College students told not to use words like “Greeks” with reference to fraternities: it’s cultural appropriation

October 12, 2016 • 2:30 pm

And it follows, as the night the day, that the Insanity of Regressive Leftism continues apace in American colleges. This time it’s at the University of California at Merced, which, as The College Fix (a right-wing site, of course) reports, is in a kerfuffle about the fraternity and sorority system.

If you’re not familiar with this, fraternities and sororities are single-sex social organizations in U.S. colleges that often have housing for members, and participate in parties, various charity drives, and generally serve as a nucleus for the social life of their members. They’re all named with two or three three Greek letters (e.g. ΛΛΛ, ΦKT, etc.), and are selective: first-year students “rush”, by visiting various fraternity or sorority houses during “rush week” and trying to impress the members, called “Greeks”. Likewise, the frats and sororities try to impress the more desirable students (read: athletes and attractive people) and then, in an age-old ritual that has traumatized millions, the Greeks slowly whittles down the list of those they want to join their group. First-years visit the fraternities who still want them several times until the final choice is made. Those students who join are called “pledges”.

And, of course, some frats and sororities are more prestigious than others: there are “jock houses” for the popular athletes, houses for the most beautiful women, houses for the studious, and so on. When my dad went to Penn State in the 1930’s, there were three all-Jewish fraternities, and Jews couldn’t join any of the other forty-odd ones (his was Beta Sigma Rho). It’s a divisive and snobbish system, and I refused to “rush” when I went to college. But in many isolated colleges, fraternities provide the only kind of organized social life around, including their infamous parties.

At any rate, it’s all called the Greek system. At least it was called the Greek system at UC Merced, until a branch of the student government decided that using the word “Greek” was a form of cultural appropriation, and set out some new language rules. As The Fix reports:

Students involved in a fraternity or sorority at the University of California Merced have been instructed not to use the terms “Greek,” “rush” or “pledge” because they are “appropriating Greek culture” and are “non-inclusive,” several students told The College Fix. [JAC: I don’t think any Greek people objected here, and certainly “rush” and “pledge” are not Greek words or terms.]

In particular, they’ve been told:

Replace “Greek Life” with “Fraternity and Sorority Life”

Replace “rush” with “recruitment”

Replace “pledge” with “potential new member”

These changes have been going on for four years:

The word “rush” was last used in the 2011-2012 academic year. Its use was prohibited because it “promoted a negative stereotype of fraternities and sororities.” The word “pledge” was last used in 2012 because it is considered “a form of hazing.”

What’s bizarre about this, besides the stupid “cultural appropriation” excuse, is that nothing will change except the language, and, frankly, I don’t think “rush” or “pledge” were invidious. Yes, there was hazing, and sometimes it was quite bad (some students died, for instance, because they were forced to drink copious amounts of booze), but changing the language won’t fix that. If they want to repair those aspects of fraternity culture that are harmful (sororities are rarely accused of bad behavior), they have to institute structural change, not linguistic change. Frankly, I see the whole Greek system as analogous to religions in their intra-Greek comity but inter-Greek divisiveness, and the way that non-Greeks are seen as apostates; and I’d just as lief be rid of the whole mess.

h/t: Cindy

More trigger warnings in the UK

October 11, 2016 • 9:40 am

I’m not sure which way Regressive Leftism migrates between Anglophone countries. It may start in the UK and move here, or travel in the reverse direction, or arise spontaneously in both places at the same time as a form of convergent cultural evoltuion. My guess would be option #1 (U.S. origin), but it doesn’t matter. What matters is stopping this fulminating movement whose effect is to promote censorship and enshrine a uniform set of ideas that aren’t to be questioned.

One aspect of this movement is ‘trigger warnings’. While I don’t object to all of them—I, for instance, would call attention beforehand to any gory or gross imagery I’d show classes—they have reached unconscionable extremes. Scenes of violence in classical literature, religion itself, eating and drinking, spiders, Nazis, needles, “dismissal of lived oppressions” (what oppressions are unlived?): all of these have counted as trigger warnings. (If you think I jest, see the list here.) There has even been some objection to law schools teaching sexual assault law as it makes students uncomfortable, but of course such instruction is necessary, and one would think that Leftists would favor it. Such is the dilemma of the Regressive Left, in which two liberal values conflict, with the lesser one often winning.

