One thing that peeves me about the “woke” crowd is this relatively new term that has come about where virtually everyone alive is living a lie through “cultural appropriation.”
Of course, the victims are anyone Black or Brown and the culture being appropriated could be anything from a fingernail fashion to one group’s entire repository of contributions to the humanities.
Well, I say virtually everyone. Really, the ones who bear the greatest degree of guilt of misappropriation include anyone who has not attained the highest level of wokedom, or plainspokenly put, certain middle-aged, White people.
White people, it seems, are serial culture thieves.
According to the Wokies, if some bit of culture from food to fashion traces its roots back to any group of people considered “marginalized,” and a White person adopts it, admires it, samples it, uses it or looks at it too closely, then they are guilty of swiping it.
It is kind of like someone plagiarizing by only having only glanced at the cover of the purloined work.
The whole appropriation thing started in Hollywood where it became a rule that if the character had a certain trait, then an actor with the same trait had to be found to play the role.
Under this new rule, only a Black person who had a dozen or so rhinoplasty operations, multiple skin bleaching grafts and fake cheeks implanted as well as a fake chin inserted might portray Michael Jackson on the big screen.
In today’s world, a lifetime of method acting does nothing for someone who wishes to play “Lt. Dan” in “Forrest Gump,” unless the actor is willing to have both legs amputated. Only Cher can get away with playing the Moon Goddess, because she, herself, is as old as the Crone in the Moon and they have the same agent.
Hollywood casting agents were castigated for hiring straight actors to play gay characters and casting any man other than Andy Dick to portray masculine male characters, since we all know that Andy Dick has now become the culturally accepted norm for a middle-aged White guy as a socially awkward, bumbling, chronically un-funny sexual deviant.
The only time this rule was relaxed was when Disney tapped this snarky, little-unknown Latina actress to play Snow White. People went along with the “Brown Snow White,” but then the studio faced the righteous rage from little people when the producers axed using real dwarves in the live-action remake of the children’s classic, so as to be more “sensitive.”
Of course, the little people thought that firing them from being cast in roles only they can realistically play was being a bit too sensitive.
It seems that no one has paid much attention to the fact that major casualty in all of this is talent. In today’s world of green-screen technology, no one actually has to learn a script any more. They are only responsible for a few lines at a time as the scripts undergo constant rewrites to satisfy the DEI department.
As things inevitably go, suddenly the sin of cultural appropriation was being unmasked everywhere and you White women are the worst offenders.
I watched a White woman on Tic Tok roll off a litany of offenses having to do with cultural misappropriation: White women wearing those thin braids or hair extensions, White women going to tanning beds, White women using a darker than their natural skin make-up foundation tone and White women getting perms are all egregious examples of appropriation.
I don’t know where those llama-like eyelash extenders were appropriated from, but they need to be sent back.
Things really began to hit the tipping point of absurdity when articles citing experts began to advise people on how to avoid “subliminal and overt cultural appropriation.”
According to the Office of Diversity and Inclusion at the University of Maryland, on Halloween, avoid having non-Native American kids dress in “brown face” as Native Americans or wear a “yellow face” dragon mask to avoid upsetting Asians, “green face” to avoid offending Wiccan witches or “Resting B**** Face” to avoid offending Maxine Waters.
It is now taboo to show up at the company picnic with watermelon or fried chicken if you are not Black, tacos if you’re not Mexican or spaghetti if you’re not Italian.
But wait! Italians didn’t even invent spaghetti! Pasta was imported to Europe by Arab traders!
OK, don’t show up to the picnic with falafel, olives, baba ghanoush or spaghetti wearing a Keffiyeh and you should be okay. Irish potato salad is alright since the Irish are nothing but a bunch of pasty-faced drunks, and they won’t notice.
Emory Goizueta Business School has gotten into the act by stating that there should be some form of punishment for cultural appropriation, adding on its website: “the act of imposing a social cost on cultural boundary crossing. It is levied on high-status actors crossing into low-status culture, in order to mitigate the reproduction of the status inequality.”
So, who exactly is supposed to act as jury? A group of none of your peers?
Cultural appropriation, Al Jolson and such that are intended to offend aside, should be something we celebrate. Life is much more complex (and tasty) when we assimilate and celebrate the good things that come from other cultures.
It reminds me of a favorite childhood story about Mamasita getting ready to prepare her famous Mexicali soup with only the best hand-picked ingredients.
One by one, each of her 12 children came into the kitchen to tell Mamasita how much they loved her soup, but asked that one offending ingredient they didn’t like be left out. When Mamasita’s husband came into the kitchen and asked she leave out the tomatoes, she chased him out with a spatula.
When dinner was served, Mamasita served her soup with all special requests granted. However, the family was not pleased to find that everything that, when combined, made Mamasita’s soup so tasty was removed and they were served a bowl of hot water.
Scott Hudson is the Senior Investigative Reporter, Editorial Page Editor and weekly columnist for The Augusta Press. Reach him at scott@theaugustapress.com
