Is acting white cultural appropriation? No doubt, but what's wrong with that? What's wrong with cultural appropriation?
I culturally appropriate every day from the Greeks and the Romans and the Jews. Why shouldn't blacks borrow from and make use of the products of white culture?
I also appropriate culturally from the Jews who play the blues, who themselves 'culturally appropriated' the blues from black bluesmen. Mike Bloomfield, for example, not only appropriates, respectfully and gratefully, from the likes of B. B. King, but improves and outplays many of the originators as in Carmelita's Skiffle and Albert's Shuffle. Call me a racist! Call me a Jew lover!
I appropriated 'p.c.-whipped' from Ed Feser. Where did he get it? No idea: maybe he coined it. Maybe he 'appropriated' it. Heavens!
My Italian mother culturally appropriated the English language when she was ten years old. Later, she taught it to me. So I am a language appropriator at one remove. How dare an Italian learn the English language? Doesn't it belong to the English? Don't they own it?
The early Christians culturally appropriated Greek philosophy in order to articulate and defend their worldview. And it's a good thing they did; else we wouldn't be talking about it.
And what is our entire philosophical tradition if not a series of cultural appropriations from the Greeks, and Plato in particular?
The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them. [. . .] Thus in one sense by stating my belief that the train of thought in these lectures is Platonic, I am doing no more than expressing the hope that it falls within the European tradition. (Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, Corrected Edition, The Free Press, 1978, p. 39)
I could go on. But you get the point unless you are either stupid or a liberal. Is there any content to the latter disjunction? Or is it like 'firefly or glow bug'?
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