, yeah, what some of the South American countries still do to their indigenous populations is awful (see Guatemalan genocide), but I think that’s an even better reason not to like cultural appropriation. I mean, the elites have stolen the indigenous culture, made it their own, and then made the indigenous second class citizens. Your argument seems to be that it’s okay because other people do it too.
The Chinese were isolationist under the Yuan dynasty?
Look man the Mandate of Heaven wants what the Mandate of Heaven wants. It ain’t imperialism if the MoH wants it.
“As a Black woman, there are many jobs that would bar me if I wore cornrows, dreadlocks, or an afro – some of the most natural ways to keep up my hair.”
Yes, and those jobs also ban me, Mr. White Man, from wearing my hair that way too. Public Schools are the same way. The public school that punishes black women for wearing their hair in a certain way, also punish me for doing the same. They’re not telling you how to wear your hair because you’re black, they’re telling you how to wear you’re hair because they believe ALL CHILDREN ARE CHATTEL. That’s why the eighth amendment doesn’t apply in schools—Ingraham v. Wright (1977).
If you want the liberty to wear your hair the way you want, you have to fight for all people regardless of their sex, race, ethnicity to be able to wear their hair the way they want.
It’s true, blacks think whites are never told how to dress, how to cut their hair, how fast to drive, what recreational drugs they can use, how many people they can marry at one time, etc. They think the laws are only enforced against them
‘from wearing my hair that way too
Schools and employers, in their majestic equality, forbids whites as well as the blacks from having afros.
Sometimes the same hairstyle is called a ‘jewfro.’ Not just black people have them
Or an Isro – a style I once favored, although my employer(s) did not. Life isn’t fair, darn it.
Brilliant!
“Schools and employers, in their majestic equality, forbids men as well as women from having long-hair.”
Oh wait, no they don’t. It’s only men who are ever punished for having long hair at a private school, or for coloring their hair.
I bet white guys with ZZ Top beards go over great in interviews.
The problem is that the “allowed” hairstyles are easy hairstyles for whites to maintain, but difficult for blacks. The banned hairstyles are the ones that are easier for blacks, but not so great for whites.
It’s clearly a cultural/class bias problem. Black hairstyles are consider ‘low-class” and therefore inappropriate, even though this determination is completely arbitrary and based on bias against black culture.
Black guys have it the easiest. Either shave or keep it real tight. No maintenance. Black women have it a lot harder, but not really any more than white women, who spend way too much time and cash on their hair.
As a white woman, in a professional occupation, I don’t do ANYTHING with my hair. I wear it straight, at an even length, get it trimmed every few months, and put it in a pony tail. My biggest expense is probably a nice conditioner.
Oh look it’s boot straps for whites/ sympathy and understanding for non-whites Hazel.
Non-whites are so lucky
Racism doesn’t even exist anymore. What do they have to complain about?
You’re offering a complaint about banal dress codes (and maintaining, preposterously, that black men are compelled to wear their hair in high-maintenance styles).
Art,
Where did I say anything about black MEN?
The article is clearly written by a black woman. The point that cornrows are disallowed is valid, IMO.
Corn rows are a neat and tidy way for black women to wear their hair. It does not look unprofessional to me.
In fact it looks MORE clean, neat and tidy to me than the allowed hairstyle of using straighteners and hairspray in a vain attempt to make black hair look straight. It always looks ridiculous to me when I see a black woman with some sort of hair helmet fashioned out of copious amounts of spray. Cornrows look better, cleaner and more professional.
Right on, Hazel.
Just because some SJWs take it too far – a white woman cannot have a black protagonist in fiction – doesn’t mean that there are not also systematic biases.
I noticed recently that the US Army started allowing cornrows – and gave detailed specifications about what size and type of cornrows are allowed. Capitulation to PC forces? Or capitulation to the fact that we don’t really want any of our soldiers forced into high-maintenance hairstyles when they should be focused on their duties?
what work places ban a natural hair style? As long as you keep it short, you can make it just about anywhere…
1. I agree with McArdle: insurers who don’t abide by the rule of law should not receive subsidies from the government. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/15/business/dealbook/a-whistle-blower-tells-of-health-insurers-bilking-medicare.html? Why do insurers get to keep multiple sets of books, one for advantage plans, one for group insurance pans, one for Obamacare plans, and so on. Keeping multiple sets of books is usually considered evidenced of fraud; indeed, it’s an invitation for fraud. Does McArdle support one set of books for insurers? Or does she prefer to let insurers slice and dice their books?