Trigger warning should always be optional, but professors should, I think, exercise some judgment about giving them. “Eating and drinking” is simply not something that you need to warn people about—it’s everywhere! So is violence, at least the type describe in Greek literature, which is often fictional. My own view is that you should announce at the beginning of a course that if students have problems with some issues, they should see you privately outside of class, but that they should never be allowed to avoid material that you’ve determined is essential to your course.

Now, according to an article in yesterday’s Independent, trigger warnings are spreading to the UK, and over subjects that need to be taught:

Academics at universities including Edinburgh, the London School of Economics (LSE), Goldsmiths, Stirling and Central Lancashire are warning students of material they think could be “disturbing”, giving them the option of leaving the lecture room if they decide to. The warnings have been issued ahead of lectures on topics including Christianity, popular culture, history, forensic science, photography, politics and law.

Seriously? Christianity? History? Photography? Politics and law? What kind of students are we bringing up here? Answer: ones who feel entitled to not only be offended at many things, but to be allowed the option of avoiding them.

Even prominent feminists have decried this trend, and suggested, as has Jon Haidt, that therapy rather than warnings is the way to deal with the issue:

Dr Naomi Wolf, feminist and recent university lecturer in Victorian sexualities, told The Sunday Times: “Trauma from sexual or other assault and abuse is very real, and ‘triggers’ are real for victims of abuse. But the place to process or deal with survivor triggers is with a trained therapist in a counsellor’s office, and not in a classroom or university context.”

. . . Earlier this year, television presenter and Cambridge scholar Mary Beard argued students must not be shielded from difficult subject matters. “It would be dishonest, fundamentally dishonest, to teach only Roman history and to miss out not just the rape of the Sabines but all their rapes. We have to encourage students to be able to face that, even when they find they’re awkward and difficult for all kinds of good reasons,” Ms Beard told TheSunday Times.

The real danger of trigger warnings is that they pressure faculty to either leave material out of the lecture, or to give students the option of not attending those lectures. Some proponents of trigger warnings say this doesn’t happen, but in fact it does, as shown by the permissive policy of LSE, Goldsmiths, Stirling, and Central Lancashire describe above. And here’s more:

Meanwhile archeology students at University College London were reportedly told last month they could leave the lecture without being penalised if they find it too “distressing”, with lecturer Gabriel Moshenka claiming it was a necessary measure as the material might induce psychological trauma. The trend echoes a wave of trigger warnings in universities acorss America, after some colleges highlighted material containing references to subjects such as rape, suicide, abortion and racism that might potentially upset undergraduates who had experienced traumas.

And there’s that pesky issue of teaching rape law:

In May it was revealed undergraduate law students at Oxford University were being issued with trigger warnings before lectures containing material deemed too “distressing”, a move that prompted a wave of criticism. At the time, law lecturer Laura Hoyano insisted those who wish to study law “have to deal with things that are difficult”, telling Mail Online: “We can’t remove sexual offences from the criminal law syllabus – obviously.”

I can only imagine what society, or at least those parts of society involving college students, will be like in 20 years.

h/t: Paul

Regressive Monday. 1. University tells students what phrases they can and cannot use

October 10, 2016 • 11:00 am

James Madison University (JMU) is in Harrisonburg, Virginia, not far from Washington, D.C. It is, I believe, the intellectual home of Jason Rosenhouse, author of the estimable EvolutionBlog, and I wonder what he thinks about this report from Law Newz. What’s happened at JMU is that “student leaders who participated in freshman orientation” (presumably those responsible for such orientation) were given a 7-page guide of “dumb things to say”: phrases that are awkward, unwise, or could be construed as bigoted or as microaggressions.

The guide, called “35 dumb things well-intentioned people say: Surprising things we say that widen the diversity gap by Dr. Maura Cullen”, is online here, and of course was first revealed by a right-wing site, The College Fix. (When will Leftist papers start taking notice of the Speech and Behavior Police proliferating in American and UK universities?) The Fix reports this:

The list was apparently derived from Dr. Maura Cullen’s book 35 Dumb Things Well-Intended People Say: Surprising Things We Say that Widen the Diversity Gap.

The existence of the handout was first revealed by The College Fix. James Madison University spokesman Bill Wyatt told the online news outlet “this was just an exercise, prior to orientation, to get our volunteers to understand how language affects others. The list was not distributed to our first-year students nor were the volunteers instructed not to use the phrases.”

