FMP 25th+26th July

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"If you take the views of the more extreme opponents of cultural appropriation to their logical conclusion, you will find similarities to their sworn enemies, believing as they do in the right to exclude others from their own fixed culture. No matter where my liberal sympathies lie, the threat of prescribed orthodoxy always lingers like a long shadow on the horizon. That’s more worrying than the tectonic plates of multiple cultures rubbing up against each other.

Unlike the gold plundered from a sacred place, culture is not pure. Apply culture to the idea of purity, the great seductive evil of human consciousness. Apply race to purity and see how you feel. Apply it to religion and see how you feel. Not very pleasant, is it? If we can only exist in and guard the cultures we emerged from, from those we resemble, we will shrink into the superficiality of newly contrived tribes. But that’s not going to happen. Like nature, culture finds a way, even when we’d rather it didn’t."

Cultural appropriation: everything is culture and it’s all appropriated

Every cultural exchange is unequal, from the respectfully borrowed to the outright stolen. Just ask Adele. So, from social media shaming to the reactionary backlash, how can identity be policed and who should police it?

By George Chesterton

1 September 2020

Cultural appropriation: everything is culture and it’s all appropriated | British GQ | British GQ (gq-magazine.co.uk)

Accessed on July26.

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