Cultural Appropriation: No Big Deal

Stephen Kershnar

Cultural Appropriation: Appropriate Away

Dunkirk-Fredonia Observer

September 23, 2019

Cultural appropriation occurs when an individual from one culture uses another culture’s ideas. Often the ideas relate to artifacts, clothes, food, and symbols. Many academics and activists think that appropriation is theft. They claim that it disrespects minorities and smacks of colonialism.

The anti-appropriators decry the Florida State Seminoles’ and Washington Redskins’ use of Native American images. They get very upset over Halloween costumes involving Mexican sombreros, ponchos, and bandoliers and even more upset at Native American war bonnets and war paint. At Yale, debate over Halloween costumes caused massive turmoil. Some cultural critics take personal offense when white women wear Japanese-style kimonos and Chinese-style form-fitting dresses.

Two years ago in progressive Portland, two non-Hispanic white women were pressured into shutting down their burrito food cart because it was alleged that they culturally appropriated the type of food and stole the recipe from the Mexican people. It is unclear why Portlanders, including Hispanic ones, would be better off with inauthentic burritos. White people who allegedly pretend to be black or Native American (NAACP chapter president Rachel Dolezal, Black Lives Matter leader Shaun King, and presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren) are criticized for appropriating a racial identity.

In art, many of history’s most important painters (Paul Gaugin, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Rousseau created primitivist art, which tries to recreate primitive experience. Other artists (for example, Amedeo Modigliani) drew inspiration for his sculpture from African art. Many art historians insist that such art is wrong or bad. In Canada in 2017, indigenous activists pressured an art gallery into shutting down a white woman’s show because her art was inspired by indigenous art.

Cultural appropriation is neither wrong nor bad. First, there is no one who is victimized when a person from one culture uses ideas, symbols, clothes, etc. from another culture. No individual owns a widespread cultural element, such as the archetype for a Central or West African mask, gaucho pants, Native American headdress, or sombrero. Specifically, no one has intellectual property rights to them (copyright, patent, or trademark rights). Nor does anyone have a moral right that is analogous to such legal rights. Just as no individual owns the archetype, nor does any group own it. There is no one, for example, who could sell, whether morally or legally, the rights to make and use gaucho pants. Nor could any person or group grant permission to others to make such pants or destroy all such pants. If an act does not wrong anyone, it’s not wrong.

Second, critics of appropriation inconsistently focus on context. No one would object to black teens in a Harlem drama club performing Fiddler on the Roof, Macbeth, or West Side Story. Some art is too good or enjoyable to be limited to just one people. Yet, if such cultural crossover is acceptable, then it’s unclear why white people may not play Asian characters. Consider, for example, David Carradine in the 1970’s show Kung Fu and Scarlett Johansson in the remake of an anime classic: Ghost in the Shell. If the concern is for ridicule or insult, then most of the above appropriation is fine. The Redskins and Seminoles adopt their symbol because they think their team namesake is dignified and full of fighting spirit. Gaugin, Modigliani, and Picasso thought that the African masks and Tahitian colors and people were aesthetically impressive. The white women selling burritos likely thought authentic burritos are outstanding.      

Third, the alleged wrongness of cultural appropriation is a one-way street. No one thinks African people wrong Western people when they use Western ideas (for example, rights protecting assembly, free speech, and the press), political structures (for example, separation of powers, parliaments, and congresses), medical discoveries (for example, polio vaccines), or religions and religious symbols (for example, Catholicism and Catholic iconography). If appropriation is wrong because it involves theft of ideas, it would be wrong in these cases. Theft does not become permissible merely because the victim is wealthy. If appropriation of political and medical ideas is good, the same is likely true for aesthetic ideas. In general, the free market with unlimited entry of people and products almost always benefits consumers.  

Also, no one objects to Notre Dame and the Boston Celtics appropriating Irish symbols or the Minnesota Vikings appropriating a Nordic symbol. Just as Notre Dame’s fans see the Leprechaun mascot as a positive celebration of Irish fighting spirit, Redskins fans similarly view their mascot. The Redskins’ fans view is bolstered by the fact that three predominantly Native American high schools name their sports teams “Redskins.”

Fourth, the boundaries of appropriation are unclear. Imagine a bunch of orthodox Jewish teens from Brooklyn who want to dress up in dreadlocks and play Reggae music. Are they appropriating? Intuitively, it seems so. Yet Bob Marley’s father was a white Reggae musician and, arguably, Jewish. There is an amusing picture of Marley wearing a chi while smoking a doobie. Here things get strange. On the one hand, history intuitively seems to make no difference here. No one cares about Marley’s lineage. On the other hand, it is odd that a group may not claim ownership over an art form when its most famous artist is from their group. The teens may wear Woody Allen costumes. The history-based permission gets murky though. May a Haitian teen dress up as Bob Marley? Perhaps it’s okay so long as he has 12.5% aggregate Jamaican and Jewish genes or heritage.

