The number of crazies out there may be fewer than they seem.
This weekend, at Townhall, I wrote about the University of Ottawa’s suspension of a free yoga class. What was deemed “problematic” was the class’s “cultural appropriation” of an ancient discipline.
But why was yoga a problem, -atic or otherwise?
Well, in the words of the “fainting heart” who made the decision to nix the program, because yoga hails from cultures that “have experienced oppression, cultural genocide and diasporas due to colonialism and western supremacy. . . .”
Robby Soave, at the Daily Beast, pushed a bit deeper than I did: “Cultural appropriation first became a talking point in sociology circles in the 1970s and ’80s. Explicitly racist and exploitative incidents from the past — like 19th and early 20th century blackface — were deemed wrong, not merely because they were horribly insulting to black people, but because they stole from black culture.”
On this ground, George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue is intolerably racist.
Idiotic. Let me repeat what I wrote this weekend:
- Cultural appropriation is a good thing; that’s how we progress. We emulate the good in other cultures. We discard practices that do not suit us. That is what good people do.
- Those people who, afflicted by the mind-virus of today’s neo-progressivism, think that “cultural appropriation” is racist are themselves racist.
How are they racist? By judging a cultural matter as racial.
Racists make too much of race. So does this new breed of self-defined anti-racists.
But remember, it was just one complaint that led to the yoga class being nixed. Had the person who addressed the complaint dared snort in derision, the whole absurdity might have stopped before it started.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob
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