Historically European countries were far more open to other civilizations and cultures than vice versa. In response to the 1793 Macartney mission to China, the Qianlong Emperor famously wrote to King George III that he "set no value on objects strange or ingenious, and [had] no use for your country's manufactures", a rejection of the United Kingdom's desire for greater exchange between the two nations that presaged the Qing dynasty's eventual decline and collapse.
Sadly, the situation seems to have reversed. The average American today knows far less about China than does the average Chinese about America, a fact emphasized in Kishore Mahbubani's recent book Has China Won. Prior to the pandemic in 2020, there were roughly 370,000 Chinese students studying in the US compared to around 12,000 American students studying in China. On a per capita basis there were about 7.2 times as many Chinese studying in the United States as the reverse. People in China have gained far more exposure to the history and culture of America in recent decades than the other way around.
We increasingly see Americans view everything Chinese with intense suspicion. Huawei and ZTE are effectively banned from the American 5G market despite their world leading technology. Our political class is fighting among themselves to grant the government dictatorial powers so that it can ban the supposed threat that is TikTok, despite TikTok having transformed the contours of Gen Z and Millennial pop culture. Chinese companies like CATL constitute roughly 55-60% of the global market for EV batteries and are indispensable partners for American companies like Tesla. In particular, in recent years Chinese companies have helped commercialize LFP batteries which unlike their NMC counterparts require no cobalt, a mineral whose mining engenders considerable human suffering. If the Biden administration has any chance of meeting its EV goals, it almost certainly needs to work more closely with leading Chinese companies rather than less.
In spite of all that, Ford's recent plans to license CATL's battery technology for a Michigan plant have run into considerable headwinds in Congress. Plans for another Gotion battery plant near Big Rapids have also aroused the ire of nearby residents. Likewise, despite DJI drones becoming an indispensable part of many local police and fire departments around the country, Ron DeSantis recently banned the government use of all Chinese drones across the state of Florida. By some estimates, the state has spent roughly $200 million of taxpayer money on their existing fleet of DJI and other Chinese drones. That money has effectively gone to waste given the grounding of Florida's Chinese-origin drone fleet. Given the lack of viable alternatives, the lives of real American men and women are being put at risk.
As I've observed events over the past decade or so, I've become increasingly convinced that the mindset of most Americans towards China eerily parallels the mindset of the woke in the United States towards supposed systemic racism and white supremacy. Author Martin Jacques compared the West's increasing suspicion of all things Chinese to the Qing dynasty's close mindedness to Western overtures in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The latter suffered the humiliation of two Opium Wars and a defeat against the Japanese prior to its collapse in 1912.
Glenn, I loved your statement about cultural confidence, because I absolutely agree that lack of cultural confidence explains the American left's obsession with deconstructing the history and culture of the West while also explaining modern day American antagonism towards China. How ironic then that the country and people we seem to despise the most might be the ones who help maintain the cultural traditions of the West as well as preserve whatever vestiges remain of the meritocratic ethos in the American public sphere.
I truly believe that the heterodox community, which has been such a force for good in terms of identifying and combating the forces of woke lunacy in this country, has basically fallen into the very same trap of wokeness on the topic of China. Ron DeSantis' decision to ban Chinese drones from government use in Florida is every bit as woke as the Art Institute of Chicago's decision to ax all of their nice white lady docents and every bit as dangerous as the erosion of merit in the medical profession in this country.
Always amazed by how tone deaf many educators seem to be in trying to impart education to the current generation There is a great new book “The Black Intellectual Tradition: Reading Freedom in Classical Literature.”. The book points out the following
Black American writers have eagerly participated in this conversation. Phillis Wheatley was a poet of the Revolutionary War era who, despite her status as an enslaved person, was nourished on the classics. When she mailed one of her poems to George Washington, the general shared it with a friend in a letter praising Wheatley’s “great poetical Genius” and affirming it as worthy of publication. Nineteenth-century abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass memorized the speeches of Cicero, in the hope that powerful oratory of the sort that once swayed the Roman Senate and courts would move America’s own leadership toward needed change.
NAACP co-founder W.E.B. Du Bois elegantly used the Roman poet Ovid’s tale of fleet-footed Atalanta, who lost a race because she turned her attention to some distracting golden apples, to illustrate why Black men and women should never settle for a narrow education that limits our worldview.
Huey Newton, a founder of the Black Panther Party in 1966, had improved his reading by studying Plato’s “Republic” and wrote in “Revolutionary Suicide” that he shared insights from Plato’s “allegory of the cave” with other Black men on his block.
The great educator Marva Collins, who founded Westside Preparatory School in 1975 for underserved families in Chicago, taught her students from the classics — opening their minds to understand not just their own stories, but the universal human story. Collins encouraged the children to look beyond their difficult circumstances, saying, “You must become citizens of the world, like Socrates.”
NAACP co-founder W.E.B. Du Bois elegantly used the Roman poet Ovid’s tale of fleet-footed Atalanta, who lost a race because she turned her attention to some distracting golden apples, to illustrate why Black men and women should never settle for a narrow education that limits our worldview.
