Please don’t trap me in box defined by DNA

Cultural appropriation must be defended because we dare not turn back the clock in South Africa, writes from Cape Town.

David Robert Lewis

Essentialist notions of culture feed puritan ideals of distinct racial groups, the self-same offensive motivations behind the manufacturers of apartheid. One has merely to examine an apartheid-era art deco building in Cape Town, strangely adorned with images of “distinct tribal peoples of our hinterland”, to realise we are no longer living in a world in which those tragic “independent homelands”, created by HF Verwoerd to supposedly preserve the “essential tribe”, exist.

Cultural appropriation, by this I mean the sharing of culture, must be defended, not because it is now all somehow about a “dominant group exploiting another for economic gain”, but because we dare not turn back the clock to that tragic period of racial purity in our own country, in which it was the very same logic of the regime which drove preservationists to create what were essentially racial museums in the so-called “independent homelands”.

So please don’t preserve the Jewish shtetl and ghetto out of which emerged my grandparents.

Please don’t preserve the Ancient Celtic ways of my Scottish bloodline.

Please don’t trap me in a box defined by DNA.

And please don’t pass new anti-miscegenation laws preventing fraternisation with persons of colour.