What do you mean “multiple sets of books”? What does is matter to you how the firm accounts internally, they need to see the values of each LOB, they can’t file one of their LOB’s for bankruptcy while keeping the rest in force, I’m not sure what your issue is. It would be like a car manufacturer keeping account of which models are profitable and pulling the ones that are loss making.
Dude, wtf? Totally missing the point of both Tyler’s article and the quoted NYT article. UHG is not keeping a double-set of books, they are using data-mining to send more expensive diagnosis codes to CMS in order to get higher reimbursement. It’s not even clear that these are fradulent claims from the article. The whistle-blower’s case seems primarily concerned that this data-mining was done for profit and not for actual health improvement. Ex: not trying to find hyper-tensions cases.
But then why isn’t the government paying out for finding hyper-tensions cases? Sounds like a case of bad incentives set up by a govt entity, per usual.
Also besides the point of the McArdle article, which is that Democrats have set-up a probably unconstitutional payment scheme in order to keep ACA afloat, and don’t give an elephant’s behind about its probable unconstitutionality.
#4 I would hope that most of us could get behind the rule: Don’t be a jerk. Most of the sad stories at this link (from my skim) are about people being insensitive jerks while being on or near “culture.” Where the “cultural appropriation” people lose it, I think, is when they think it’s about the culture and not the behavior.
I live in the land of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. This is very explicitly and legally a merged culture. Heck, I live 400 miles south of the birthplace of the MIssion burrito, which comes from San Francisco, folks. Yelp tells me a local kid is selling Bulgogi Bahn Mi. Enjoy all that. And try not to be a jerk.
“I would hope that most of us could get behind the rule: Don’t be a jerk.”
How do you define “being a jerk”? Are high gasoline, liquor, and cigarette taxes –that create powerful drug cartels that control Chicago–being a jerk?
That sounds kind of crazy, but the idea that liquor taxes might increase drug use is something economists might study. Got a link?
+1
This is pretty much the article:
“Wearing sneakers is just wrong. People who wear sneakers need to check their privilege and be more sensitive. What’s that? Why? Millions of people wear sneakers and enjoy the comfort and convenience, and nobody gets hurt? Well let me tell you about this guy who one time kicked a puppy in a pair of Air Jordans. I also heard about someone else who cheated on his girlfriend while wearing Pumas.”
Damnit. Do you know how many hours I worked on my jerk costume?
Zero. Just walk outside like you do every day. 🙂
I am a new Yorker cartoonist. What I’m doing here is to tell you how to be funny.
At the gym or a coffee shop, you should always ask a person “where is the lost and found?” And then what is the value of a bottle cap; is it trash or not? I can only hope they are placed in wagon wheel thingy along with flip phones that marie antoniette rides in with her Perrier jouet 42.
At the grocery store, you should always wear a trenchcoat and push a cart like a ben franklin gremlin and periodically run and periodically knock things down. Grocery store girls are the top kissers but they’ve seen “go” when tripping mushrooms so if you fall asleep in ur cart that’s okay.
Also no, laura dern is not a real person.
Well yeah, obviously.
4. “With her single “Unconditionally,” Perry sang about undying love while playing up the image of a passive, submissive sexual object of an Asian woman.
For her, it was just a character – but this stereotypical image has real consequences for Asian women in the US. Their experiences with dating, racialized sexual harassment, and fethishization reveal that white men actually expect Asian women to live up to the “exotic geisha girl” stereotype of being sexually submissive and docile.”
It’s unrecognized but obvious that Katy Perry’s songs are a recipe for the behavior of young American males. Maybe she could get them to turn their cheap ball caps around so the bill is in the front and make them leave their cargo shorts in the closet.
It’s become a standard of internet commentary that the utterances of a single, generally inconsequential, individual are used as the rationale for combating some deep and horrifying national social trend. Lame argument.
