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ORIGINAL: kiwisub22

I was reading on another post in the general forum when a poster said something about cultural appropriation, and it occurred to me that does cultural appropriation mean that only people of Anglo-Saxon descent should speak English, and only people of French descent should speak French and so on and so forth.

After all ,the most basic expression of a culture is language.
If a culture can claim a particular hair style, then can a culture claim a language -and if not why not?

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The University of Chicago’s president, Dr. Robert J. Zimmer, wrote a Wall Street Journal article, titled “Free Speech Is the Basis of a True Education.” In it, he wrote: “Free speech is at risk at the very institution where it should be assured: the university. Invited speakers are disinvited because a segment of a university community deems them offensive, while other orators are shouted down for similar reasons. Demands are made to eliminate readings that might make some students uncomfortable. Individuals are forced to apologize for expressing views that conflict with prevailing perceptions. In many cases, these efforts have been supported by university administrators.”

Sharing the president’s vision, the University of Chicago’s dean of students, John Ellison, sent a letter to freshmen students that read, in part: “Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so-called ‘trigger warnings,’ we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual ‘safe spaces’ where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own.”...

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What began as a legitimate complaint has morphed into a handy way of being offended at something that should be taken as a compliment.

You’ve heard it around forever. Elvis Presley stole rock music. Or Eminem couldn’t be considered a truly “authentic” rapper because he’s white.

And there was sense in all of that. But what began as a legitimate complaint has morphed into a handy way of being offended by something that should be taken as a compliment.

A much-discussed recent editorial in Time, where a black woman tells white gay men to stop imitating them by taking on their gestures and expressions, neatly illustrated the nut of the issue. To her, these men are “stealing” black womanhood.

But what does it mean to “steal” someone’s culture when we’re not talking about money? With gay white men and black women, for example, it’s not as if the black women are being left without their culture after the “theft,” or as if gay white men are somehow out there “out-blacking” the women they “stole” from.

The debate over what we call cultural appropriation has roots in the justifiable resentment of white pop musicians imitating black genres for monetary gain. Presley was the classic example. However, this legitimate objection was about bucks: Presley and artists like him were reaping financial rewards that the originators of their music never saw.

But over time, the concept of cultural appropriation has morphed into a parody of the original idea. We are now to get angry simply when whites happily imitate something that minorities do. We now use the word steal in an abstract sense, separated from any kind of material value.

It used to be that we said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. But now there is new way to see the matter: Imitation is a kind of dismissal.

But does this idea hold up? I doubt it. If one is seen, and seen in an approving light, one will be imitated. This is what human beings do. The very faculty of language is, to a large extent, a matter of imitation. The idea that when we imitate something we are seeking to replace it rather than join it is weak. Think about it: Does that even make sense? It’s certainly up for debate.

Yet some will insist that we squeeze ourselves into the mental straitjacket and allow this as a “progressive” new take on what it is to be a human in a diverse society. But it won’t work. What’s the evidence? All of human history.

We should just get back to basics on this. For example, white gay men imitate black women out of admiration, much of it out of a sense of black women as fellow sufferers of oppression. The column in Time argues that the main problem is that white gay men suffer less oppression than black women. But as J. Bryan Lowder has put it, that’s a slippery proposition. Comparing Holocausts isn’t a useful way to untie the knot here.

How about this? The claim that white gay men are wrong to imitate black women because they aren’t as oppressed implies that black women’s cultural traits are all a response to oppression. But that’s a reductive take on what it is to be a black woman, which would be dismissed as racist if ventured by a white person.

Ralph Ellison was useful on this: “Can a people,” he asked, “live and develop for over three hundred years simply by reacting?” So very much of what it is to be a black woman is simply being someone, being someone beautiful with a particular complex of cultural traits that simply are, for themselves. That isn’t something anyone can “steal.”

What was good for the Harlem Renaissance is good for 2014. The idea that people can come together while “respectfully” refraining from becoming more like one another is, in all senses, hopeless.

The grand old empires (including the ones in Africa) were all about rampant interethnic appropriation. Every language in the world is shot through with words and grammatical patterns from other languages—that is, signs of people in the past doing what we would call “appropriating.”

In the melting pot that was Harlem in the 1920s, whites were picking up new ways of singing and making music from black people and creating today’s American musical landscape. Were George Gershwin and all of those country singers picking up the blues “appropriating” musical styles they should have given back?

A great deal of black culture was “appropriated” by young America as recently as the ’90s. It became normal for young American women of all extractions to, in underscoring a point, do a certain swivel of the neck which before then was known only to black (and perhaps many Latina) women. Even many extremely white young men today have “appropriated” from black men certain vocal cadences, expressions like “Yo” and “Bro” and greeting styles. Has anyone thought anything was wrong with any of this?

So we don’t even need to explore whether cultural cross-fertilization is a good thing in itself (although Robert Wright is one person especially useful on that). All we need to know is that we will never arrest it, and that a stipulation that brown people in America must be shielded from it will serve no purpose except to provide people with something to be upset about. It will keep happening.

Sure, appropriation can be done clumsily. Last year, Miley Cyrus’ heart was in the right place but she could have used some sensitivity coaching. That’s an old story. In the ’20s, white Carl Van Vechten started feeling so comfortable around black people as a chronicler of the Harlem scene that he misstepped in titling a book “Nigger Heaven.”

But beware any idea that stories like that mean that whites imitating brown people is, fundamentally, wrong and that whites’ job is to somehow pass by minority cultures with some form of what is sometimes termed “respect,” whatever that would mean in practice.

