To Praise Cultural Appropriation, Not to Bury It

with Heather Mac Donald

Tolstoy is mine! Shakespeare is mine! As a man of the West, I am an inheritor of all of its traditions and great figures, just as surely as I’m an inheritor of the traditions and great figures particular to African American history. That’s true true not just of me but of anyone who cares to lay claim to the Western tradition by immersing themselves in the study and lived experience of those traditions and their fruits. Shakespeare is mine, just as Duke Ellington and Ralph Ellison may “belong” to an Englishman born in the 1990s.

We cannot know who will inherit the traditions we create and perpetuate. Surely one of the most startling and pleasing developments in recent years has been the ardency with which Asian and Asian American musicians have pursued and performed music in the European classical tradition. Anyone doubting whether a person of Asian descent can adopt the Western tradition need only listen to Yo-Yo Ma perform Bach’s cello suites to have those doubts dispelled.

The irony is that the very Western traditions that other cultures are adopting, perpetuating, and perfecting are now regarded in many corners of the US as mere epiphenomena of Western imperialism, colonialism, and slavery. You have to wonder whether these leftist skeptics have actually sat down and listened to the music, considered the art, and read the literature they’re so eager to toss into the dustbin of history. Heather Mac Donald’s new book, When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives, serves as a rejoinder to those who would abandon the greatness of the West’s cultural legacy in the name of a superficial and confused narrative of historical injustice. In this excerpt from my recent conversation with Heather, we discuss how these traditions are being carried on, why the leftist critique of them misunderstands what makes them great, and why we ought to praise cultural appropriation rather than burying it.

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GLENN LOURY: Okay, I'm again putting myself in the devil's advocacy. A European high culture is parasitic on European colonialism, and the reason I don't show respect for the former is because I have contempt for the latter. That's the argument. “Parasitic” in the sense that the leisure class and the surplus that was needed to support it that allowed for individuals to pursue their interest in the arts rested upon an economic foundation of expropriation, of slavery, of colonial domination, and so on. That's what created the wealth that gave the Austrian emperor or the London-based businessmen or whomever, philanthropists, the resources with which they supported the production of these artistic works. And I have contempt for that. And hence I don't have reverence for the fruit of that. 

HEATHER MAC DONALD: Well, you can say that about anything, I guess. That would mean that any kind of human accomplishment that exists in a world that is not absolutely egalitarian must be torn down. And I would say culture is much more complicated than that. There are human endeavors that involve the life of the mind, the life of the spirit, the life of our yearning, our fears, our sorrows, and they cannot be reduced, should not be reduced to material conditions, even though clearly there is a relationship between various structures of society and the economy.

But to not acknowledge that art has its own amazing stylistic development, it's preposterous to say that it tracks conditions of production in some Marxist way. It does not. I think that one of the great human dramas is the evolution of style, whether it's in visual art or musical art or literary art. How do we get from medieval epic—Le Roman de la Rose in France—and a literary vocabulary that used allegory that did not have the resources or the interest, possibly, of describing the individual psyche, but instead had knights and allegorical personifications of virtue or deception—how did we get from that literary vocabulary to the intense empirical and psychological acuity of the nineteenth-century novel, whether it's by George Eliot or Leo Tolstoy? That is an incredible journey of human expression. It is not explained by the development of feudal economies into industrial capitalism. It may have some remote explanation, but it can be understood as an interior development. And the same thing from Gregorian chant through Rachmaninoff's second piano concerto. That is an incredible sea change of what human beings can express. 

So I think it is absurd to say, “Well, I deplore colonialism, and so anything that exists in an age of colonialism is of no interest in me or I should condemn.” But again, my first response to all of these is, okay, if you're gonna use that deconstructive, pseudo-Marxist, demystifying impulse, apply it across the board. Why don't you apply it to China and its oppression of the serf or to extraordinary Indian classical music with its caste system or to African tribal genocide? We don't do it. Only towards the West. 

I hear you. I have a thought. I wonder how you'd react to it. This is in this part of your book talking about the arts and how the equity imperative seems to be undermining an appreciation for and pursuit of beauty. And it is this. I have a student—a former student—who's a brilliant concert pianist, and I went to one of his performances with the Brown Student Orchestra, here at Brown. He was playing a Brahms concerto in B minor. And I'm not a music person, but you probably know the piece that I'm talking about. He performed magnificently, as did the orchestra. And I'm sitting there with my wife, and we're just absorbing this gorgeous cascade of sound. I'm looking at the orchestra, and it's at least a third and maybe more Asian. No kidding. The lead violinist, the string section, the horns. I mean there were a lot of Asian musicians in the orchestra, kids, students at Brown. 