Agreed. Let’s talk about revealed preference. Asian-American women still date and marry white men at a higher rate than any other inter-racial pairing in the US. If Katy Perry et al.’s stereotypes were really that awful surely we should see Asian-American women hightailing it away from fetishizing white men.
Revealed preferences for the win!
Nearly 1 in 3 Asian Americans marry someone outside of their race. If fetishization was a turn off, we would expect to see much lower rates of intermarriage.
About 17 out of 18 americans are not asian american. So the revealed preference is that asian americans prefer to marry another asian american. However, I suspect its even sharper: asia has a large number of ethnicities, south asians (e.g. indians) don’t see much in common with east asians (e.g. chinese) and even these two are more a collection of noticeably different ethnicities. I suspect the rates of indian american/japanese american intermarriage to be very low.
I believe the highest rate for ethnic mixes is currently white + hispanic, complicated by the fact that white isn’t an ethnicity (according to our government, it’s just hispanic or non-hispanic).
White is a racial category while Hispanic is an ethnic category. About half of all Hispanics self-identified as white in the 2010 Census so that is why Hispanic/non-Hispanic has to be a separate dimension from race.
We are stuck in this funny place where geneticists tell us race is not a thing and sociologists tell us it is. I wonder how long the sociologists can keep winning? Forever because they keep believing themselves? Or less long, because they pause and listen to the geneticists …
Self-reported race/ethnicity in the age of genomic research: its potential impact on understanding health disparities
>Genetic analysis of individual ancestry shows that some self-identified African Americans have up to 99% of European ancestry – https://humgenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40246-014-0023-x
Umm, Rachel Dolezal, is that you?
Yeah, headgear orientation and the type of shorts people wear are really big problems- if you are complete idiot.
Kind of like “cultural appropriation”.
If I call them hiking shorts, can I keep them? Bonus: If you have zippered pockets the zipline guy doesn’t make you give up wallet and phone.
#6
Amenities:
Check-in/Check-out not enforced
Generous Welfare
Infidel white girls to rape
#4 Please define the following words:
-trivialize
-marginalize
-perpetuate
-commercialization
-privileged
-disempowered
-oppression
Paul Romer needs to get involved here
+1
meets produces a list without a single “and”.
+1 Romer
(no commas either. are they going they way of the semicolon, python node?)
It’s postmodernism. It’s not supposed to have any meaning.
Oh no, that is completely wrong. It is intended to be a kind of writ, which you cannot challenge. The meaning is in the medium, and that is: “We are disempowering you.”
5. Once again, Hollywood confuses “everybody I know” with “everybody.”
4. Freddie DeBoer wrote a very good critique of cultural appropriation arguments on his blog, which was unfortunately taken down when he restructured it.
My views is that there’s nothing wrong with using particular elements from other cultures to weave into new stuff in your own, because the boundaries between cultures and societies have never been hard and fast. Sichuan cuisine, for example, was created with a heavy utilization of New World ingredients. The problem is when you cross from merely using stuff to outright impersonation that it becomes more dubious morally (like if you deliberately present yourself as the creator of something and you weren’t).
Incidentally, the people making the “cultural appropriation” accusations have never really been able to lay out a standard of what is and isn’t appropriate use. It’s mostly just used as a cudgel against folks doing something they don’t like with stuff.
It’s still up on his Medium site.
The term is heavily abused, but there are certain cultural elements that can serve as “flags” or “rally points” for a culture that lose their significance and can be destroyed if adopted by another culture. When this happens, the rallying effect is lost, and the culture can suffer from the lost of a unifying symbol.
That explains the uproar about hooped earrings.
An actual example would be the concept of “sellout” as it is applied in the hardcore, punk and metal communities.
Sichuan cuisine, for example, was created with a heavy utilization of New World ingredients.
Right, and more importantly, it wasn’t created because they were being oppressed, or oppressing others.
If you want to use the author’s narrow definition of adopting elements of cultures of which you have been the oppressor then we should be good on Yoga and Kimonos, because we have never really oppressed the Indians or the Japanese. Japan was never colonized by any European power. The post-war US occupation doesn’t count, as they were the aggressor and it didn’t last that long.