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ORIGINAL: PeonForHer


On the other hand, he's always very vehement in what he says - this you can see by the way he says 'fucking' and 'shit' a lot. People who are really vehement just must be right, no?

http://www.seekfind.net/Logical_Fallacy_of_Argument_by_Vehemence.html#.WBSC3SSHMcM

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ORIGINAL: Curmudgeonly1

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ORIGINAL: PeonForHer


On the other hand, he's always very vehement in what he says - this you can see by the way he says 'fucking' and 'shit' a lot. People who are really vehement just must be right, no?

http://www.seekfind.net/Logical_Fallacy_of_Argument_by_Vehemence.html#.WBSC3SSHMcM

Is it just me or is there something ironic about citing logical fallacies in an ad hominem attack?

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ORIGINAL: PeonForHer
That last was my way into it, re North America at least.

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ORIGINAL: kiwisub22
The idea of limiting what students are exposed to because it would make them uncomfortable is .... odd to me.

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ORIGINAL: kiwisub22
If you don't like what they teach you choose another university.

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ORIGINAL: PeonForHer

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Dismissing a position out of hand is far easier than actually having a rational discussion about it's merits. This is and has been your intellectually dishonest position in most of your posts. That is why we simply note that:
Jesus you are phoquing stupid.

On the other hand, he's always very vehement in what he says - this you can see by the way he says 'fucking' and 'shit' a lot. People who are really vehement just must be right, no?

http://www.seekfind.net/Logical_Fallacy_of_Argument_by_Vehemence.html#.WBSC3SSHMcM

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ORIGINAL: Curmudgeonly1

quote:

ORIGINAL: PeonForHer


On the other hand, he's always very vehement in what he says - this you can see by the way he says 'fucking' and 'shit' a lot. People who are really vehement just must be right, no?

http://www.seekfind.net/Logical_Fallacy_of_Argument_by_Vehemence.html#.WBSC3SSHMcM

Is it just me or is there something ironic about citing logical fallacies in an ad hominem attack?

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ORIGINAL: tweakabelle
To draw attention to the fact that Awareness is "always very vehement in what he says" is not an ad hominem attack. It is an observation of fact that describes Awareness' posting style, amply supported by the evidence of Awareness' own posts. It's more about Awareness' posting style than anything else. Peon's position is validated by a defence of accurate representation of fact. So there is no irony of the type you are suggesting.

Or alternatively, to answer your question directly, it might just be you. Only you really knows the answer to that.

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ORIGINAL: Awareness

quote:

ORIGINAL: tweakabelle
To draw attention to the fact that Awareness is "always very vehement in what he says" is not an ad hominem attack. It is an observation of fact that describes Awareness' posting style, amply supported by the evidence of Awareness' own posts. It's more about Awareness' posting style than anything else. Peon's position is validated by a defence of accurate representation of fact. So there is no irony of the type you are suggesting.

Or alternatively, to answer your question directly, it might just be you. Only you really knows the answer to that.

Ye Gods, I've spanked you so hard and made you look like an assclown so effectively that your butthurt is going to extend for months, possibly years. Priceless!!!

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ORIGINAL: tweakabelle
Yes Awareness we all know you think you are God's gift to us poor humans.

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Have you noticed that the only person who says good things about you is .... you?

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Dream on you poor deluded fruitcake. I pity you.

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ORIGINAL: RedMagic1

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ORIGINAL: PeonForHer
That last was my way into it, re North America at least.

The driving force in North America is that real wages have been falling since 1968, and, in the 1980s in particular, many union-scale jobs left to Mexico and Asia. This meant that a whole generation of kids grew up in homes that were more dysfunctional than had existed in previous generations, even when the population was "poorer," because earlier generations were poor and hopeful, while a significant percentage of today's 18-year-olds grew up with parents who were hopeless.

Those kids are college-age now, and they have the highest percentage of mental illness of any incoming college group ever. This is more pronounced among students from low-income minority communities. Those students have a higher likelihood of witnessing a murder, death by drug overdose, plenty of other fun things that impair one's ability to concentrate and learn over the long term.

On the other hand, alt-right racist ideology has been on the rise in the US, including among college students, for years. I believe this is due to almost exactly the same economic factors -- loss of living-wage jobs, loss of hope. Trump is a symptom, not a cause.

Just like elementary and high school teachers, colleges and universities step in to address problems that the parents and politicians should be addressing, but aren't. There are student populations who would learn better if they had places to decompress, away from a real or perceived mocking of their culture and identity. That's where the infamous "safe spaces" come from, and why some activities like "everyone on campus dress like a Mexican day" are now discouraged.

The irony -- and the reason "we can't have nice things" -- is that some upper income students of color are culturally appropriating the struggles of lower income students of color. The hunger striker at Mizzou, and the woman whose tirade against the Yale prof went viral, were both students born with silver spoons in their mouths, who risked nothing if their protests went to hell. Hunger striker guy's parents are worth millions, while tirade-woman's parents own an ad agency. Students in the categories of my earlier paragraphs just want to feel secure, learn some stuff, and graduate. Not too effing complicated. The attempts to push this outside of those bounds is what has lead to things like the University of Chicago letter.

All that said, universities, including the University of Chicago, still have legal responsibilities under Title IX and other federal laws, to ensure the students on their campuses are safe and *feel safe*, and to ensure that hate speech is not promulgated. Exactly what "feel safe" and "hate speech" mean will probably be worked out in courts and future legislation.