A University of Miami law professor recently offered reasons why that the public should consider extending copyright law to include “collectively held cultural identities.”
In an excerpt of her paper “Protecting Cultural Personality” in Race, Racism and the Law, J. Janewa Osei-Tutu notes companies such as Timbuk and Louis Vuitton “have designed and marketed clothing based on traditional ethnic clothing styles or symbols” … but without the “knowledge, consent, or involvement of the cultural group” in question.
Osei-Tutu argues intellectual property laws are “underinclusive — at least in relation to valuable intangible cultural heritage from indigenous communities and local communities from the global south [which] allows corporations and those outside the community to capture and monetize this unprotected resource, which means that it is exposed and subject to misappropriation.”
Sounds like bullshit, dunnit? Gets deeper, though:
In order to protect “cultural personality rights,” Osei-Tutu (pictured) says cultural groups should have “sufficient boundaries and markers, or indicia” by which to identify them.
Groups can be “self-defining,” and it’s “not necessary for the public to have significant knowledge of the group.”
Sure, just make it up as you go along. Okay, I’ll play.
Supposing I composed and released a blues song in the style of, oh, B.B. King. (Note: “in the style of”, not a copy of.) Am I making an appropriation of the blues culture — defined on the fly as something that is inherently of Southern Black origin? According to this college harpy professor, probably so.
Fine. But let’s just examine that “blues culture” thing for a moment. It was indisputably a lament, born of a race’s suffering, and played on either piano or else guitar by Black musical luminaries such as Otis Spann and Muddy Waters, respectively.
On the piano? You mean, that keyboard instrument invented and devised in 1700 by Italian Bartolomeo Cristofiori, a White man? And about the guitar: the “classical” acoustic version was invented by inter alia Spaniard Antonio de Torres Jurado, and its electrical counterpart by inter alia Adolph Rickenbacker and Leo Fender (to name but two). Regardless, both instruments were invented by White men of European heritage.
If Spann and Waters had had to operate under those pesky “cultural appropriation” restrictions, it’s safe to say that the blues would still be being sung in Black Christian churches and not in concerts all over the world.
Wait: did I say “churches”?
Doesn’t look too much like something African (or African-American), does it?
Of course, I’m just screwing around here. But at the heart of this little piece of satire is a very serious message to the racist hustlers like this Osei-Tutu creature:
Stop fucking around and claiming that “cultural appropriation” is somehow an evil thing. That, or don’t wear jeans (invented by White Jewish guy Levi Strauss) ever again.
And steer clear of fried chicken, while you’re about it, or else the Romans are going to declare a classical fatwa on your ass.
I could go on all day, but I think you get my point.
Don’t you know that only white people can be racist? That we never invented anything, ever?
Heck, that until white people conquered it Europe was full of muslim African American blacks?
The BBC says so, so it must be true, right?
These neo liberal nitwits come up with bad idea after bad idea under the guise of being creative. They have too many teeth in their mouths.
This is why lower primates named “J. Janewa Osei-Tutu” shouldn’t even fucking be here. Africans have appropriated everything more advanced than a mud hut, a spear, and a drum.
Judging by the name of the person involved reminds me of a quote. “There’s not one thing coming out of Africa that would not be a huge step backward”. Or something like that.
You missed one.
“University of Miami law professor” “Janewa Osei-Tutu”
Who invented the concept of universities? Of scholarship?
A legacy of the great 12th-century Timbuktu civilization, as witnessed by all the literature they left behind.
Well, if the object is to prevent infringement on cultural zones, would it not be reasonable to enjoin people who visit (or are transported to) another cultural zone, to strictly and exclusively adopt the mores of that zone? …until you can be conveniently and economically transported back to your own. In the meantime take your turban off while you’re at Mass.
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Given she’s against so-called cultural appropriation, I’d like to disappropriate that phony, swellhead right back to giving her racist lectures from a sub-Saharan shithole mud hut, half-naked wearing animal skins and decorating her hair with red mud, in one of hundreds of African languages, not English, without writing, mathematics, the wheel, a two story building, a paved road, a bridge, any medicine beyond some jigaboo throwing bones, and traveling barefoot down some narrow, muddy, snake ridden path through the bush or jungle. The “professor,” at age 54, can do us all a favor by forfeiting her Western university degrees and die from some African hemorrhagic fever, parasitic disease or malaria before age 55.
I have spoken with white Americans who traveled extensively in East Africa (formerly known as “British East”) and Southeast Africa who commented on something apropos here. They noticed how the people in, to name just two countries from memory, Mozambique and Malawi, wore casual, lightweight Western clothing, that is, T-shirts advertising Western Products like Pepsi or Budweiser, and shorts. The woman who reported for those two countries said she was initially disappointed that they weren’t wearing some sort of traditional regional or tribal garb, but after thinking about it, she thought, who was she to require the people residing in the places she visited to dress like the people she would see in that country’s exhibit at the Disney Epcot Center in Florida or one of the world’s fairs that once were so popular. They were living there for themselves, not for her benefit as a tourist [as in, say, Williamsburg, or some other tourist magnet].
Oh, and Hitler once referred to trousers as an invention by the Hun, almost universally replacing the less practical kilts and long shirts favored by the non-Aryan cultures. To him this (unsurprisingly) signified the strength and practicality of Aryan culture.
Good theory. Let us test it. Take her degree, her money and her location and repatriate her. If she is alive after 6 months I would be surprised. I knew someone who was in the Peace Corp in the 80s. 3 meter cobra in the garden shed. Had to run 100 yards through army ants because they were coming down the trail and bush so couldnt be side stepped. Ate monkey and pangolin as she was meat starved. Got massive parasite infections that required experimental treatments at Bethesda to cure. Still has malaria.
And the good she did was undone as soon as she walked away….the people ate the fingerlings the new ponds were stocked with and polluted them as they were closer and safer than the natural bodies they used for washing.
Then the civil war burned everything down.
Can we find the good professor’s email address and send her the essay “Let Africa Sink?”
Saw a black woman with long, very light blonde hair last week. In my head I was screaming “Cultural appropriation!!!!” Would have loved to say it out loud.
I met a genuine non-hypocritical cultural appropriation activist once. She had never drunk Scotch, been in a Bee Em or Mercedes, traveled in a jet airplane, taken antibiotics, or used a phone of either the land or smart variety. She cleaned her ass with her hand after using the outdoor long-drop privy, and cooked meals over an open fire. And so on, and so on. Then I woke up and my coffee was cold.