The US still occupies Japan.
No, we have a garrison in Japan. The number of billets (35,000) might be enough to secure the island of Shikoku and the Hiroshima commuter belt if ‘occupying’ these territories were anyone’s object. About 95% of Japan’s people live elsewhere.
Pedantically, the US is in Okinawa….which the Japanese are occupying.
have u read Hiroshima?
#3 The author fails to pass the Laugh Test with respect to technology.
“Vivek Wadhwa is Distinguished Fellow and professor at Carnegie Mellon University Engineering at Silicon Valley and a director of research at Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke”
Hmmm. It must be easier to get those professorial posts then I had previously thought.
The guy was talking specifically about the Indian outsourcing business and its travails. What precisely did you find laughable? Automation is indeed happening (though I would guess slower than all the hype makes it out to be.)
Though a lot of his recommendations don’t make any sense. If stuff has to be automated, it can be very well be done within the US, which is where the cutting-edge knowledge lies (certainly not in India.)
Teen sex comedies have vanished because they occur out of phase with paroxysms of campus-based political correctness. The “internet did it” thesis overlooks the great wave of teen sex comedies in the early 80’s, and I don’t think it’s coincidental that this wave expired with the rise of campus political correctness around 1985, nor do I think it coincidental that the teen sex comedy wave of the late 1990’s began after almost a half decade of waning political correctness on campus.
4. N.K. Jemisin, of all people, has the best response to this line of thinking:
http://theangryblackwoman.com/2009/11/04/the-appropriateness-of-appropriation/
Also, there are historical inaccuracies in the article Prof. Cowen linked to.
Freddie DeBoer also made some good points in an article entitled “No one has the slightest idea what is and isn’t cultural appropriation”, but it has vanished into the aether.
#5 The “loss of inocence” brought by Columbine, 9/11, the non-job recovery, the Great Recession and modern perceptions of the bullying phenomenon killed the genre. People became too bitter and cynical to tread again the escapist John Hughes’ path.
When you stop pretending to be a weird Brazilian lunatic and comment on your own country you are much more interesting and insightful.
1) I do not pretend.
2) I am insightful about America exactly because it is not my country. Something Chesterton may have written about a cathedral being seen from the outaide.
3) I am not weird, I am typical.
4) I am not lunatic, I am remarkably stoic and sane.
do u want to meet in Villa Madeleina at that one hotel with the roof view and all the garish looking women. me? Oh thaks for asking, I prefer the coast of sao paolo between sao paolo and rio with the farms though floripa is bad. But really you ask? Oh well sure morro de sao Paulo has plenty of Israelites no but for me that place outside of sao paolo with the crescent beach is gold.
You contain multitudes.
Yes, but it does not mean I am a lunatic or a liar.
“American Pie”, considered the first film of the teen sex comedy resurgence in the early 2000’s, was released the summer AFTER the Columbine school massacre.
Those things take time to shoot (I mean, the movies, not Columbines). And Columbine was just the warning shot, so to speak. I mentioned other four events/phenomena that helped to kill Hughes-styled movies.
This is part of it – great comment. There is an innocence to these comedies (the deeper innocence about how life will be as an adult) that just seems ridiculous now.
4. Yeah, but I identify as human.
#4 is sort of a motte-and-bailey strategy. She defines cultural appropriation fairly narrowly to say it only counts as appropriation if the culture being taken from has been oppressed *by that group*. But then she list all sorts of examples where there is no clear history of oppression.
For example, Americans have not really oppressed Indians, ever. There has never been an oppressed Indian Amerian minority, and America was not in charge of the British East India Company or any part of the British Raj.
In order to say white people can’t practice Yoga without appropriating is to conflate all whites with the British. Which is pretty racist in itself.
