America IS 'cultural appropriation,' so get over it All we hold dear was created by throwing everything in the pot to produce something better

Jordan Harris | Louisville Courier-Journal

A few weeks ago, upon the removal of four monuments to the Confederacy, Mitch Landrieu, the Mayor of New Orleans, gave the exact speech that America needed. It was a speech reminiscent of a time when politicians actually had something worth saying, and as Frank Bruni of The New York Times pointed out, a reminder that eloquence can still exist in a world otherwise dominated by childish tweets. It was an equally powerful reminder of a way of thinking that seemed to be left for dead by modern liberals.

Landrieu, probably inadvertently, provided a valuable contrast to the narrative of “cultural appropriation,” a term that some have adopted to discourage any attempt by people of different backgrounds to exchange and celebrate their differences.

He spoke instead of the value of America’s diversity, and the ways it makes us a stronger nation. “All we hold dear is created by throwing everything in the pot; creating, producing something better; everything a product of our historic diversity,” Landrieu said. “We are proof that out of many we are one, and we are better for it!”

It’s an illustration made all the better by the fact that he is from New Orleans, a place where the value of diversity is self-evident, but one that resonates anywhere in the country. Pointing to America’s founding principles, he noted that, “We can more closely connect with integrity to the founding principles of our nation and forge a clearer and straighter path toward a better city and a more perfect union.”

His view is the right one. To work together, as one people, in overcoming our biggest challenges is to adopt the core ideals of America, not to stand in contrast to them. The cultural appropriation narrative, however, is interwoven with a belief that America itself is something to be ashamed of, rather than celebrated. As George Will wrote recently, “Indignation about appropriation is a new frontier in the ever-expanding empire of cultivated victimhood.”

Thus, according to this belief, any attempt to celebrate the different cultures that make up our country fails to recognize its history of victimization and is, therefore, an affront to the “oppressed” group.

The damage done by this belief far exceeds that of guilty appropriators.

Two prominent liberal intellectuals, recognizing dangerous trends in leftist thought in the 1990s, sought to avoid the regressive pathway that fostered these ideas. Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s book The Disuniting of America and Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country took on these subjects, with both men aiming their critiques at fellow liberals. Rorty’s thesis was an encouragement to return to an earlier way of thinking, while Schlesinger’s thesis was to avoid a way of thinking that he saw on the horizon.

Schlesinger, who was most famous as the “court historian” of the John F. Kennedy administration, argued that the left’s allegiance to identity politics threatened the American identity. A narrow-minded adherence to what makes us different would put us on a pathway to a disunited nation. His urgings sound much like Mayor Landrieu’s calls for unity, but in the decades since his book has not encouraged deviation. Schlesinger almost perfectly predicted the path of the American left.

Rorty divided the left into two separate and competing groups; the “cultural left” and the “progressive left.” The cultural left, an extension of post-modern intellectuals like Michel Foucault, offered critiques of society but made no attempt at solutions. The “progressive left,” with champions like Walt Whitman and John Dewey, acknowledged American exceptionalism, took genuine pride in the country and sought to make progress through their politics. The ultimate hope of the progressive left was for a better country, and to have such hope one must take pride in the country, to begin with.

Both men have thus far lost the ideological battle.

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Rorty’s “cultural left,” which others have termed the “regressive left,” dominated Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, monopolizes the narrative on college campuses, and drives many of our national conversations. Doing so, it provides fuel for an equally disgusting intolerance on the right, and indoctrinates a generation of young people to have nothing more than shame for their country.

We are left with a class of “conservatives” that want to conserve all of the wrong things (i.e. the Confederacy), with liberals that make no attempt at progress, and a deeply divided country. In Landrieu’s speech, we have a great opportunity to change the narrative and adopt a constructive dialogue that helps us achieve a united country. We should seize it.

Jordan Harris is the executive director of the Pegasus Institute in Louisville, Kentucky. This piece was first published inThe (Louisville) Courier-Journal.

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