My Culture, Your Culture, Our Culture

            Since I’ve been attacking the vigilantes of cultural appropriation for a while, let me look at things from a different side.  First, a story:

            In 2006 I, a born Catholic, Jesuit-educated, semi-Christian, interviewed in Florida for the interim headship of the largest Jewish day school south of Washington DC.  As you might expect, I faced some tough questions.  One of the easiest, however, was intended as a challenge: “What are you going to do if one of the rabbis says to you, ‘This is a Jewish thing; you wouldn’t understand.”  I immediately said, “I’d say ‘Rabbi means teacher, doesn’t it.  So you must teach me, and then I will understand.”  I got the job, ran the school for two years, and was succeeded by another Catholic.  And I spent two years asking questions, which the rabbis and others were delighted to answer.

            What’s my point?  That cross-cultural understanding is not only vital, it is a positive, life-enhancing activity, and should be encouraged first, and only challenged when there appears to be a negative, hostile, or avaricious motivation on someone’s part.

            Consider the vexed question of clothing, for example, both everyday and special occasion.  Here motivations, uniqueness, and cultural distance all come into play.  Anyone who wants to wear green on St. Patrick’s Day is, I believe, welcome to do so.  A person not of direct Scottish descent can probably wear a kilt in some situations – say a non-Scottish bagpiper, or a friend at a Scots wedding.  People wearing everyday kimonos or yukatas around the house, okay.  Likewise, berets, top hats, Irish caps, tweed, fine.   Women have even more latitude, I think, in many areas – culturally identified blouses, for example. 

            But turbans, dashikis, war bonnets, keffiyahs, pretty much not.  And burkas, kente cloth, any culture’s ritual or religious wear, no.  (I once heard from an Argentine-Jewish family who had gone to Buenos Aires on school vacation.  Visiting a hip coffee house, they overheard two locals speaking in Spanish about the mens’ yarmulkes:  “What are they wearing?”  “Oh that’s the cute little cap that’s all the rage in Miami.”)

            And absolutely not – racially, nationally or other garb that speaks to a group’s oppression or crimes: no slave clothes and no Nazi uniforms.

            I’ve stuck to clothing because it’s less complicated than other areas.  Can whites, for example, use black language?  Well, they have for more than a century: Jazz, jive, juke, mumbo- jumbo, ragtime, chill, crib, tote, voodoo, zombie, to name just a few.  The rules and lines are complex.  Like much slang, a group invents a word to distinguish itself from others, and that word enters common use and therefore often becomes useless for its in-group purpose.  (Compare Yiddish, which has so thoroughly entered non-Jewish usage that numerous words for body parts, as well as many insults, are now common property.)

            The borderlines seem to include words that are viewed as inoffensive when used within the group, but not by outsiders.  The 1902 novel, The Virginian, gave us the memorable phrase (altered over time) “Smile, when you say that,” when an outsider uses the phrase s-o-b, which the cowboys call each other regularly.” 

            They also include words that are newly coined by the ingroup, and considered proprietary.  There’s a sort of cultural copyright: “cool” entered the public domain long ago, but “fleek” hasn’t, and “sick” is too confusing for borrowing.  Unfortunately, slang moves so quickly through modern media that the lag time has become much too short in the ears of many originating groups.  See “bae,” “ratchet,” and the above-mentioned “fleek.”  Watch The Wire, or Dear White People and try to decide which words a white non-Baltimorean can use.

            Finally, they include words created by the majority to denigrate the minority: “gyp,” “paddy wagon,” “hooligan” “Indian giver” “Jew down” “pickanniny,” and of course the n-word and all its cousins: the k-words (for Jews, Germans, or South African blacks), the g-word (for Vietnamese), the w-word (for Italians) the f-word (for the French), c’s, p’s, and  j’s condensed words for Chinese, Polish, and Japanese people, and on and on.  The lists I consulted actually had insults beginning with every letter but A or Z. 

            Finally, the great question of art.  Here things get even harder.  Should we stop reading The Merchant of Venice, Othello, Huck Finn, and all the other works with female characters or characters of color who are not treated according to our modern standards?  Surely the case is different the closer we come to the present moment.  But how should we decide who can write about whom?  Men about women? Women about men?  Persons of different races about each other?  Nationalities? Gender identities?  Ages?  And if we segregate authors, artists, musicians, etc. by such criteria, should we expect that outsiders will be interested in reading the works of our groups?  I recall reading a piece by an African woman attorney who said reading To Kill a Mockingbird and admiring the character of Atticus Finch led her to her vocation.  If I had not read James Baldwin, Bernard Malamud, and Alan Paton in high school, would I have either the awareness or the empathy I have now?  Will I not grow in awareness and empathy by reading female, immigrant, Muslim, and other Others? 

            A young man I know, son of an African American father and a Greek-American mother, has become a successful jazz pianist.  For his first album, Promethean, he chose an epigraph from French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard:  “It’s not where you take things from, it’s where you take them to.”  My sentiments exactly.