Similarly, imagine a group of Catholic white teens from Iowa having watched Bruce Lee’s Fist of Fury, decide to wear his character’s Chinese outfit and show off his famous moves. Is this objectionable appropriation? Lee is probably one-quarter white and attended Catholic schools. To make things more confusing there is a good chance that kung fu originated in India, not China. In any case, Bruce Lee’s preferred style was his own Jeet Kune Do, not kung fu, and he developed it when living in the U.S. It is hard to believe that any of these facts determine whether the teens may wear such an outfit.  

In general, it is mysterious as to why people may not display their enjoyment of art or other accomplishment by someone from another group. Many Asian, Hispanic, and white guys from the New York City area took pride in Lawrence Taylor’s relentless play for the Giants, especially those who played linebacker. No one blinked an eye when they wore his jersey.  

Cultural appropriation is neither wrong nor bad. No one owns cultural symbols and the unfettered free market in them makes the world a much better place. Rather than spending time denouncing cultural appropriation, cultural critics’ and academics’ would be better served by wearing a chi and smoking a doobie.

Immigration: The Country Club Model

Stephen Kershnar

Immigration and Country Clubs

Dunkirk-Fredonia Observer

September 2, 2019

The 2020 Presidential election will likely be about immigration. It should be. A Yale-MIT research team estimates that there are 22 million illegal aliens in the country today. If large numbers are amnestied and chain-migration remains in place, tens of millions of these aliens and their families will become citizens. This will reshape the country. 

The Democratic Party supports nearly open borders. Congressional Democrats, along with Republican establishment types, have back doored in a catch-and-release policy for illegal aliens. They’ve done so by ensuring that, as a general matter, illegal aliens who show up with a child or underage teenager and claim asylum are briefly held and then released into the country so long as they promise to show up to an immigration hearing. Because large numbers blow off the hearing and are not tracked down, they are in effect let into the country.

Democratic Presidential candidates announced that they want to amnesty illegal aliens, decriminalize illegal border crossing, eliminate Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), hand out medicine, education, and welfare to illegal aliens, and tear down the southern border wall. Among the candidates who support two or more of these policies: Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Bill de Blasio, Kamala Harris, Beto O’Rourke, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren.  

Earlier, President Obama put forth a nakedly unconstitutional order to amnesty one group of illegal aliens (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals - DACA - aliens). This term the Supreme Court will likely strike the order down. In negotiating with President Trump over the budget, congressional Democrats again made DACA aliens a priority. Many Democratic cities have declared themselves sanctuary cities. Fourteen largely Democratic controlled states give driver’s licenses to illegal aliens. Democrat and establishment Republicans insist that the children of illegal aliens automatically become citizens, and thus become anchor babies, even though neither the text nor history of Constitution supports this rule. Nor has Congress ever voted to put the rule in place. 

The issue matters for a couple of reasons. First, if large numbers of illegal aliens were amnestied, politics in the U.S. will swing far left for decades. Second, the slow motion invasion will forever change U.S. identity. China, Israel, Japan, and Norway have an identity that is based in part on being constituted by a people with a shared history and sense of identity. Similar to these countries, the U.S. has an identity that is based in part on being constituted by a people with a shared history and sense of identity. Were it constituted by a different people, it is unclear if the American people would retain their identity. It is also unclear whether the country would remain as committed to political and economic liberty. The freest countries in the world are concentrated in Western Europe and East Asia. It is unclear whether tens of millions of illegal aliens and their chain-based relatives share this value and even less clear whether they’ll identify as American. Writing in evonomics, George Mason economist Garrett Jones argues after immigrating to a new country, immigrants and their descendants largely retain their attitudes toward markets, trust, and social safety nets and change governments accordingly. Demography is destiny.  

A good way to think about immigration in moral terms is via an analogy. Consider an exclusive Westchester County country club. It is justified by the consent of its members. The members jointly own its property. Consider, for example, its clubhouse, lands, and financial assets. As a moral matter, the members may run it for their own benefit. This is part of a more general feature of morality. Individuals may favor their families, friends, and neighbors over strangers. They may also spend their money on their own projects. Morally, the members get to decide who joins the club or uses its facilities. It is not decided by who sneaks into the club in the dark of night.

A country is similar to a country club. Its government is justified, if is justified at all, by the consent of its members. It members jointly own its property. Consider, for example, a country’s air space, financial assets, military assets, parks, and roads. As a moral matter, members may run it for their own benefit and get to decide who joins it or uses its facilities. Also, like a club, who gets to join a country or use its facilities should not be decided by who sneaks into it.  

What follows from this is that, as a moral matter, citizens should get to decide who becomes a member of their country. It may keep illegal aliens out for any reason or no reason whatsoever. Whether the aliens will likely cause the U.S. to be less free, enter more foreign wars, and have less respect for the Constitution is beside the point. On a side note, they will likely do so. Without the 1965 Hart-Celler Immigration Bill, Barack Obama, with his weaponized DOJ, FBI, and IRS and frequent unconstitutional abuses (Chrysler bailout, campus speech restrictions, Obamacare implementation, Libyan war, etc.) would likely not have been elected.       

There is a debate, albeit one that is often not publicly discussed, as to whether amnestying most, if not all, of the 22 million illegal aliens would be economically or culturally good for the American people or would increase their freedom. What there is no debate on is that the country’s owners did not consent to let them in and have not retroactively permitted them to stay. That’s really the issue.

