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New York Times op-ed columnist Bari Weiss recently decried what she calls the “increasingly strident left” for its “separate-but-equal” rhetoric around the question of cultural appropriation. According to Weiss, “charges of cultural appropriation are being hurled at every corner of American life: the art museum, the restaurant, the movie theater, the fashion show, the novel and, especially, the college campus.” Cultural appropriation has become a flash point for debate. From sites as ordinary as dining rooms to those as lofty as the opera house, conflict has erupted over perceived power imbalances in cultural exchange. But Weiss seems unaware that the Left is hardly unified on this matter, with debates on cultural appropriation and identity politics perpetually starting feuds and ending friendships. Weiss, however, flattens any dialogue over the subject into nonexistence: The logic of those casting the stones goes something like this: Stealing is bad. It’s especially terrible when those doing the stealing are “rich” — as in, they come from a dominant racial, religious, cultural or ethnic group — and those they are stealing from are “poor.” It isn’t clear whether Weiss is equating the “rich” with “a dominant racial, religious, cultural or ethnic group” or if she’s alleging that the Left makes this conflation. She doesn’t bother to explain what she means by “poor.” Weiss then uses these ill-defined terms to separate cultural appropriation from cultural development, a distinction she claims the “strident left” fails to see. Few of us doubt that stealing is wrong, especially from the poor. But the accusation of “cultural appropriation” is overwhelmingly being used as an objection to syncretism — the mixing of different thoughts, religions, cultures and ethnicities that often ends up creating entirely new ones. In other words: the most natural process in a melting-pot country like ours. Weiss differentiates appropriation — stealing — from syncretism, the organic synthesis of separate cultural groups’ practices. Although she implicitly allows for the possibility of politically objectionable forms of appropriation, she doesn’t give any examples. Even more disingenuously, Weiss suggests that syncretism demonstrates the uniqueness of one culture — namely, American culture, that “melting pot” we heard about in elementary school social studies. Weiss’s commentary has, rightly, met with widespread criticism. A response in Paste called it the work of “another writer who thinks white people deserve accolades when they take an idea from a marginalized culture and abuse it like it’s an accessory they own.” But the column’s problems go deeper than who Weiss is, which cultural practices she cites, and how she treats those citations. If Weiss “doesn’t know what cultural appropriation is,” as Paste’s headline claims, what is it?

Process vs. Product The word “appropriation” is now used to denote a wide range of practices. One that Weiss doesn’t concern herself with is subcultural formation, which, as it was theorized by Marxist thinkers like Stuart Hall, describes how groups, especially marginalized groups, use subcultures to build community. There is a broader category of cultural syncretism, which Weiss claims to be defending, that describes exchange across cultural barriers. Finally, there is commodification, in which capital reproduces a cultural practice to generate profit. These elements are not always clearly separated, but our understanding of cultural appropriation suffers if we fail to identify the material factors at play. By suppressing how economic and social hierarchies shape culture, Weiss creates a false dichotomy. She glibly dismisses those who claim that cultural appropriation is an instance of the rich stealing from the poor, but she doesn’t explain whether this is because she believes that the rich are entitled to these spoils, or because she believes that the gap between rich and poor has no bearing on cultural production. She imputes this incoherence to “the strident left” without advancing an alternative framework. Weiss’s terms conflate material effects with idealist concepts like racial difference. As Barbara Fields has pointed out, this error inverts social processes and their products. Summarizing her work on race with Karen Fields, she says, We see race not as a physical fact, but as a product of racism. And we see racism not as an attitude or a state of mind, like bigotry: it’s an action. It’s acting on a double standard, with that double standard itself based on ancestry or supposed ancestry. In short, racism is real, but race is not. When people talk about race, they’re referring to a range of factors, including biological phenotype and cultural heritage, often neglecting to differentiate between them. While phenotypical and cultural difference will always exist, they are not inextricably linked, nor are they determined by birth. The most discerning thinkers who have dealt with the politics of culture do not make this mistake. In fact, some early critics of cultural appropriation weren’t concerned with syncretism itself. The object of their analysis was a problem Weiss doesn’t acknowledge: capitalism. Weiss fittingly uses the MTV Video Music Awards to launch her diatribe, as music criticism has been the site of the most intense debates over cultural appropriation. The poet Amiri Baraka, a founder of the Black Arts Movement, addressed this subject in the context of his advocacy for black jazz musicians. Even through the mid-sixties, white musicians like Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond tended to overshadow artists like John Coltrane. In his 1963 essay “Jazz and the White Critic,” Baraka writes: Failure to understand, for instance, that Paul Desmond and John Coltrane represent not only two very divergent ways of thinking about music, but more importantly two very different ways of viewing the world, is at the seat of most of the established misconceptions that are daily passed off as intelligent commentary on jazz or jazz criticism. The complexity of the question led Baraka through a range of perspectives, including black nationalism, which temporarily mired his thinking in biological essentialism. But over a lifetime of active intellectual engagement, political practice, and cultural production, he refined his perspective, as he explained in a 2007 interview: In the United States, whatever you say becomes commodified immediately, in terms of the mainstream. I don’t have any problem with that per se; all cultures learn from each other. The problem is, if The Beatles are gonna tell me they learned everything they know from Blind Willie John, I wanna know why Blind Willie John is still running an elevator in Jackson, Mississippi. It’s that kind of inequality that is abusive, not the actual appropriation of culture, because that’s normal. In the final measure, Baraka wasn’t concerned with whether white musicians imitate black musicians. His quarrel was with a society that allows some to rake in profits at the expense of others, a process that has consistently and aggressively exploited racial divisions.