"Cultural appropriation" isn't real. It's just culture
FAIR Substack | Franklin Einspruch
Artist and writer Franklin Einspruch argues what is obvious to some, but heretical to others—cultural appropriation isn’t real. “As far as we know, every people of the earth in every era produced visual culture, styling and modifying their bodies, adorning themselves, and producing durable objects of representation and abstraction. New culture came about the way new people came about—by mixing. The anti-appropriationists of today sound much like the anti-miscegenationists of the past, taking for granted that racial groups have clear borders and ought not be seen in public to combine.”
“Cultural appropriation” is hard to define because it isn’t real,” Einspruch writes. '“Culture doesn’t belong to you; you belong to a culture. What does not belong to you cannot be, as Braswell puts it, ‘taken.’”
In fact, he shows, “Reifying ‘cultural appropriation’ requires you to go around quantifying aggregate phenotypic and ancestral material in a manner that typifies obsolete race science.”
