Cultures evolve through borrowing

Re Writers’ Union editor resigns in storm over ‘appropriation,’ May 11

We were reminded at the 2015 Oscars how few big roles there were for minorities.

Let’s say a white author writes a novel that Hollywood wants to turn into a movie. Hopefully her novel has some important minority characters that we’ll see on the big screen. Oh wait, there are none, because it would have been “cultural appropriation” for her to include any.

Cultures evolve by borrowing from each other. Aboriginals in the northwest appropriated metal tools from Europeans and used them to carve soaring totem poles. English is a pastiche that draws on Latin, Greek, French, German and Dutch, to name a few.

Even to many progressives, this handwringing about cultural appropriation plays as a precious affectation indulged by a few in the arts and academia. It reveals an inability to distinguish between legitimate complaints, like discrimination in housing and employment, and imagined slights. And it’s one factor that drives people to support hard-right political parties. Then we all lose.

David Giuffrida, Ridgeway, Ont.

Cultural appropriation has me flummoxed. The rules are not clear but it is very important not to break them, because, as the Star has reported, people lose their jobs. Does it mean that I, as a person of Scottish and English heritage, committed a grave error when I made a canoe? Should I be offended when Mexicans take part in a Robbie Burns dinner? Can a white man sing the blues? Can a black woman do Shakespeare in Patois?

Ian McLaurin, Port Perry, Ont.