The Absurdity of "Cultural Appopriation

Back in August of 2015 the Washington Pest,,,er,,,Post ran a story about cultural appropriation which claimed that it was once a appropriate critique but it has now run amok.  One Cathy Young wrote the piece entitled To the New Culture Cops, Everything Is Approriation. Except for actual cultural theft, the taking of artifacts that belong to a culture and rightly should be in their museums, the idea of "cultural appropriation" is absurd. I would point out, however, that when some of these artifacts were taken, it was because the culture that produced them no longer could guard them as they should, and so it is appropriate when they again can, to return them. But for the rest of it, the only word I can muster is balderdash.

Frankly, I am more than happy to put my culture up against anyone.  If someone claims that a white person is wearing corn rows for instance, I would counter with something like "Fine, I'll take them out.  When will you turn off the electricity?  Or start walking. because automobiles are a European invention?"  I could go on and on, but those would be enough to start.

The problem, of course, is that students today do not know history as the should, and so they are easy marks for the race hustlers and assorted charlatans that compose the so called academics ..."in the late 1970s and 1980s as part of the scholarly critique of colonialism. By the mid-1990s, it had gained a solid place in academic discourse, particularly in the field of sociology." Men (and I shouldn't have to add Women, but I do) have been learning from other men, and "borrowing" their ideas since men have been men.

Cattle is thought to have first been domesticated in the Near East and also in the Indus Valley from wild Aurochs some 10,000 years ago. Should only the peoples who first domesticated them be allowed to breed and own cattle? More recently, the Chinese invented gun powder, but the idea for using it to power a projectile at another person or animal came from multiple sources in the Middle East and Europe.  Who then can claim to be the only culture to use the firearm?  Most things will turn out to have many fathers and mothers, and claims of cultural appropriation can rightly be made against all sides.  Henry Ford is credited with the idea of the assembly line.  Should only Ford be allowed to use it, and all other manufacturers have to build there automobiles one at a time by hand?  The world would be poorer if that were the case.

If one takes the whole of a culture, and not just cherry pick those things that make the case of appropriation, one begins to see that we have been borrowing...appropriating, if you will...since time immemorial.  The things we have borrowed have often been put to new uses, and have been so fused into our own way of life, that these things have become indistinguishable as cultural borrowings.  Like most things the SJW get wrong, the idea of cultural appropriation is an absurd waste of time and energy designed to keep you upset and allow them to tell you what to think and to do.