“Cultural Appropriation” Is No Such Thing: It Is Called “Culture”

Justin Bieber hairI find myself in the odd and distinctly uncomfortable position of defending Justin Bieber from SJW attacks, prompted by his “cultural appropriation” of dirty, unkempt hair….also known as dreadlocks.

My experience with dreadlocks, and their stench, was mercifully brief….a matter of two weeks. I had to train someone as my replacement, and that required her to sit next to me in my office all day. Yes, she had dreadlocks. No, they were not immaculately clean.

But dreadlocks are not cultural talismans for any particular group, so the charge of appropriation is particularly stupid in this case. A few minutes on the internet will reveal widespread use of this particular style across many cultures. Whose culture did Bieber appropriate? Black American? Rastafarian? Hindu? And Samson’s locks sound suspiciously like dreadlocks!Bearded_Shiva

The larger question of course is why these ignorant asses believe that cultures deserve some sort of protection in the form of social shaming and the creation of barriers between them. Successful cultures survive because they improve themselves relative to other cultures around them. And they do that by taking what is better in other cultures and absorbing that into their own. While I would argue that adoption of dreadlocks is not vital to the survival of Western culture, it certainly isn’t an insult to those cultures from which they are borrowed.

In reality, “cultural appropriation” happens all day, every day, in almost all cultures. Perhaps there is some heretofore unknown tribe in the mountains of Malaysia or deep in the Congo that has had no contact with other cultures, but I’ll bet when they do meet us, and they get their first taste of Western medicine they will happily appropriate penicillin into their previously pristine and primitive lives.

My guess is that these SJWs are perfectly content to appropriate White Western culture. Their iPhones and flat-screen TVs and perfect teeth and low cholesterol and warm homes belie their loudly proclaimed purity. If they want consistency and purity in culture, then they should give up the advantages that horrible logic and fact-based Western culture has provided them.

The charge of “cutural appropriation” is simply another arrow in the quiver of their fascistic attacks on freedom of speech and our pluralistic society. What is ironic is that one of their self-proclaimed antecedents, the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, fought for exactly the opposite. I can’t imagine Martin Luther King Jr. fighting for the right to draw clear distinctions between Blacks and Whites in America. yet these willing but unwitting tools of the hard Left are doing exactly that.