And I thought to myself, well, they have embraced—these youngsters and I assume their families and the cultural location from which they come—European high art as their own. They're not looking over their shoulders thinking that they're betraying their ancestors or that they're being white adjacent or, what do they call 'em, “bananas”? You know, yellow on the outside, white [on the inside]. They're not thinking any of that. They're just learning how to play the fiddle. They're mastering the score, and they're achieving a kind of sublime excellence.

And I thought to myself—and I wonder what you think about this—maybe it's because they have confidence that they're not threatened by European achievement, since they can look on their own ethnic cultural history with a great deal of pride. And maybe an instinctive revulsion or being repulsed by European high art is, in a way, betraying a lack of confidence in oneself and an unwillingness to appreciate what another civilization has produced without feeling that. That's one kind of answer. 

Of course, my answer is it's my civilization, too. My ancestors are not mainly Europeans, but I am here in the West. I'm an American. All I've ever known is this cultural environment. Why wouldn't I embrace it as my own? Why does racial ancestry define cultural inheritance? That's my answer. But I'm asking two different things at the same time. The one main thing I'm trying to get you to respond to is, doesn't it seem like this problem of reticence to appreciate the value of European high culture is more prevalent in some non-European quarters than in others?

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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. I think what you have extraordinarily astutely described, without using the term itself, is the pathetic concept of cultural appropriation, Glenn. In a field of very, very strong competitors, “cultural appropriation” may well be the most idiotic idea to come out of the academic left and the identitarian left. That there is something improper about aspiring to understand or enjoy or consume a different cultural tradition. 

Again, you have explained something to me, just as you did with how we're going to react to a decision on the Harvard racial preferences case, how to explain cultural appropriation—this idiotic concept—which is a lack of confidence in one's own cultural work, somehow. I write in the book about some of these idiots at the Juilliard drama division, the Juilliard School, major conservatory in New York City. They have a drama division, and their black students had a complete meltdown—hugely performative, hugely overwrought, pathetic—over a recreation of the black slave trade taken out of Roots.

But they're dividing all these boundaries. “You can't have us do white works, but you also can't have white people do black works.” And this carving things out, saying you cannot step over these lines, it's ridiculous. Culture is appropriation, by definition. It is voracious. It takes in whatever it can. The West has been particularly voracious, and rightly so, because you cannot put barbed wire around the human imagination. It will, left to its own devices, leap over those boundaries and try to conquer and enter new fields of expression. 

If China finally decides that it's not interested in Western classical music, the tradition's over. Right now there's tens of millions of Chinese students in China who are learning to play the piano because their parents haven't yet got the message that classical music is somehow dowdy or irrelevant. And thank God for them. In Beijing, music conservatories are are booming. Concert halls are booming there. And yes, it's not just Brown's student orchestra that is a third Asian. Most of the top orchestras in the United States—professional orchestras—also are way overrepresented for Asians because they have the same home culture that we were talking about before, with regards to academic achievement. Intense tiger mom involvement and a belief that there is something valuable there. 

There's a wonderful classical pianist, Chinese, named Lang Lang. And he's got his detractors, because at the beginning of his career he was very flamboyant in his gestures. But I have to say, and some of the elites may have [looked] down their nose at this, but I find his interpretations inevitably eye-opening. He hears inner voices in pieces that are extraordinary. I can tell a Lang Lang performance of a Beethoven sonata on the radio within like two notes, because there's something always new there.

In any case, he was raised by a tiger dad in China who was verging on abuse. I mean, he was disciplining Lang Lang to practice at just extremes of human effort. And Lang Lang was winning competitions in China. Then he was finally going to enter his first European-based piano competition, and he was very scared. He said, “Well, how can I do this? It's their tradition.” And his father said, “It's not their tradition. It's our tradition. It is the world's tradition. You have as much right to that music as a somebody who's grown up in Vienna.” And that is true. It is our tradition. It is everybody's tradition.

That is the attitude that we should be inculcating, not this ridiculous idea of drawing “police line, do not cross here” around different artistic traditions. 

You know, I just had a very disturbing thought, which is that the twenty-first century may end up belonging to the Chinese, because we in America, in the West didn't have enough confidence in our own cultural inheritance to defend it against the barbarians at the gates. The barbarians at the gates are the equity mongers who would destroy elite, intellectual and cultural institutions here in the interest of racial parity. I mean, it would be profoundly ironic that the non-European Chinese behemoth—not just an economy, but a cultural force to be reckoned with for generations to come—would overtake us because they saw the virtue of the European inheritance and made it their own.

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