https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPejK2tnl04

Vice ran a story about Jeremy McLellan, “a Southern Christian comic making a living playing Muslim festivals.”

Note that McLellan hasn’t changed his material to suit Muslim audiences. He didn’t borrow or “appropriate” Muslim comedic material. It just turns out that certain Muslim groups happen to like his comedy.

After  this article ran, a number of social justice warriors began harassing Jeremy online. These warriors (many of whom are spoiled rich white kids) said that he’s stealing jobs from Muslims comics. They claim Jeremy must not accept gigs at Muslim festivals; those gigs should instead go to Muslim comics.

These accusations are absurd. Jeremy doesn’t need me to stand up for him, of course. He knows better than to engage with the critics. But it’s worth reflecting on how McLellan’s contemptible critics have things ass-backwards.

Imagine, in parallel, that I did the following:

I noticed the Irish coffee shop down the street had a lot of Muslim customers. I said to the owner, “Hey, you’re stealing *customers* from Muslim coffee shop owners! Muslims don’t have autonomy and can’t decide for themselves what kind of coffee to drink and from whom to buy it. Instead, white dudes should decide on behalf of Muslims to self-segregate from Muslims, in order to preserve jobs for Muslims. Irish people have a duty to avoid interacting with Muslims in order to preserve Muslim culture.” [Nevermind that there are many Muslim cultures just as there are many Christian cultures.]

That would be absurd.

Imagine I instead the following:

I open up an Irish pub. A black customer comes in. I say, “Hey, friend, you should go eat black people food. I don’t want to steal customers from the black pub owner down the street. This is Irish food for Irish people, and it’s racist of me to share it with people from disadvantaged groups, as doing so might crowd out and ruin their cultures. Sorry, but I have to refuse to serve you in order to avoid oppressing you.

Also absurd.

If you think this way, you aren’t pro “social justice”. You are just the left-wing version of the KKK. (On that point, see this article on how the alt-right and campus social justice warriors have become natural allies, in much the same way that the Christian right and radical feminists became allies about sex and pornography. The alt-right wants to avoid contaminating white culture with non-white culture, and some far left SJWs want to avoid contaminating non-white cultures with whiteness.)

People are agents. People from different backgrounds can decide, for themselves, that they want to consume material and culture created by people of other, different backgrounds. When they do that, we should let them. We should celebrate their openness. We shouldn’t take it upon ourselves to self-segregate. We should rather recognize that people can choose, autonomously, which cultures they want to consume and experience. Failure to recognize that that would be disrespectful.

Some people accused McLellan of “cultural appropriation.” That’s silly in part because he’s not doing anything that falls under the concept. (It’s not like he’s a white guy starting an Ethiopian restaurant or a cis-woman/cis-man playing a trans-woman on TV.) He’s not doing “Muslim material.” He’s not Eminem, who by his own admission is ” the worst thing since Elvis Presely to do black music so selfishly and use it to get [him]self wealthy”.

But even if McLellan were engaging in cultural appropriation, which he plainly isn’t, it would be fine. Cultural appropriation* is how good new culture gets made. Everything you think of as “native culture” just is the product of past appropriation and synthesis. There is no duty to “make things authentic.”

In the end, we can choose to have open cultures in which we freely share and experiment with ideas. Or we can demand that we see each other as the Other.

*Just what is cultural appropriation and why might anyone think it’s bad? Here, as elsewhere, the Left has a tendency to use vague concepts, which in turn allows them to use Motte and Bailey tactics when arguing about these issues. “Cultural appropriation” is often used to condemn almost any white interaction with, consumption of, reproduction of, or attempted innovation upon non-white culture. But, when pressed, critics retreat back to a narrow definition and mundane examples that most people will agree are offensive. In much the same way, postmodernists will make dramatic claims, such as “There is no objective reality,” but when pressed, retreat back to, “Oh, I just meant to say that our understanding and perception of the world is mediated through concepts.”