THE INSANE WAR ON ‘APPROPRIATION’
WE’RE off the deep end when a Kardashian needs defending. After Vogue posted an image of Kendall Jenner with teased hair on Friday, social-justice warriors accused the magazine, the model and everyone involved of “cultural appropriation.” Jenner’s hair, goes the claim, was obviously an afro, thus the photo and all involved must be racists.
Vogue apologized, even though Jenner’s look is clearly Edwardian-inspired. But we’ve become so hypersensitive that even the flimsiest accusations must be validated and offenders prostrated.
Remember last Halloween, when rich, white Brooklyn moms made headlines for vilifying little girls — some of whom were their own daughters! — for wanting to dress as Polynesian princess Moana? Still happening. Even People magazine just revisited the agonized post by blogger Sachi Feris that went viral last year.
“First, I considered whether my daughter and I could find Polynesian artists that made traditional clothing and both learn about and support their work — but I wasn’t coming up with such artists . . . and, moreover, it still felt problematic to ‘dress up’ as another culture, even while trying to learn about and honor it.”
Feris suggested her daughter, who is of Argentinian descent, go as someone from her own culture and suggested Che Guevara. Apparently, a terrorist who once hoped to launch nuclear missiles at New York City beats a Disney princess as long as your culture is shared.
The whole notion of cultural appropriation is absurd, and its foothold dangerous. Not so long ago we celebrated the outré and outrageous; now we nurse our trigger points and microaggressions, insisting progress is only possible by stifling and censoring art.
Think that sounds dramatic? Consider what’s happened in the wake of last year’s Whitney Biennial, when protesters demanded the removal of “Open Casket,” a portrait of Civil Rights martyr Emmett Till by artist Dana Schutz, who is white. Since then, the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis have begun reaching out to any group or community depicted in artwork — before it’s ever exhibited — and allowing veto power.
Last May, artist Scott Durant donated his sculpture, a recreation of gallows used in famous executions, including Saddam Hussein’s, to the Dakota Nation, which claimed outrage. They burned it. Famed novelist Lionel Shriver has also been criticized for criticizing what amounts to censorship. In a speech at the 2017 Brisbane writers’ conference, Shriver argued, rightly, that without artistic freedom there is no such thing as fiction. All she would have left, she said, would be permission “to write from the perspective of a straight white female born in North Carolina, closing in on 60, able-bodied but with bad knees . . . all that’s left is memoir.”
A 2016 study by two researchers at New York’s New School for Social Research found that readers of literary fiction scored higher in empathy — that in experiencing the world as any given character does, the reader has a greater understanding of those who would otherwise seem different, foreign, inscrutable. This is what all great art gives us, yet we’re on some dystopian mission to circumscribe those who can make or draw or build or write it.
Some people see frizzy hair as a warning shot. But sometimes it’s just frizzy hair.