Cultural Appropriation

While the questions of appropriation and artistic freedom are nuanced and layered, they arise today from the most mundane of human attitudes – entitlement and indifference. So lets begin by calling a spade a spade (pardon the inverted allusion to colour). The blinkered and belligerent thrust of Trumpish communications seems to have found revealing expression in the midnight twitterings of our own Canadian media elites. The indignation expressed by some of the keepers of Canadian culture reveals the reality of our national paradigm far more clearly than the most astute critique.  As Zainub Verjee notes “The panicked tone of the accusations of censorship leads me to suspect that what is being asserted has little to do with artistic freedom per se, and everything to do with a bitter fight to retain normative status, and the privileges that flow from it.” Indeed, it does seem to me that the supremacist entitlements that inform the norms of the national order have momentarily revealed themselves.