However, some of the JMU orientation handout materials obtained by the website appear to contradict some of Wyatt’s claims. A document titled “Building an Inclusive Environment” that was included with the list of phrases handout pointedly reminds orientation leaders that they have a duty to “create a safe an inclusive environment for your first year students” and instructs them to use the list of phrases “as a resource to help accomplish this goal.” The document also instructs orientation leaders to “take some time to reflect on your prejudices and biases, and how that might affect your interactions with students.”

And here’s the list of phrases to be avoided:

1. “Some of my best friends are …”
2. “I know exactly how you feel.”
3. “I don’t think of you as …”
4. “The same thing happens to me too.”
5. “It was only a joke! Don’t take things so seriously.”
6. What do ‘your’ people think.”
7. “What are you?” or “Where are you really from?”
8. “I don’t see color” or “I’m color blind.”
9. “You are so articulate.”
10. “It is so much better than it used to be. Just be patient.”
11. “You speak the language very well.”
12. Asking black people about their hair or hygiene.
13. Saying to LBGTQ people “what you do in the privacy of your own bedroom is your business.”
14. “Yes, but you are a ‘good’ one.”
15. “You have such a pretty face.”
16. “I never owned slaves.”
17. “If you are going to live in this country, learn to speak the language!”
18. “She/he is a good person. She/he didn’t mean anything by it.”
19. “When I’ve said the same thing to other people like you, they don’t mind.”
20. Calling women “girls, honey, sweetie pie” or other familiar terms.
21. When people of color say, “It is not the same thing.”
22. When people of faith say, “Love the sinner, hate the sin.”
23. When white men say, “We are the ones being discriminated against now!”
24. Referring to older people as “cute.”
25. Asking a transgender person, “What are you really? A man or a woman?”
26. Referring to the significant other, partner, or spouse of a same gender couple as their “friend.”
27. “Why do ‘they’ (fill in the blank) always have to sit together? They are always sticking together.”
28. “People just need to pick themselves up by their bootstraps.”
29. People with disabilities are “courageous.”
30. “That’s so gay/queer. That’s so retarded.”
31. “I don’t see difference. We are all part of the same race, the human race.”
32. I don’t care if you are pink, purple or orange, I treat all people the same.”
33. Asking a transgender person, “Have you had the operation.”
34. Saying to a Jewish person, “You are so lucky to have ‘your’ Christmas spread over a week!”
35. “Here’s another book on political correctness.”

Now I agree that nearly all of these phrases are not ideal things to say, and many are downright offensive. The student guidesheet explains why. I’ve chosen four that I think are less offensive than others:

The ones that bother me most are the ones that find offensiveness in statements like “I don’t see color” or “we’re all the same.” To me, that was once the ideal of an egalitarian society, and so it was to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who wanted people judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. I suspect that Dr. King would have approved of being able to overlook someone’s ethnicity or race and treat everyone as equals.

Things are different now. It’s considered offensive to say that you don’t see color. Why? Because, with identity politics, color is considered part of a “life experience” that cannot and should not be dismissed. But what are you supposed to say if you’re really color-blind in this way? “Yes, I see your color and I am a bad person for being a racist and discriminating on that basis?” The “dumb” statements almost force one to recriminate oneself for bigotry.

My main objection, though, is this: colleges should not be in the business of telling students what or what not to say in the interests of amity. Is it really “free speech” for a college to pass out handouts like this, and police language in a university? I don’t think so. It’s the College of Life that will teach students what things foster good social interaction and what things don’t. Here James Madison University is not just acting in loco parentis, but in loco societas (pardon my Latin).

If free speech is truly to be valued in a university, they should not issue guidelines about what or what not to say. After all, where are JMU’s instructions about not calling Jews “kikes” or Mexicans “beaners”? Shouldn’t the students know that, too? Of course they should, but they learn it from interacting with others, not as a diktat handed from above.

And if you think this is a good idea, go read about what happened a year ago when Harvard University tried to foist “social justice placemats”, showing Officially Approved Words and Behaviors, on its students. Here’s what they looked like:

Hitchens on “identity politics”

October 4, 2016 • 12:30 pm

Reader John S. called my attention to this addendum to chapter 15 of Christopher Hitchens’s Letters to a Young Contrarian, which I haven’t read in a long time. It’s fifteen years old now, but rings especially true these days—a time when the Left is divided into mutually carnivorous factions, feasting on the “small differences” Hitchens mentions.