Similar thing for Chinese and Japanese culture. There was an oppresed Chinese-American minority in the US, but people who get into “Eastern” religions like Buddism are adopting it directly from China and Japan, not from Chinese Americans. If there’s something to appropriate from Chinese-Americans, according to her definition, it might be a white person opening a restaurant that serves General Tso’s Chicken, but nobody thinks that’s authentic anything. Which is again, kinda racist since you’re implying that Chinese-American culture – itself a product of local oppression of a minority is “fake”. General Tso’s Chicken isn’t “real” Chinese culture, but it IS “real” Chinese-American culture. The Chinese in general have not been oppressed by Americans or whites, except for maybe the British for a fairly short period of time. So it’s a bit of a stretch to say that white people can’t adopt anything from Chinese culture.
You could make a long list like this. If appropriation ONLY means when culture is adopted from an oppressed group, by the people who oppressed them, then you can come up with an endless list of exceptions since the “oppressors” in question aren’t really “everyone with white skin or European ancestry”, and the “oppressed” aren’t really “everyone from any non-white culture anywhere”. Imperialism was wrong and all, but let’s not pretend that white people collectively oppressed the entire planet and everyone non-white culture in it.
Good catch on that motte-and-bailey, which I hadn’t seen
Given the lack of historical knowledge of many of those complaining (like not knowing that the ancient greeks wore both cornrows and hoop earrings) and the impossible complexity of ethnic groups and world history, there will never be a clear definition of what is or is not appropriation, nor is there a place one can go and get a permit for one’s appropriation. The appropriation scam is a perpetual motion machine of grievance generation. Anything can be claimed, no one can be exonerated, nothing can be refuted.
“Imperialism was wrong and all, but let’s not pretend that white people collectively oppressed the entire planet and everyone non-white culture in it.”
Wow, talk about not acknowledging your privilege!
(I’m joking; what you said is excellent. But you mostly likely don’t work in an academic setting.)
I don’t. It seem to be a huge blind spot where academics are always saying we should not conflate people of different nationalities and ethnicities into one group – unless those people are white and we’re talking about cultural appropriation. Hispanics are actually a diverse group covering all of Latin America, but not when we’re talking about white people opening an Argentinian restaurant. In that case the Spanish-American war invalidates an Polish families right to serve grass-fed Argentinian beef steaks.
and the blue figure struggled over the green speckled lake.
4. Cultural appropriation is such a weird argument. Should probably go all the way and get different schools for everyone so they can learn about their, and only their, culture. Different fountains too, I mean, why are white people drinking black’s water? don’t they know there is a drought in Africa, talk about trivializing suffering.
I worry for third wave feminists. Eye on the ball, ladies!
My mother always said, “if you go in looking for a fight then you are sure to find one.”
Why is “appropriation” bad other than being a scary sounding word?
Influence is a good thing. Lending and borrowing are good things. Learning and acquiring taste are good things.
It is a shakedown racket. They would be fine if you appropriated it in exchange for generous royalties.
It is that, derek, but the coin of the realm is not always money. They are fine if you appropriate if you “acknowledge your privilege” in the requisite manner (which again doesn’t always mean paying in currency. You can “pay” in other ways.)
#6 But is the place any good?
Mel Beooks on Yugoslavia: “At night, you can’t do anything, because all of Belgrade is lit by a ten-watt bulb, and you can’t go anywhere, because Tito has the car… And the food in Yugoslavia is either very good or very bad. One day we arrived on location late and starving and they served us fried chains. When we got to our hotel rooms, mosquitoes as big as George Foreman were waiting for us. They were sitting in armchairs with their legs crossed.”
Brooks
#4: I’m shocked to see TC link this. My perception was that the “cultural appropriation” argument was so fringe left that anyone moderate found it ridiculous. Now, TC links the most extreme nonsense with a “I don’t agree, but worth reading.”
It’s against the whole model of globalization, specialization, trade. Of course, people like goods/services/products produced by others that they don’t necessarily have personal affinity for. The argument is just so absurd on every level. I’m glad to see others here have the same shock that TC would link this.
Let us suppose that US whites totally adopted some culture–all the food, clothing, hairstyles, religion from country X. Wouldn’t we say that X had conquered the US culturally?
Exactly what country X’s people gets from it? When Americans stole the airplane from Brazil and the Japanese stole the Walkman from Brazil, what Brazil got?
You. They got you.
It is cold comfort. They would have me anyway. And I was born almost eight decades after the airplane was invented.
