Cultural Appropriation and Secular Blasphemy

http://kenanmalik.wordpress.com/2017/07/09/cultural-appropriation-and-secular-blasphemy/
Date Written:  2017-07-09
Publisher:  Pandaemonium - Kenan Malik's blog
Year Published:  2017
Resource Type:  Article
Cx Number:  CX21052

On the controversies over 'cultural appropriation'.

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

It is perhaps just as well that I am a writer, not an editor. Were I editing a newspaper or magazine, I might soon be out of a job. For this is an essay in defense of cultural appropriation. In Canada last month, three editors lost their jobs after making such a defense.

The controversy began when Hal Niedzviecki, editor of Write, the magazine of the Canadian Writers' Union, penned an editorial (in an issue of the magazine devoted to Indigenous writing) defending the right of white authors to create characters from minority or indigenous backgrounds. Within days, a social media backlash forced him to resign. The Writers' Union issued an apology for an article that its Equity Task Force claimed 're-entrenches the deeply racist assumptions' held about art.

Another editor, Jonathan Kay, of The Walrus magazine, was also compelled to step down after tweeting his support for Niedzviecki. Meanwhile, the broadcaster CBC moved Steve Ladurantaye, managing editor of its flagship news program The National, to a different post, similarly for an 'unacceptable tweet' about the controversy.

It’s not just editors who have to tread carefully. Last year, the novelist Lionel Shriver generated a worldwide storm after defending cultural appropriation in an address to the Brisbane Writers Festival. Earlier this year, controversy erupted when New York's Whitney Museum picked for its Biennial Exhibition Dana Schutz's painting (shown at the top of the page) of the mutilated corpse of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African-American murdered by two white men in Mississippi in 1955. Many objected to a white painter like Schutz depicting such a traumatic moment in black history. The British artist Hannah Black organized a petition to have the work destroyed.