PS: Since this often seems to come up in discussions of the radical style, I’ll mention one other gleaning from my voyages. Beware of identity politics. I’ll re-phrase that: have nothing to do with identity politics. I remember very well the first time I heard the saying “The Personal Is Political.” It began as a sort of reaction to the defeats and downturns that followed 1968: a consolation prize, as you might say, for people who had missed that year. I knew in my bones that a truly Bad Idea had entered the discourse. Nor was I wrong. People began to stand up at meetings and orate about how they felt, not about what or how they thought, and about who they were rather than what (if anything) they had done or stood for. It became the replication in even less interesting form of the narcissism of the small difference, because each identity group begat its subgroups and “specificities.” This tendency has often been satirised—the overweight caucus of the Cherokee trans-gender disabled lesbian faction demands a hearing on its needs—but never satirised enough. You have to have seen it really happen. From a way of being radical it very swiftly became a way of being reactionary; the Clarence Thomas hearings demonstrated this to all but the most dense and boring and selfish, but then, it was the dense and boring and selfish who had always seen identity politics as their big chance.

Anyway, what you swiftly realise if you peek over the wall of your own immediate neighborhood or environment, and travel beyond it, is, first, that we have a huge surplus of people who wouldn’t change anything about the way they were born, or the group they were born into, but second that “humanity” (and the idea of change) is best represented by those who have the wit not to think, or should I say feel, in this way.

I’m not sure exactly what Hitchens is saying in that last paragraph, unless he means that people are so wedded to their ethnic, religious, or other personal status that they make it the centerpiece of all discourse, demanding not just the right to feel offended, but to tell others what is offensive, and therefore what should not be said. And maybe he means that such people are unable to transcend their own identity to deal with issues affecting other groups—or humanity as a whole. Perhaps he’s referring to the kind of people who, deeply wedded to being thought of as anti-bigotry liberals, are willing to throw Middle Eastern women under the bus since they’re oppressed by Muslim people of color.

But Hitchen’s coda reminds me of what one Yale student wrote after she was mortally offended by Erika Christakis’s letter to her Silliman House students defending Halloween costumes as a form of free speech, and asking for people to chill out. As the Atlantic reported (my emphasis):

Another Silliman resident declared in a campus publication, “I have had to watch my friends defend their right to this institution. This email and the subsequent reaction to it have interrupted their lives. I have friends who are not going to class, who are not doing their homework, who are losing sleep, who are skipping meals, and who are having breakdowns.” One feels for these students. But if an email about Halloween costumes has them skipping class and suffering breakdowns, either they need help from mental-health professionals or they’ve been grievously ill-served by debilitating ideological notions they’ve acquired about what ought to cause them pain.

The student next described what she thinks residential life at Yale should be. Her words: “I don’t want to debate. I want to talk about my pain.” In fact, students were perfectly free to talk about their pain. Some felt entitled to something more, and that is what prolonged the debate—not a faculty member who’d rather have been anywhere else.

Another example is “Islamophobia,” where the criticism of bad religious doctrine elides into personal offense, shutting down any possibility of a debate (and given that the topic is religion, a constructive debate is unlikely anyway).

The Pecksniffs go after—get this—dog Halloween costumes

October 3, 2016 • 9:00 am

Halloween is here, and that means that the Pecksniffs (also known as Leisure Fascists) will be out policing or criticizing kid’s costumes. No sombreros, Native American costumes, any costume that bespeaks “cultural appropriation” and so on. Now these critics have some point: you don’t want blatant racial stereotypes, like someone in blackface, which has a history of racist tropes. (But again, those should not be forbidden, simply criticized). Sombreros seem okay to me, and I’m not even sure that Native American costumes are out of bounds. Yes, we have a sad history of exterminating those groups, but a costume doesn’t mean you favor genocide (unless it’s a Nazi outfit). Maybe you really like the colorful clothes worn by many Native Americans. (The critics would respond that unless those kids are deeply educated in the history of Native Americans, they can’t wear them.)

Anyway, there’s an argument to be had there, and I won’t engage in it now. What I want to point out is that the Pecksniffs have started policing ANIMAL COSTUMES. Why? Because pet stores, which sell animal costumes, are selling “male” costumes, like policemen, for male animals, and “female costumes”, like the French Maid Dog Costume, for female animals. And that is gender bias. As the Washington Post reports in the article below (click screenshot for link):

Pet costumes have been gaining popularity in recent years, with 16 percent of Americans saying they’ll dress up their dogs, cats and bunnies for Halloween this year, according to the National Retail Federation. The most popular costumes for pets were gender-neutral pumpkins [OMG! PUMPKINS!], hot dogs and bumblebees.