Or nine after the US had it.
No, the Americans stole it a few years after Santos Dumont created it.
Well, linking to this prompted a lively, interesting, and for once, almost consensual, debate. I’m sure Tyler predicted this happy outcome when he gave this stupid link.
“Of course, people like goods/services/products produced by others that they don’t necessarily have personal affinity for. The argument is just so absurd on every level.”
This is why male cousin dresses like a geisha, he likes sushi and Japanese cars.
4. Is a race and a culture the same thing?
No. You can win a race, but you can only dominate a culture?
You can put a culture in a petri dish, but can you put a race in there?
#5: I’m somewhat puzzled as to how The Breakfast Club, which had no erotic dimension and concerned the anxieties and discontents of the adolescent subjects and the teacher supervising them, gets put in the pigeonhole ‘teen sex comedy’. Seems more ‘teen angst’.
I’ll go further and say that Sixteen Candles isn’t a teen sex comedy either.
Neither is Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Porky’s is a sex comedy. American Pie is a sex comedy.
I always joked with my college friends that fusion cuisine couldn’t possibly survive the onslaught of political correctness. Looks like I was right.
Oh my god we need to hang out!!! Near where I (why can’t you graphic design???) you live.
Fusion cuisine is surviving and thriving but pc will complain about everything
My father had never seen a rugby game before and he is loving how savage and picturesque it is – Brazil is crushing Paraguay like it is 1870 again. Is it cultural appropriation? Can we be sued?
The derivation of the word “redskin” is incorrect – see http://anthropology.si.edu/goddard/redskin.pdf
Probably much else incorrect as well, but I’m not sure its worth reading/researching this
4.
Some observations
– insisting separating cultures seem like a dark, bitter path
– the left are eating their own: the target here is not the right, but leftist artists, yoga-teachers, chefs who are exploring
– the reference of analysis here seem to be that the world has two types of people, oppressors and oppressed. and that ones whole person is that ethnic identity.
1. “nobody likes being told that they “can’t” do something”
I think that is a fair description of why someone, say a yoga-teacher, might object to this analysis. If someone told me that I, say, I cannot make rap music or eat mexican food because of my assumed ethnic heritage, that
– Seems like an unreasonable overreach. Who has the legitimacy to decide? What if the analysis is wrong or incomplete?
– The reasons for the proposed harm (outcomes) are dubious. What if the effect is the opposite?
2. “That’s why cultural appropriation is not the same as cultural exchange, when people share mutually with each other – because cultural exchange lacks that systemic power dynamic.”
It reads to me like the only relevant dimension this person considers is the power hierarchy of identity groups.
I am left wondering if it is technically possible in this analysis for two ethnic groups to be exactly equal with no history of oppression. My feeling is no, and that means that cultural exchange is impossible? Am I getting this wrong?
3. “marginalized groups don’t have the power to decide if they’d prefer to stick with their customs or try on the dominant culture’s traditions just for fun.”
This seems
– Wrong. My observations tell me that it is well within the power of a member of a marginalized groups to themselves decide which pants to put on.
– To suggest that it isn’t just seems quite patronizing, both to an individuals power of themselves, and the assumed victim they are to their group identity
4. “We should be ashamed”.
Like others have commented, it is very hard to spot an end-game down this road. What can I do to meet this persons demands?
Let’s say I read this and found myself inspired. Would it be reasonable to evaluate all my actions, music, clothing, rituals, foods. And in all of them cleanse it of anything that may have roots in another ethnic identity’s culture? I am genuinly curious, what do people who 100 % buy this analysis do to live up to the ideals?
Let’s say I did and succeeded. In the end I am then firmly only speaking Norwegian words (my ethnic group), dancing Norwegian dance, listening to music eternally rooted in Norway, eating Norwegian food (unfortunately for me, a very limited cuisine). Then I can step back into the world of other cultures. I am now free from cultural appropriation. And if I do that with a shame of the oppressions my ethnic group has caused in the past. I am one step closer to being a moral person and making the world a better place?
5. “People say that sharing between cultures is supposed to help us learn, but cultural appropriation is teaching us all the wrong lessons.”
