Cultural appropriation in the news

The issue of cultural appropriation is getting some significant press attention this week. On Canadian Broadcasting, two writers faced off concerning the editor of Write Magazine’s flippant call for a cultural appropriation prize to encourage writers to imagine subjects outside their own cultures—and how some of Canada’s most influential editors actually pledged money for this award. In the Washington Post, George F. Will dismisses what he calls “the left’s obsession with cultural appropriation” as “authoritarianism leavened with philistinism.” But I think that to countenance cultural appropriation, which almost invariably traffics in lazy stereotypes and factually baseless fantasies, is itself a form of philistinism.