Huey Newton, a founder of the Black Panther Party in 1966, had improved his reading by studying Plato’s “Republic” and wrote in “Revolutionary Suicide” that he shared insights from Plato’s “allegory of the cave” with other Black men on his block.
The great educator Marva Collins, who founded Westside Preparatory School in 1975 for underserved families in Chicago, taught her students from the classics — opening their minds to understand not just their own stories, but the universal human story. Collins encouraged the children to look beyond their difficult circumstances, saying, “You must become citizens of the world, like Socrates.”
Where would the great African American invention of Jazz be without European musical instruments. ""Cultural appropriations" have produced unthinkably great hybrids.
Glenn, I have a comment of gratitude. It could be here or appended to any discussion but my hope is that you'll read it. I have a 28-yr-old son and I suggested he listen to some episodes. At this point he says he's deep into your archives. For a few years in his early 20s he neglected his education, perhaps believing it wasn't for him. He's a different man today, having realized through attention and effort that education certainly is for him and that he has a future, a future in service to his community in the medical world. He's reading one of your books in addition to his course books and says having your voice in his head all the time is very enriching and helps him frame his thoughts when thinking of issues, academic or social. An professor might say he's re-learning how to think. Of course he loves your sense of humor and especially your discussions with John. He said just yesterday how privileged he feels to be exposed to your thoughts and voices. So why did this come to mind just now? It was this Glennism in this clip: "Heather, I have a thought; I wonder how you'd react to it..." We are both looking forward to reading your new book. Many, many thanks, Glenn.
To be fair, we should go back far in time to think about cultural appropriation; lots of language appropriation happened (eg others adopted Latin, English), works of Greek philosophy were widely appropriated, hunter-gatherers appropriated farming from others, etc. Pretty sure humans have been doing cultural appropriation for a couple hundred thousand years and no culture today has their own pure homegrown culture. And why does Jazz get such recognition when it is only a recent and very minor impact of culture when compared to others like Latin and Greek classical philosophy? Nvm I know why :D.
'Tolstoy is mine! Shakespeare is mine! As a man of the West, I am an inheritor of all of its traditions and great figures'. I hear you on this! I'm fed up with the fetishization of ethnicity, with getting your genes done to find out who you really are'.
'Cultural diversity' sucks--as I know because I grew up with it in a gritty white-ethnic city where everyone 'was' something--Italian, Polish, Jewish, or whatever. And everyone took care of their own and couldn't fathom the idea of doing anything for a 'perfect stranger'--someone who was not a member of their family or tribe. When I went away to college in the midwest I thought I'd died and gone to heaven because it wasn't tribal, because the first question people asked when someone was mentioned in conversation wasn't 'What is he?'
But then people who'd never experienced the real thing set about promoting neo-ethnicity--the obligation to identify with one's ancestral culture, however remote. Race and blood--the tyranny of authenticity. I'M a person of the West, of Europe, and the Anglo-sphere, of America. I'm sick of being told that this isn't really mine, that I should identify with ancestral cultures which are completely alien to me.
Dear Mr. Barchetta: [Loury's program may have abruptly ended my attempt to explain fully; not enough room at the end to complete my response to you without a start-over. (?)]
Thank you for your additional observations and questions. Alas, I may be too far removed from the age cohorts you cited to have answers more fitting than those I offered. This may be due to how ancient I am, and removed from today's nihilism that possesses many blacks younger than 22 or thereabouts, even though I do have a 10-year-old great granddaughter. You see, come August, I'll become 93, though I believe you can tell I remain involved in the types of questions we two are discussing. I like to think that my seniority and experience provide insight that younger people may lack. You'll have to be the judge of that. (At the end of my dialogue, I see some of it has been cropped at the end. I can't tell whether it picks up later on, so if toward the end it seems clipped, it was not my doing unless I accidentally hit a key that I should not have hit. I can only hope for the best, playing it by ear.)
What's more, my experiences from childhood on were unique compared to what I observe today among youth groups. This brief timeline may quickly help you decide:
I was born into the early years of the Great Depression in a smallish town in Minnesota in 1930, when 24% of workers (nearly all men except teachers & nurses) were unemployed. I was the ONLY kid of color in that town of 23,000. My dad was blue collar. Owned his own body shop. Did impeccable work.
Though technically black, he looked as white as you do. My complexion falls into the category many called "cafe au lait" back then (coffee with cream, in French).
As it happened, Minnesota was the least prejudiced state in America, by my reckoning. People were accepted based on their character and behavior. Dad was a good role model. A disciplinarian as well. He taught me phonics before I hit kindergarten.
11 years later found us living in San Diego where he worked at the aircraft company that made Liberator bombers. His experience repairing damaged auto bodies endowed him with skills related to building airplanes. He looked white, so likely checked the "white" box on the application form, and was hired. (That question on hiring applications has since been outlawed.)