Hm, okay, well what are the right lessons?
She explains, those are “real stories”, those who have a “direct connection to their (marginalized groups) suffering.”
So again the analysis lifts up an ideal: what is real stories. And the answer: horrific stories of oppression.
This really shakes me as a profoundly bleak view of the world, to say that the only reality that exist is oppression and suffering. Throw Pochahontas movie. Instead tell your children about the real “Matoaka, was abducted as a teenager, forced to marry an Englishman (not John Smith, by the way), and used as propaganda for racist practices before she died at the age of 21.”.
6. “Did you know yoga was once banned in India as part of the “racist and orientalist narratives”
Well, now I know. I also learned that it apparently, according to this legitimate representative of all peoples of Indian heritage that it “feel like a slap in the face to see carefree white people enjoy the practices your ancestors were penalized for.”.
The analysis here seem to be that one should sort of submit your very perception to this specific interpretation of the world. And of course, continuing to do yoga then would indeed be tantamount to violence.
I mean, do you want to slap all Indians in the face just for some excercise and meditation? I certainly don’t!
She then in the addendum makes a nuancing. That I can maybe do yoga, as long as I am “thoughtful about using things from other cultures, to consider the context, and learn about the best practices to show respect.”
But this is a very vague description. I know I should be ashamed. But what more do I need to learn about context and best practices to show respect before doing Yoga moves from being a “slap in the face” to being okay? You see, if I really adopted this ideology, that would be incredibly important to me naturally. And I can’t help but conclude that the safest course of action would be to stop.
7. “We have a lot of work to do to heal from the impact of oppression from the past through present day”
And, well, it seems to me that
Step 1 segregation of ethnic identities across all axes
Step 2 (and/or) feel shame if your ethnic group is an oppressor, understand that everything is contextual
Step 3: “???”.
Step 4: healed ?
I don’t know, she isn’t specific about the end-game here. But I suppose this could become a testable hypothesis we could run a controll experiment on. We could do step 1 and 2 forcefully in some groups, and see if the result is healing. Although I got a feeling I would then profoundly miss the point. Because I think that believing that this is the way is part of step 2.
7. 6. ““It is dehumanizing at best to constantly be compared to a stereotype and to have people chasing you not as a person, but as an embodiment of the stereotypes that they use to define you.”
I find it comforting that she voices my own worry with this view of the world.
It is dehumanizing to be a stereotypical ethnic group and not a real, full person with many dimensions. People are more than their ethnic group. My group identity is not the full reach of my being. And there is more to learn about me and the world I live in than oppression my ethnic group is the victim of or perpetrated. We are all conscious beings in this world, and for all we know, we are the only ones. And in this world there is truth, and beauty and love. In society there are problems to be fixed, but there is also altruism, competence and organization. There is so much good in this world worth fighting for. For all its faults is the best the world has ever seen as far as we know. It’s reason to figure out how this came to be. How come we live in relative peace and abundance, and how can we make sure that we don’t lose that in the future.
I don’t know. I feel I am shouting into the wind here. This meme and the analytical structure it builds upon seem incredibly resilient to not dealing with dialogue. I worry that things will get a lot worse before it gets better again.
“I feel I am pissing into the wind here.”
That is part of my ancient culture. Your pissing-into-the-wind is a slap in my face, and I don’t want a wind-pissing slap.
“I feel I am shouting into the wind here. This meme and the analytical structure it builds upon seem incredibly resilient to not dealing with dialogue. I worry that things will get a lot worse before it gets better again.”
I know what you mean. I thought postmodernism was the nadir. Now I occasionally think we might just look back on the po-mo era as a benign time.
#6 This seems to be a nifty marketing campaign, how much of Sweden is public land? The campaign seems to imply most of it is.
About 640 million acres (about 28% of the total US land area) is owned by the federal government, mostly in the western states, and (probably, only did a little bit of investigation) most of it is available for free camping with various restrictions. Federal land is managed under several different agencies (Bureau of Land Management, Forestry Service, National Parks Service, Fish & Wildlife Service), so you have to check to find out the specifics.
Sweden’s entire area is 110 million acres.