The glass ceiling appears to be firmly in place at PetSmart, where career costumes labeled “male” include firefighter and police officer, while female dogs can choose between a pink cowgirl costume and pink loofah.

On the site BaxterBoo.com, options for your female pooch include “sweet heart nurse” or French maid. “Any tidy girl dog will look adorable wearing this French Maid Dog Costume,” the site’s description reads. “Whether your pup is a clean freak or a messy mutt, she will enjoy playing ‘dress up’ in this fun costume.”

The choices for male dogs, meanwhile, include fireman, mob boss and doctor (suggested pairing: “match up with a girl friend with the Sweet Heart Nurse Dog Costume.”)

“It seems silly on the surface, but this is part of a larger message we’re sending, that there are certain jobs for men, and certain jobs for women,” said Scott Lawrie, 36, who co-hosts a podcast, ‘She will not be ignored,’ about gender issues. “The career options for women — and dogs — need to go beyond pink loofahs and pink cowgirls.”

Again, there’s some point here, but not one that’s so trenchant that I feel it needs to be underscored.

Lawrie, who plans to dress his two dogs as the cop duo Cagney and Lacey, says he did a double-take when he saw PetSmart’s police officer costumes marked for “males.” He clicked around and noticed a pattern: Career-related costumes were often explicitly marked “male” and “female.” (A number of other costumes, however, ranging from lobsters to pumpkins and dinosaurs, bear the “male/female” label.)

“I thought surely there was some reason behind this: maybe the pets needed to relieve themselves a certain way, or something like that,” said Lawrie, who lives in San Francisco. “But all of the costumes are identical.”

Representatives for PetSmart and Baxter Boo did not respond to requests for comment.

Now you can, I suppose, make Lawrie’s argument that gender segregation for animals might bleed over into gender segregated-costumes for kids, but, as the Post article notes, most retailers have already stopped labeling toys or costumes as appropriate for one sex or another. I approve of that. There’s still a difference, though: as with dry cleaning, items marketed to girls cost on average 7% more than those marketed to boys.

That’s discrimination, and needs to be scrutinized. But seriously: do you think a female dog wearing a tutu is going to be jealous of a male dog dressed as a fireman? I suspect the vast majority of these pets are neutered, anyway.

imrs — Sixteen percent of Americans plan to dress their pets in Halloween costumes this year. (Rebecca Blackwell/AP)

None of this, of course, applies to cats, who won’t wear costumes and thus are immune to cultural appropriation.

And Grania wanted to add this:

I would point out that people who dress their dogs up in costumes , even gender neutral womyn-affirming culturally sensitive ones, deserve to have said dog throw up on their carpets.

h/t: Cindy

Feminists remove flyers advertising an “offensive” talk by Christina Hoff Sommers, claim that their vandalism is “freedom of speech”

October 1, 2016 • 2:15 pm

The Young America’s Foundation (YAF) is a conservative organization that runs a conservative website. And it’s on those websites where you’ll find documentation of Regressive Leftism. Don’t look for videos like the following on PuffHo or even the Daily Beast. If you want to see Regression in action, you have to get into bed, at least temporarily, with conservatives. But, you know, sometimes they don’t lie.

So, the story is this. Christina Hoff Sommers, who considers herself an equity feminist but is despised by Third-Wave feminists and regressives, was sponsored by the YAF to speak this coming Tuesday at Cal State University at Los Angeles (CSULA). Here’s the poster advertising her talk

“Where feminism went wrong.” Well, that’s just damned offensive, and so two feminists were filmed by the YAFers going around campus tearing down the posters. Here’s a video:

As the YAF website notes:

After being confronted by a CSULA YAF student, the vandal repeatedly insisted the fliers were “offensive.”

One of the feminists claimed removing the fliers was her First Amendment right.

“This is my freedom of speech,” she said.

“So it’s freedom of speech to infringe on our freedom of speech?” the YAF student responded.

He didn’t get an answer.