60 days later came Pearl Harbor & the war years. In San Diego, racism was hardly known, thankfully. My high school class was like a little United Nations: Mainly Anglo whites, plus quite a few Mexican kids, plus a good number of black kids, plus Portuguese, Italian, Greek, Philippino, Chinese and Japanese kids. Everybody got along without animosity, as is supposed to be in any American school.
How lucky I was to have had the good fortune to land in academically excellent schools from start to finish, but schools totally without racial animosity.
Higher education was not a "thing" in my home environment, so I did not start higher education until '49 after moving to Chicago where my mother lived. The following year, N. Korea invaded S. Korea. I entered the Air Force Nov. 20,1950. After 3 years, which included spending 6 months in Japan, I was mustered out, having acquired almost another two semesters college credit by enrolling in courses taught on the base or at nearby colleges, but not quickly enough to qualify for Air Cadet School. I was mustered out after 3 years, not the four I enlisted for.
I finished my BA at the U. of Illinois and pursued a career in marketing & selling. My first choice was Advertising During my senior year, I took a day-long test sponsored by the American Association of Advertising Agencies which graded me stronger in the attributes of a successful ad man than 95% of those already employed in advertising. Didn't matter. No Negroes (the polite term used at the time) wanted.
I was eventually hired by a Chicago brewery, selling beer. It was a start.
Before long, I segued to Helene Curtis Industries which made products for professional hairdressers. It was a good fit. 26 years later, I retired from Revlon Professional Products as Vice President/Advertising & Sales Promotion of that Division.
Along the way I acquired a wife and a son. From my first marriage, I already had a daughter. My daughter was the first black female to earn a degree in architecture from the Illinois Institute of Technology. Immediately afterwards, she earned a law degree from the U. of Chicago. My son (who, by the way, looked absolutely white because his mother was half Irish, half American Indian) graduated from Northwestern School of Medicine as an anesthesiologist. Alas, he died of non-symptomatic coronary disease at age 40.
My daughter practiced law for 6 years, was counsel for the Chicago School Board, and Vice Presidents for several leading firms in Chicago. She now is CEO of the DuSable Museum of African-American History. If ever you are in Chicago, take a tour.
Knowing what you now know about the arc of my personal life, it may be easier for you to understand my critiques, convictions and points of view. All were hard-earned. It is impossible for anyone black to navigate life in America without overcoming the obstacles invented & maintained to frustrate black ambition.
As much as I appreciate your mature and embracing view of life in America, as I hope I have been able to convey, simply being a competent go-getter does not guarantee success for blacks as it usually does for whites. Hard work and sheer luck figure into it. The person deciding to hire you may hate blacks deep down, or at best have little willingness to break the color line to hire you, UNLESS it fits a larger need on his/her part. Equal Employment Opportunity today beats what it was back in the mid-'50's, but in the minds of many whites, reservations and hesitancy still exist regardless of credentials & work history. Most will take a chance on a marginal white applicant before saying yes to a superlatively qualified black candidate. My whole life, the statistics show that white guys with a high school diploma are usually paid more than a black guy with a bachelor's degree. Bias is bias. Emotion is emotion.
The only work environment I know of where that does not apply is in the military. Which was never the career path for me, and is not, for the majority of black college grads.
Incidentally, going back to the challenges of race in personal life choices, my son-in-law is a Dutchman from Rotterdam who graduated from IIT with my daughter.
I offer this much detail so as to make it easier to understand my views, not to congratulate myself. I know small companies and I have been part of Fortune 100 companies.
While I have family kin who are black and look black, others of them are but look white. I happen to look more Mexican or Puerto Rican than black, causing many non-blacks to mis-classify me.
An aside: While in the Air Force in San Antonio, aiming to try for Air Cadet Training which required 2 years college while I had one year-plus, I tried enrolling in night school at San Antonio College. A high-School buddy from San Diego was already in the Air Force there. He accompanied me to enroll.
which occurred with no questions asked. I attended my one night class the first evening. Walking back to my car to return to the base, I heard someone calling my name across the courtyard. It was a middle-aged guy in a business suit: The college dean. A bit breathless, he asked me directly: "Manuel, are you Negro?"
"Yes, Dean. Why do you ask?"
"I must ask you to disenroll! If the Texas Accreditation Board found out, we would lose our accreditation!"
End of higher education in Texas, unless I wanted to enroll in a segregated black college there which offered no academic courses at all; only vocational courses. (Dialogue maxed out here? I give up!)
I always thought that I could love Carlos Santana's music. It belonged to me also because he is American. Same for jazz and blues because those artists were American, and as American artists their music belonged to me too. It made me proud and happy. I was told of course that people like me had no right to the superior products of people I had personally oppressed. Eventually I was shamed into just keeping my mouth shut on the subject. Your words are good to hear.
I thought anyway that the change to more interiority that Heather McDonald is talking about can easily be seen in Cervantes and Shakespeare by 20th-century commentators looking back on these two authors. The audiences for whom Cervantes and Shakespeare are writing are broad audiences who have barely been affected by any imperial adventures by England and Spain AFAIK.
