All of the faux-concern about cultural appropriation is a complete waste of time as that’s simply fighting against how culture works and always will.

Yet simply to point out instances of appropriation in the assumption that the process is by its nature corrosive seems to me a counterproductive, even reactionary pursuit; it serves no end but to essentialise race as the ultimate component of human identity.

Of course the origin of this is the complete victory of neoliberal thought even in the progressive mind. Identity politics after all is naught but neoliberalism filtered through modern pseudo-progressive sensibilities (and nearly all progressives these days are pseudo-progressives).

The stupidest example of this I’ve seen recently, and alas I don’t remember which site I saw it on, was the idea that making a certain kind of food that combined cuisine from two cultures was “cultural appropriation.”

Damn, if that person knew anything — anything at all — about the history of food and all the cross-pollination, hybridization, immigration-related fusions and borrowing, she could never eat anything but like a tree stump. And maybe not even that.

Even rap music which in the modern liberal moron mind supposedly “belongs” to black people is just an instance of a form of music that happens in all human cultures when people are too goddamn poor to afford instruments.

Such as puirt a beul, or Scottish mouth music. Notice particularly the end where it sounds pretty damn rap-like.

Fighting cultural appropriation is like fighting the wind — on Neptune.

But it’s a nice distraction from real issues, which is its real intent anyway.