Cultural Appropriation Doesn't Exist

Social Justice Warriors are rebels without a cause. When they are not busy disrupting speeches from people whose ideas they disagree with, they are busy virtue signalling people – or as the French say, “looking for lice.”

One such louse is “cultural appropriation.” Whenever someone – usually a white person – dresses, acts or does anything usually not associated with their “culture”, they are publicly shamed and are asked to make amends.

There is a major problem with this mentality: there is no such thing as cultural appropriation since it is not owned by anyone.

Culture, as with almost everything human, was created progressively through the years by individuals, not “the people.” True, some of these creations are strongly associated with particular groups: hair braiding for Africans, rain dances for Natives, sombreros for Mexicans, etc.

Nevertheless, ideas and customs – what a culture is all about – are not property. Wearing a sombrero in Mexico – or similarly, the Asian conical hat in East Asia – actually makes sense for anyone living there in order to protect oneself from the blazing sun. The same logic applies for people dressing like Tuaregs (completely covered from head to toe) when they go to desert countries to protect the skin from sun and sand even though they are not Berbers.

If we were to push de SJW’s logic to its end, then life would be both boring and difficult. More than half the words of the English language would disappear since they don’t originate from the old Anglo-Saxon dialects – words like jewel, warrior, budget, democracy, republic, etc. Modern printing would have to disappear, since Gutenberg very likely took his idea from the Chinese. Writing, for that matter, would also disappear for anyone not born in Mesopotamia (ancient Iraq-Iran region). And so would the wheel, clothes, houses, agriculture, mathematics – in short, anything not invented by “your people.”

Modern life as we know it exists because humans were allowed to move and to bring their new ideas with them. So what we truly have is a human culture; every person on this planet profits from others’ ideas, knowledge and habits. It allows us to use the right word – even if it’s “borrowed” from another language – to make our life easier, to entertain us or to celebrate their practices that can make great dance shows.