History consists, as far as I can see, of three things: unceasing and pervasive "cultural appropriation," repeated spasms of "cancel culture," and, occasionally, a genuinely new creative contribution that everyone else either wants to appropriate or cancel.
Another great example of cultural appropriation: Tiger Woods. This black and Asian kid, and his parents, took this white sport and didn’t just buy into it — he absolutely owned it for better part of 20 years. We were all richer for his appropriation.
Well, you've also articulated, obviously, the Du Bois statement, which just breaks my heart. I can't even repeat it, because I'll start crying again. But you know, his sense of walking arm-in-arm with Aristotle and Aurelius, and a magnificent belief in his and everybody else's ability to take in the entirety of Western or probably world civilization
In the “Soul of White Folks” DuBois writes
The discovery of personal whiteness among the world’s peoples is a very modern thing — a nineteenth and twentieth century matter, indeed. The ancient world would have laughed at such a distinction. The Middle Age regarded skin color with mild curiosity; and even up into the eighteenth century we were hammering our national manikins into one, great, Universal Man, with fine frenzy which ignored color and race even more than birth. Today we have changed all that, and the world in a sudden, emotional conversion has discovered that it is white and by that token, wonderful!
This assumption that of all the hues of God whiteness alone is inherently and obviously better than brownness or tan leads to curious acts; even the sweeter souls of the dominant world as they discourse with me on weather, weal, and woe are continually playing above their actual words an obligato of tune and tone, saying:
“My poor, un-white thing! Weep not nor rage. I know, too well, that the curse of God lies heavy on you. Why? That is not for me to say, but be brave! Do your work in your lowly sphere, praying the good Lord that into heaven above, where all is love, you may, one day, be born — white!”
I do not laugh. I am quite straight-faced as I ask soberly:
“But what on earth is whiteness that one should so desire it?”
Then always, somehow, some way, silently but clearly, I am given to understand that whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen!
The only thing that is happening now is that attention is being made to accomplishments of Black artists in history. This means that a few nanoseconds less is being spent on European artists. Henry Louis Gates has an excellent multi volume set of the images of Blacks in Western civilization that takes us back to the Middle Ages and forward. The fact that and overwhelming number of Black faces are not showing up at a concert is meaningless. We are busy reading about and watching the Chevalier Saint Georges on screen.
I’ll get around to her new book in due time. I guessing that it will be another tome that asks DuBois’ question, “How does it feel to be a problem, Black America?”
Well, you've also articulated, obviously, the Du Bois statement, which just breaks my heart. I can't even repeat it, because I'll start crying again. But you know, his sense of walking arm-in-arm with Aristotle and Aurelius, and a magnificent belief in his and everybody else's ability to take in the entirety of Western or probably world civilization
In the “Soul of White Folks” DuBois writes
The discovery of personal whiteness among the world’s peoples is a very modern thing — a nineteenth and twentieth century matter, indeed. The ancient world would have laughed at such a distinction. The Middle Age regarded skin color with mild curiosity; and even up into the eighteenth century we were hammering our national manikins into one, great, Universal Man, with fine frenzy which ignored color and race even more than birth. Today we have changed all that, and the world in a sudden, emotional conversion has discovered that it is white and by that token, wonderful!
This assumption that of all the hues of God whiteness alone is inherently and obviously better than brownness or tan leads to curious acts; even the sweeter souls of the dominant world as they discourse with me on weather, weal, and woe are continually playing above their actual words an obligato of tune and tone, saying:
“My poor, un-white thing! Weep not nor rage. I know, too well, that the curse of God lies heavy on you. Why? That is not for me to say, but be brave! Do your work in your lowly sphere, praying the good Lord that into heaven above, where all is love, you may, one day, be born — white!”
I do not laugh. I am quite straight-faced as I ask soberly:
“But what on earth is whiteness that one should so desire it?”
Then always, somehow, some way, silently but clearly, I am given to understand that whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen!
The only thing that is happening now is that attention is being made to accomplishments of Black artists in history. This means that a few nanoseconds less is being spent on European artists. Henry Louis Gates has an excellent multi volume set of the images of Blacks in Western civilization that takes us back to the Middle Ages and forward. The fact that and overwhelming number of Black faces are not showing up at a concert is meaningless. We are busy reading about and watching the Chevalier Saint Georges on screen.
I’ll get around to her new book in due time. I guessing that it will be another tome that asks DuBois’ question, “How does it feel to be a problem, Black America?”
Historically European countries were far more open to other civilizations and cultures than vice versa. In response to the 1793 Macartney mission to China, the Qianlong Emperor famously wrote to King George III that he "set no value on objects strange or ingenious, and [had] no use for your country's manufactures", a rejection of the United Kingdom's desire for greater exchange between the two nations that presaged the Qing dynasty's eventual decline and collapse.
