Cultural Appropriation as Civilizational Education By Peter Wood
The scientific director of Canada’s Institute of Indigenous Peoples’ Health resigned in early November after she was revealed to have falsely claimed to be a Native American. Carrie Bourassa, who represented herself as a member of the Métis nation, turned out to be of Russian, Polish, and Czech extraction. Bourassa, of course, is one of many ethno-preneurs who in recent years have played this kind of costume drama.
Rachel Dolezal is among the most famous: the white woman who, pretending to be black, rose to become president of the NAACP chapter in Spokane, Wash. But such cases are now too common to be thought of as aberrations. Ward Churchill built his career as a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado Boulder by pretending to be Cherokee. Fake Cherokee ancestry also served Senator Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) as she advanced her academic career at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard. Jessica Krug, a professor of African-American history at George Washington University, passed herself off as black and was well known for her black “rage,” until she confessed that she was white and that her whole career was rooted in a “toxic soil of lies.”
These are instances in which individuals achieved some degree of prominence by carrying a false claim of ancestry all the way to a wholly fictitious biography, including a fake cultural identity. Elizabeth Warren earned widespread mockery for the supposed family recipes she contributed to a cookbook called “Pow Wow Chow.” There are plenty of others who could be added to the list, just as there were once plenty of blacks who passed as white.
These days the cultural dynamics as well as the spoils of affirmative action favor whites passing as Native American or black — so much so that, according to a recent report, more than a third of white college applicants lie about their race by claiming to belong to a racial minority.
If I were to wear my hat as a former professor of anthropology, I would say these cases point to the fluidity of ethnic boundaries within American (and Canadian) society. Much as minority groups might like to maintain strict boundaries, and much as public shame is visited upon those who are caught fictionalizing their ethnic heritage, the borders are easily crossed, and many are attracted to the idea of adopting new ethnic identities.
These trespasses are surely the extreme form of what is now called “cultural appropriation.” The term designates a peculiar form of supposed theft, except that in most cases, nothing is actually taken away. The typical cultural appropriator simply imitates the customs, speech, diet, dress, jewelry, or manner of people from some group that is not his — or more often her — own. When this involves deception, it is dishonorable. Often it goes further than mere imitation. Carrie Bourassa, Rachel Dolezal, Ward Churchill, Elizabeth Warren, and Jessica Krug all staged their cultural masquerades to win career advantage, and thereby presumably deprived others of the opportunities reserved for actual members of the groups they imitated.
Cultural imitation in itself hardly seems worthy of complaint, but when practiced by con artists, it deserves opprobrium. Yet the deviousness (dolezality?) of figures ethno-masking for personal advantage isn’t the worst form of appropriation. That occurs when governments turn ethnic enclaves into tourist attractions or, lacking suitably compliant villagers, pose outsiders as make-believe natives. China, for example, has apparently set up fake Uyghur villages populated by ethnic Han Chinese to reassure the outside world that all is well in the midst of ethno-cide. Cultural imitation can indeed be put to nefarious ends, but generally it is just part of the give-and-take of humanity and, in fact, part of the foundation of Western civilization. Without it, the West would have stagnated in poverty, isolation, and ignorance.
“Cultural appropriation” has become an all-encompassing term, even including yoga if it is divorced from Hindu or Buddhist spirituality. Today selling tacos from a truck while lacking a Hispanic pedigree is akin to genocide; wearing an Asian-style prom dress while sporting European genes reeks of napalm; and uttering the word “woke” while white drives supremacist needles under the nails of black folks.
We seemingly have discovered a new way to inflame group resentments and fling ourselves on the bonfire of guilt. I wish I could cure this with a touch of common sense, but since all such concepts are now deemed polluted with privilege, I’ll try ancient history instead.
Back in the fifth century b.c., the Greek city-states were proud of their achievements but well aware that they had lots of unfriendly neighbors. Herodotus (c. 484–425 b.c.), from the Greek city Halicarnassus in the Persian Empire, spent his life on the move and traveled to far-flung places, including Egypt, Italy, and Babylon. Later in life he composed his massive book, The Histories, which purported to explain the wars between the Greeks and the Persians, but which doubled as an elaborate account of all the peoples of the world as he knew it.
Herodotus observes, for example, that the Egyptians were superb at preserving their old traditions intact for hundreds of generations. They took pride in supposedly adopting nothing from elsewhere. To the north of the Greeks roamed the barbarian hordes of the Scythians — bloodthirsty marauders, and no less proud of their traditions. So proud were they, in fact, that they would execute any of their own who dared put on Greek clothing or imitate Greek customs.
Off to the east, the Persians held court over their conquered neighbors. Unlike the Egyptians and Scythians, however, the Persians eagerly absorbed all that was new to them from the people they met. They were indiscriminate cultural appropriators, entranced by glittering novelty. Herodotus reserves his praise (of course) for the Greeks, whom he credits with the power of proper discrimination. The Greeks, he writes, readily absorb a foreign custom if they have examined and weighed it and found that it will enhance their lives, but they turn away from mere novelty and from customs they judge to be immoral or destructive.
The ancient Greeks, of course, are one of the foundations of the West, and their ethic of selective appropriation remains crucial to understanding what the West is. We didn’t come by written language, mathematics, or a thousand other root inventions by sticking with a tradition impervious to innovation. We came by these things through imitation, selective borrowing, and integration into an encompassing pattern. Christianity, through Paul, latched onto this winning approach and also linked the West to the exclusivist, inward-turning Hebrew tradition. The Romans took from the Greeks and, under Constantine in a.d. 313, infused Christianity into the notion of an ever-expanding political entity. The synthesis over the centuries that followed, past the collapse of Rome itself, gave rise to a culture that gradually subsumed the Celts and the Germans as well as the numerous other pagan peoples of Europe. That subsuming, however, was never a matter of simply kicking the existing cultures to the curb. Older shrines and rituals were absorbed, in some case virtually unaltered: We still celebrate Halloween and put up Christmas trees. The late-19th-century scholar Sir James George Frazer spent a lifetime compiling his twelve-volume The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion, which devotes hundreds of pages to tracing the survival of the ancient pagan customs into modern times, where they are redressed as part of Western Christendom.
I shall stop there and let the reader contemplate how Western civilization is a wonderful synthesis of pieces thrown together by fortune but never just by accident. Cultural appropriation has been the engine of an ever restless but still selective search for the good, wherever it may be found. We imported corn, tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, pumpkins, peanuts, and chocolate when Europeans encountered the people of the New World. We chose not to import ripping the hearts out of prisoners sacrificed to the gods, or cannibalism. Choices were made.
And the same choices continue to be made, though we might begin to worry that the dynamic of cultural appropriation has lately been inverted. These days many people are more drawn to neo-paganism, unwed childbearing, and mythological fantasies (e.g., the 1619 Project) than would be wise for a civilization that hopes to remain open-minded, inquisitive, and ready to absorb the best that is on offer from the world’s great diversity of ideas and customs.
The West, in its ideals, is a universal culture open to all, but always on the condition that those who hope to enter it recognize its unceasing demand to reach for those ideals that promise unity in the midst of innovation.
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