This is what it’s come to on some campuses: students deem that they have the right to remove any posters deemed “offensive” as part of their “freedom of speech.” But only an extremist could deem Sommers or her message as “offensive.” Challenging, yes. A rebuke to Third Wave feminism, certainly. What these mushbrain vandals need to learn is the obvious lesson that if you’re “offended” by someone challenging your ideas without attacking your personally, well, too damn bad. That doesn’t give you the right to engage in censorship; and censorship is certainly what’s going on in the video above, for these vandals are denying other students the possibility of even hearing that Sommers will be lecturing.

h/t: Amy Alkon

Nick Cohen on the flaws of the “cultural appropriation” warriors

September 29, 2016 • 11:00 am

I keep saying that Nick Cohen is an Anglophonic treasure. In terms of his straightforwardness and adherence to classical rather than Regressive Leftism, he’s the closest thing we have to the late Christopher Hitchens. And everyone should read his two books You Can’t Read this Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom and What’s Left?: How Liberals Lost Their Way.

In his column at Standpoint this week, Cohen has finally written about the Cultural Appropriation Wars, using as his springboard the fracas involving Lionel Shriver, a white woman who gave a talk at the Brisbane Writer’s Festival defending a writer’s prerogative to write about the lives of marginalized and oppressed people—indeed, about anybody. In response, the black Australian Muslim writer Yassmin Abdel-Maglied, mortally offended at what was not that provocative a talk, stalked out of Shriver’s talk in tears, and wrote a petulant screed in the Guardian about the dangers of culturally appropriating minority characters. I was strongly on Shriver’s side (see here, here and here for my posts on the story).

And so I’m pleased that Cohen agrees with me, and on several issues, including the right to try such writing, even if it fails, and on the notion that no group is homogeneous, and that there’s no culturally approved way to write about marginalized characters except to make them flawless heroes. And that would be a disaster for fiction, since everyone’s flawed and flaws, in fact, are what makes good fiction.

Just two excerpts of Cohen’s piece to whet your appetite. In the first, he shows how you just can’t win when trying to placate the social justice warriors. (I used to use that term but then stopped because I thought it was offensive to people who really were concerned about social justice instead of just promulgating purity tests and flaunting their own virtue and purity; but now I think I may adopt it again):

Jonathan Franzen said recently that, because he had few black friends, he would not dream of creating a black character. Notions of identity politics and cultural purity lead to segregation. Yet when Franzen acknowledged it, the same type of social justice warrior who criticised Shriver criticised him. None quite demanded that he must create black characters, but, as one said, his reprehensible admission had weakened the fight for “diversity and inclusion” — as if the two were synonymous.

And that is how the Left eats its own, a theme of Cohen’s book What’s Left. And in the final bit of his article, Cohen makes an argument for the right of cultural appropriation that I see as unassailable (I’ve put the telling bit in bold):

Given the passion behind the assaults on cultural appropriation, can we expect the appearance of culturally sensitive novels and dramas whose frightened writers confine themselves to their tribal homelands or apply for visas if they wish to stray beyond its borders. It’s possible, but unlikely.

Shriver asked who a writer should go to for permission to publish her story of a trans woman or Nigerian man, when no one had the authority to issue permission on behalf of others. When I wrote about freedom of speech, for instance, an editor wanted “a Muslim scholar” to assure him that a passage about the life of Muhammad was not “offensive” (by which he meant “not likely to get my office bombed”). A liberal Muslim activist said it was fine. If an Islamist or Salafist had read the book, he would have said the opposite.

The great failing of identity politics and arguments against cultural appropriation is they assume identities and cultures are islands with warships patrolling their coasts. Cultures mix. None exists that is not a hybrid except possibly in the Amazon rainforest. Not everyone in an ethnicity shares the same identity, and it is a rank prejudice to treat them as if they do. Freedom of the individual is the freedom not to have your autonomy denied by collectives who claim to speak on your behalf. In other words, there is no legitimate cultural authority to stamp a writer’s passport. [JAC: I’ve noted before that while some black writers criticized white author William Styron’s book The Confessions of Nat Turner, about a slave, other black writers praised the book.]

The logical conclusion of cultural appropriation is solipsism. For why stop at saying a person of one culture cannot appropriate the experience of another? By what right can I write about you, or you me? If no one can imagine or inquire about life in another culture, how can they do so about the life of another person? The self will then be the only subject. Solipsism may power the social justice warriors, who weep about how grievously their feelings have been offended. But it is unlikely to produce fiction even they will want to read.

We’re now past the time when blatant and invidious stereotypes can be counted as good fiction, and even if they are published, everyone has a right to criticize them. But nobody has the right to dictate what subjects—or what people—can and cannot be written about.

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