Sadly, the situation seems to have reversed. The average American today knows far less about China than does the average Chinese about America, a fact emphasized in Kishore Mahbubani's recent book Has China Won. Prior to the pandemic in 2020, there were roughly 370,000 Chinese students studying in the US compared to around 12,000 American students studying in China. On a per capita basis there were about 7.2 times as many Chinese studying in the United States as the reverse. People in China have gained far more exposure to the history and culture of America in recent decades than the other way around.
We increasingly see Americans view everything Chinese with intense suspicion. Huawei and ZTE are effectively banned from the American 5G market despite their world leading technology. Our political class is fighting among themselves to grant the government dictatorial powers so that it can ban the supposed threat that is TikTok, despite TikTok having transformed the contours of Gen Z and Millennial pop culture. Chinese companies like CATL constitute roughly 55-60% of the global market for EV batteries and are indispensable partners for American companies like Tesla. In particular, in recent years Chinese companies have helped commercialize LFP batteries which unlike their NMC counterparts require no cobalt, a mineral whose mining engenders considerable human suffering. If the Biden administration has any chance of meeting its EV goals, it almost certainly needs to work more closely with leading Chinese companies rather than less.
In spite of all that, Ford's recent plans to license CATL's battery technology for a Michigan plant have run into considerable headwinds in Congress. Plans for another Gotion battery plant near Big Rapids have also aroused the ire of nearby residents. Likewise, despite DJI drones becoming an indispensable part of many local police and fire departments around the country, Ron DeSantis recently banned the government use of all Chinese drones across the state of Florida. By some estimates, the state has spent roughly $200 million of taxpayer money on their existing fleet of DJI and other Chinese drones. That money has effectively gone to waste given the grounding of Florida's Chinese-origin drone fleet. Given the lack of viable alternatives, the lives of real American men and women are being put at risk.
As I've observed events over the past decade or so, I've become increasingly convinced that the mindset of most Americans towards China eerily parallels the mindset of the woke in the United States towards supposed systemic racism and white supremacy. Author Martin Jacques compared the West's increasing suspicion of all things Chinese to the Qing dynasty's close mindedness to Western overtures in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The latter suffered the humiliation of two Opium Wars and a defeat against the Japanese prior to its collapse in 1912.
Glenn, I loved your statement about cultural confidence, because I absolutely agree that lack of cultural confidence explains the American left's obsession with deconstructing the history and culture of the West while also explaining modern day American antagonism towards China. How ironic then that the country and people we seem to despise the most might be the ones who help maintain the cultural traditions of the West as well as preserve whatever vestiges remain of the meritocratic ethos in the American public sphere.
I truly believe that the heterodox community, which has been such a force for good in terms of identifying and combating the forces of woke lunacy in this country, has basically fallen into the very same trap of wokeness on the topic of China. Ron DeSantis' decision to ban Chinese drones from government use in Florida is every bit as woke as the Art Institute of Chicago's decision to ax all of their nice white lady docents and every bit as dangerous as the erosion of merit in the medical profession in this country.
This woman takes cultural appropriation to the next level (and next life):
Black Women Signing Up 4 Reincarnation in India
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogDW5EvpfwM
Always amazed by how tone deaf many educators seem to be in trying to impart education to the current generation There is a great new book “The Black Intellectual Tradition: Reading Freedom in Classical Literature.”. The book points out the following
Black American writers have eagerly participated in this conversation. Phillis Wheatley was a poet of the Revolutionary War era who, despite her status as an enslaved person, was nourished on the classics. When she mailed one of her poems to George Washington, the general shared it with a friend in a letter praising Wheatley’s “great poetical Genius” and affirming it as worthy of publication. Nineteenth-century abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass memorized the speeches of Cicero, in the hope that powerful oratory of the sort that once swayed the Roman Senate and courts would move America’s own leadership toward needed change.
NAACP co-founder W.E.B. Du Bois elegantly used the Roman poet Ovid’s tale of fleet-footed Atalanta, who lost a race because she turned her attention to some distracting golden apples, to illustrate why Black men and women should never settle for a narrow education that limits our worldview.
Huey Newton, a founder of the Black Panther Party in 1966, had improved his reading by studying Plato’s “Republic” and wrote in “Revolutionary Suicide” that he shared insights from Plato’s “allegory of the cave” with other Black men on his block.
The great educator Marva Collins, who founded Westside Preparatory School in 1975 for underserved families in Chicago, taught her students from the classics — opening their minds to understand not just their own stories, but the universal human story. Collins encouraged the children to look beyond their difficult circumstances, saying, “You must become citizens of the world, like Socrates.”
NAACP co-founder W.E.B. Du Bois elegantly used the Roman poet Ovid’s tale of fleet-footed Atalanta, who lost a race because she turned her attention to some distracting golden apples, to illustrate why Black men and women should never settle for a narrow education that limits our worldview.
Huey Newton, a founder of the Black Panther Party in 1966, had improved his reading by studying Plato’s “Republic” and wrote in “Revolutionary Suicide” that he shared insights from Plato’s “allegory of the cave” with other Black men on his block.