There’s little debate that the aliens would not be as good for the American people as would 22 million immigrants who were let in on the basis of merit. Such immigrants might be let in because they invested millions of dollars into the economy or had the job skills, advanced education, or high IQ important to an advanced economy. Still, this issue is irrelevant. What is relevant is that the American people did not agree to let them in.

The Paradoxes of Abortion: Inconsistencies in the Pro-Life Position

Stephen Kershnar

The Paradoxes of Abortion

Dunkirk-Fredonia Observer

June 25, 2019

The pro-life position on abortion (abortion is morally wrong and should be illegal) contains a number of paradoxes that indicate that the pro-life side either doesn’t believe in or doesn’t understand its position.   

First, most pro-life advocates don’t support charging abortion-doctors and the women who hire them with murder. This is odd in that on the pro-life theory a fetus has the same status as a baby. If someone were to willfully, premeditatedly, and with malice aforethought kill a baby, he would be charged with murder. This is especially true if he did it for money. Hence, advocates should think that abortion-doctors and the women who hire them should be charged with murder, even if they don’t admit this publicly.

Second, most pro-life advocates don’t support shooting abortion-doctors. Yet killing aggressors to prevent them from slaughtering infants and young children intuitively seems permissible. In World War II, for example, were an American paratrooper to discover a Nazi worker about to dump poison (Zyklon B) into a room full of Jewish children, few doubt that he may shoot the worker if that were the only way to save the children. Even if it turned out the worker could have been prevented from dumping the poison without killing him, few would shed a tear for the worker. Perhaps pro-lifers think that their cause is better served by changing hearts and minds rather than violence. Still, on pain on inconsistency, they should think that such killings are just. Again, this is true even if they don’t want to admit it publicly.

Third, most people judge women who damaged their children in the womb through alcohol, drugs, or smoking far more harshly than they judge women who’ve had an abortion. Consider, for example, the millions of women who’ve used the morning-after pill and escape condemnation from their pro-life friends. It’s far worse to be killed than harmed and so women who’ve used the pill have done far worse to their fetuses than those who harmed their fetuses through drinking or drugs. For example, following a car accident, most people would want to live even if they didn’t think as well or weren’t as healthy as they were before the accident.   

Fourth, few pro-life people reassure themselves that abortion isn’t so tragic because aborted fetuses are going to enjoy everlasting life in heaven. This is odd in that, on their account, fetuses have the same status as babies and, on some lines of Christianity, babies who die go to heaven. A Catechism of the Catholic Church (1261) says that while we don’t know what happens to unbaptized infants, people may hope that they go to heaven. This likely includes aborted and miscarried fetuses. This is a reasonable interpretation of the Bible given that Jesus said, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.” [Mark 10:14].

Fifth, pro-lifers often think that people begin to exist at conception. Yet zygotes and embryos can’t think and so there is little reason to believe that they have souls. Having a soul is an essential feature of a person who can think and live millennia after his body dissolves away. Such an individual is no mere biological organism, but rather an immaterial thinking thing. It is odd, then, to think that people are organisms when thinking about abortion and immaterial souls when thinking about the afterlife.

What explains the seeming inconsistencies? Perhaps it is that pro-lifers don’t really believe that fetuses, especially early in pregnancy, are people. Instead, they might implicitly think that a fetus is a precursor to a person much as an acorn is a precursor to a tree. Alternatively, they might implicitly think that the fetus trespasses onto the women’s body and, thus, however distasteful, abortion is a woman’s right. The right is based on her owning her body rather than the state, fellow citizens, or fetus owning it. On this view, a woman may kill a fetus, even though it is innocent, just as she may kill a psychotic attacker, even though the attacker is innocent in the sense that a court would find him not guilty due to insanity.

Even the pro-life legal position is odd. The pro-life lawyers and law professors generally want Roe v. Wade (1973) and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) overturned and the matter kicked back to the states. This is strange given that the Due Process and Equal Protection clauses should be read to require that people be protected against maiming and murder by private parties, if anyone is protected against such violence. For example, it would not pass constitutional muster for individual states to get to decide whether private citizens may hire hit men to kill blacks, Jews, or teenagers. Yet this is precisely what pro-lifers argue for in claiming that the Supreme Court precedent on abortion should be merely reversed rather than replaced with an interpretation that protects fetuses in the same way that the Constitution would be read to protect blacks, Jews, and teenagers against private killings.

In the end, it is unclear to me what accounts for the inconsistencies. The issue is made worse by the fact that the pro-life movement’s home is in the Republican Party and, in other areas, it is far better at ensuring peace, freedom, and posterity than the loathsome Democratic Party.

Perhaps what accounts for the inconsistencies is the practical nature of the American people. In particular, Americans and their politicians are not especially interested in theory, but in practical solutions that allow people to ignore Washington and focus on themselves and their families. Perhaps, instead, abortion, like adultery and sex, are impolite topics of conversation and this prevents open discussion and, thereby, prevents people from noticing the inconsistencies. Neither explanation strikes me as correct, though, so I’m not sure what explains the inconsistencies.