The great educator Marva Collins, who founded Westside Preparatory School in 1975 for underserved families in Chicago, taught her students from the classics — opening their minds to understand not just their own stories, but the universal human story. Collins encouraged the children to look beyond their difficult circumstances, saying, “You must become citizens of the world, like Socrates.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/04/05/black-educators-endorse-classics/
This is a much more inviting message for the current generation. If you approach instruction with contempt rather Than invitation, you may fail.
Where would the great African American invention of Jazz be without European musical instruments. ""Cultural appropriations" have produced unthinkably great hybrids.
People might find this cultural evolutionary take on racial issues of interest.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/social-consequences-of-economic-evolution
Glenn, I have a comment of gratitude. It could be here or appended to any discussion but my hope is that you'll read it. I have a 28-yr-old son and I suggested he listen to some episodes. At this point he says he's deep into your archives. For a few years in his early 20s he neglected his education, perhaps believing it wasn't for him. He's a different man today, having realized through attention and effort that education certainly is for him and that he has a future, a future in service to his community in the medical world. He's reading one of your books in addition to his course books and says having your voice in his head all the time is very enriching and helps him frame his thoughts when thinking of issues, academic or social. An professor might say he's re-learning how to think. Of course he loves your sense of humor and especially your discussions with John. He said just yesterday how privileged he feels to be exposed to your thoughts and voices. So why did this come to mind just now? It was this Glennism in this clip: "Heather, I have a thought; I wonder how you'd react to it..." We are both looking forward to reading your new book. Many, many thanks, Glenn.
To be fair, we should go back far in time to think about cultural appropriation; lots of language appropriation happened (eg others adopted Latin, English), works of Greek philosophy were widely appropriated, hunter-gatherers appropriated farming from others, etc. Pretty sure humans have been doing cultural appropriation for a couple hundred thousand years and no culture today has their own pure homegrown culture. And why does Jazz get such recognition when it is only a recent and very minor impact of culture when compared to others like Latin and Greek classical philosophy? Nvm I know why :D.
'Tolstoy is mine! Shakespeare is mine! As a man of the West, I am an inheritor of all of its traditions and great figures'. I hear you on this! I'm fed up with the fetishization of ethnicity, with getting your genes done to find out who you really are'.
'Cultural diversity' sucks--as I know because I grew up with it in a gritty white-ethnic city where everyone 'was' something--Italian, Polish, Jewish, or whatever. And everyone took care of their own and couldn't fathom the idea of doing anything for a 'perfect stranger'--someone who was not a member of their family or tribe. When I went away to college in the midwest I thought I'd died and gone to heaven because it wasn't tribal, because the first question people asked when someone was mentioned in conversation wasn't 'What is he?'
But then people who'd never experienced the real thing set about promoting neo-ethnicity--the obligation to identify with one's ancestral culture, however remote. Race and blood--the tyranny of authenticity. I'M a person of the West, of Europe, and the Anglo-sphere, of America. I'm sick of being told that this isn't really mine, that I should identify with ancestral cultures which are completely alien to me.
Melting pot good! Cultural appropriation bad! Good to hear someone take on the fractal that is America's head up its butt.
Dear Mr. Barchetta: [Loury's program may have abruptly ended my attempt to explain fully; not enough room at the end to complete my response to you without a start-over. (?)]
Thank you for your additional observations and questions. Alas, I may be too far removed from the age cohorts you cited to have answers more fitting than those I offered. This may be due to how ancient I am, and removed from today's nihilism that possesses many blacks younger than 22 or thereabouts, even though I do have a 10-year-old great granddaughter. You see, come August, I'll become 93, though I believe you can tell I remain involved in the types of questions we two are discussing. I like to think that my seniority and experience provide insight that younger people may lack. You'll have to be the judge of that. (At the end of my dialogue, I see some of it has been cropped at the end. I can't tell whether it picks up later on, so if toward the end it seems clipped, it was not my doing unless I accidentally hit a key that I should not have hit. I can only hope for the best, playing it by ear.)
What's more, my experiences from childhood on were unique compared to what I observe today among youth groups. This brief timeline may quickly help you decide:
I was born into the early years of the Great Depression in a smallish town in Minnesota in 1930, when 24% of workers (nearly all men except teachers & nurses) were unemployed. I was the ONLY kid of color in that town of 23,000. My dad was blue collar. Owned his own body shop. Did impeccable work.
Though technically black, he looked as white as you do. My complexion falls into the category many called "cafe au lait" back then (coffee with cream, in French).
As it happened, Minnesota was the least prejudiced state in America, by my reckoning. People were accepted based on their character and behavior. Dad was a good role model. A disciplinarian as well. He taught me phonics before I hit kindergarten.
11 years later found us living in San Diego where he worked at the aircraft company that made Liberator bombers. His experience repairing damaged auto bodies endowed him with skills related to building airplanes. He looked white, so likely checked the "white" box on the application form, and was hired. (That question on hiring applications has since been outlawed.)
60 days later came Pearl Harbor & the war years. In San Diego, racism was hardly known, thankfully. My high school class was like a little United Nations: Mainly Anglo whites, plus quite a few Mexican kids, plus a good number of black kids, plus Portuguese, Italian, Greek, Philippino, Chinese and Japanese kids. Everybody got along without animosity, as is supposed to be in any American school.
How lucky I was to have had the good fortune to land in academically excellent schools from start to finish, but schools totally without racial animosity.
Higher education was not a "thing" in my home environment, so I did not start higher education until '49 after moving to Chicago where my mother lived. The following year, N. Korea invaded S. Korea. I entered the Air Force Nov. 20,1950. After 3 years, which included spending 6 months in Japan, I was mustered out, having acquired almost another two semesters college credit by enrolling in courses taught on the base or at nearby colleges, but not quickly enough to qualify for Air Cadet School. I was mustered out after 3 years, not the four I enlisted for.
I finished my BA at the U. of Illinois and pursued a career in marketing & selling. My first choice was Advertising During my senior year, I took a day-long test sponsored by the American Association of Advertising Agencies which graded me stronger in the attributes of a successful ad man than 95% of those already employed in advertising. Didn't matter. No Negroes (the polite term used at the time) wanted.
I was eventually hired by a Chicago brewery, selling beer. It was a start.
Before long, I segued to Helene Curtis Industries which made products for professional hairdressers. It was a good fit. 26 years later, I retired from Revlon Professional Products as Vice President/Advertising & Sales Promotion of that Division.
Along the way I acquired a wife and a son. From my first marriage, I already had a daughter. My daughter was the first black female to earn a degree in architecture from the Illinois Institute of Technology. Immediately afterwards, she earned a law degree from the U. of Chicago. My son (who, by the way, looked absolutely white because his mother was half Irish, half American Indian) graduated from Northwestern School of Medicine as an anesthesiologist. Alas, he died of non-symptomatic coronary disease at age 40.
My daughter practiced law for 6 years, was counsel for the Chicago School Board, and Vice Presidents for several leading firms in Chicago. She now is CEO of the DuSable Museum of African-American History. If ever you are in Chicago, take a tour.
Knowing what you now know about the arc of my personal life, it may be easier for you to understand my critiques, convictions and points of view. All were hard-earned. It is impossible for anyone black to navigate life in America without overcoming the obstacles invented & maintained to frustrate black ambition.
As much as I appreciate your mature and embracing view of life in America, as I hope I have been able to convey, simply being a competent go-getter does not guarantee success for blacks as it usually does for whites. Hard work and sheer luck figure into it. The person deciding to hire you may hate blacks deep down, or at best have little willingness to break the color line to hire you, UNLESS it fits a larger need on his/her part. Equal Employment Opportunity today beats what it was back in the mid-'50's, but in the minds of many whites, reservations and hesitancy still exist regardless of credentials & work history. Most will take a chance on a marginal white applicant before saying yes to a superlatively qualified black candidate. My whole life, the statistics show that white guys with a high school diploma are usually paid more than a black guy with a bachelor's degree. Bias is bias. Emotion is emotion.
The only work environment I know of where that does not apply is in the military. Which was never the career path for me, and is not, for the majority of black college grads.
Incidentally, going back to the challenges of race in personal life choices, my son-in-law is a Dutchman from Rotterdam who graduated from IIT with my daughter.
I offer this much detail so as to make it easier to understand my views, not to congratulate myself. I know small companies and I have been part of Fortune 100 companies.
While I have family kin who are black and look black, others of them are but look white. I happen to look more Mexican or Puerto Rican than black, causing many non-blacks to mis-classify me.
An aside: While in the Air Force in San Antonio, aiming to try for Air Cadet Training which required 2 years college while I had one year-plus, I tried enrolling in night school at San Antonio College. A high-School buddy from San Diego was already in the Air Force there. He accompanied me to enroll.
which occurred with no questions asked. I attended my one night class the first evening. Walking back to my car to return to the base, I heard someone calling my name across the courtyard. It was a middle-aged guy in a business suit: The college dean. A bit breathless, he asked me directly: "Manuel, are you Negro?"
"Yes, Dean. Why do you ask?"
"I must ask you to disenroll! If the Texas Accreditation Board found out, we would lose our accreditation!"
End of higher education in Texas, unless I wanted to enroll in a segregated black college there which offered no academic courses at all; only vocational courses. (Dialogue maxed out here? I give up!)
I always thought that I could love Carlos Santana's music. It belonged to me also because he is American. Same for jazz and blues because those artists were American, and as American artists their music belonged to me too. It made me proud and happy. I was told of course that people like me had no right to the superior products of people I had personally oppressed. Eventually I was shamed into just keeping my mouth shut on the subject. Your words are good to hear.
I thought anyway that the change to more interiority that Heather McDonald is talking about can easily be seen in Cervantes and Shakespeare by 20th-century commentators looking back on these two authors. The audiences for whom Cervantes and Shakespeare are writing are broad audiences who have barely been affected by any imperial adventures by England and Spain AFAIK.
History consists, as far as I can see, of three things: unceasing and pervasive "cultural appropriation," repeated spasms of "cancel culture," and, occasionally, a genuinely new creative contribution that everyone else either wants to appropriate or cancel.
Another great example of cultural appropriation: Tiger Woods. This black and Asian kid, and his parents, took this white sport and didn’t just buy into it — he absolutely owned it for better part of 20 years. We were all richer for his appropriation.
Another book about the failures of the Negro.
Ms. Mac Donald laments:
Well, you've also articulated, obviously, the Du Bois statement, which just breaks my heart. I can't even repeat it, because I'll start crying again. But you know, his sense of walking arm-in-arm with Aristotle and Aurelius, and a magnificent belief in his and everybody else's ability to take in the entirety of Western or probably world civilization
In the “Soul of White Folks” DuBois writes
The discovery of personal whiteness among the world’s peoples is a very modern thing — a nineteenth and twentieth century matter, indeed. The ancient world would have laughed at such a distinction. The Middle Age regarded skin color with mild curiosity; and even up into the eighteenth century we were hammering our national manikins into one, great, Universal Man, with fine frenzy which ignored color and race even more than birth. Today we have changed all that, and the world in a sudden, emotional conversion has discovered that it is white and by that token, wonderful!
This assumption that of all the hues of God whiteness alone is inherently and obviously better than brownness or tan leads to curious acts; even the sweeter souls of the dominant world as they discourse with me on weather, weal, and woe are continually playing above their actual words an obligato of tune and tone, saying:
“My poor, un-white thing! Weep not nor rage. I know, too well, that the curse of God lies heavy on you. Why? That is not for me to say, but be brave! Do your work in your lowly sphere, praying the good Lord that into heaven above, where all is love, you may, one day, be born — white!”
I do not laugh. I am quite straight-faced as I ask soberly:
“But what on earth is whiteness that one should so desire it?”
Then always, somehow, some way, silently but clearly, I am given to understand that whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen!
https://medium.com/religion-bites/the-souls-of-white-folk-by-w-e-b-du-bois-354f91ca08ef
The only thing that is happening now is that attention is being made to accomplishments of Black artists in history. This means that a few nanoseconds less is being spent on European artists. Henry Louis Gates has an excellent multi volume set of the images of Blacks in Western civilization that takes us back to the Middle Ages and forward. The fact that and overwhelming number of Black faces are not showing up at a concert is meaningless. We are busy reading about and watching the Chevalier Saint Georges on screen.
I’ll get around to her new book in due time. I guessing that it will be another tome that asks DuBois’ question, “How does it feel to be a problem, Black America?”
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1897/08/strivings-of-the-negro-people/305446/
Another book about the failures of the Negro.
Ms. Mac Donald laments:
Well, you've also articulated, obviously, the Du Bois statement, which just breaks my heart. I can't even repeat it, because I'll start crying again. But you know, his sense of walking arm-in-arm with Aristotle and Aurelius, and a magnificent belief in his and everybody else's ability to take in the entirety of Western or probably world civilization
In the “Soul of White Folks” DuBois writes
The discovery of personal whiteness among the world’s peoples is a very modern thing — a nineteenth and twentieth century matter, indeed. The ancient world would have laughed at such a distinction. The Middle Age regarded skin color with mild curiosity; and even up into the eighteenth century we were hammering our national manikins into one, great, Universal Man, with fine frenzy which ignored color and race even more than birth. Today we have changed all that, and the world in a sudden, emotional conversion has discovered that it is white and by that token, wonderful!
This assumption that of all the hues of God whiteness alone is inherently and obviously better than brownness or tan leads to curious acts; even the sweeter souls of the dominant world as they discourse with me on weather, weal, and woe are continually playing above their actual words an obligato of tune and tone, saying:
“My poor, un-white thing! Weep not nor rage. I know, too well, that the curse of God lies heavy on you. Why? That is not for me to say, but be brave! Do your work in your lowly sphere, praying the good Lord that into heaven above, where all is love, you may, one day, be born — white!”
I do not laugh. I am quite straight-faced as I ask soberly:
“But what on earth is whiteness that one should so desire it?”
Then always, somehow, some way, silently but clearly, I am given to understand that whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen!
https://medium.com/religion-bites/the-souls-of-white-folk-by-w-e-b-du-bois-354f91ca08ef
The only thing that is happening now is that attention is being made to accomplishments of Black artists in history. This means that a few nanoseconds less is being spent on European artists. Henry Louis Gates has an excellent multi volume set of the images of Blacks in Western civilization that takes us back to the Middle Ages and forward. The fact that and overwhelming number of Black faces are not showing up at a concert is meaningless. We are busy reading about and watching the Chevalier Saint Georges on screen.
I’ll get around to her new book in due time. I guessing that it will be another tome that asks DuBois’ question, “How does it feel to be a problem, Black America?”
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1897/08/strivings-of-the-negro-people/305446/