By Ervan Darnell
Summary: The idea of “cultural appropriation” denies ownership to actual inventors and instead ascribes it to a group, which is conveniently the right size for identity politics. In its denial of individual merit, it does not recognize credit or payment where due, but only uses that idea as an excuse for collectivism.
Reporting on the (previous) Olympics, AP headlines an article “Olympic surfing exposes whitewashed Native Hawaiian roots”. The article notes that “White settlers first arrived on the island in the 1700s, bringing with them disease that nearly wiped out the Native Hawaiian population…”. How is that relevant to surfing, least of all the Olympics? How is it news? The sentence confesses the disease was an accident but contextually frames it as an assault. That might seem incidental here, but it goes to the intended purpose of the article, which is not to report the news but to leverage surfing for collectivist ideology (i.e. identity politics).
The article claims surfing was “appropriated”, which requires the claim that Hawaiians invented surfing. Bill Maher nicely mocks this idea of cultural appropriation by noting that many people invented surfing and anyone living next to a (warm) ocean would eventually do so. Nor does any of this notion of “invented” account for the myriad of small innovations that made it something more interesting. It’s a contrived argument to find racism where there is none.
But, those objections are all potentially false in the sense that some things really are unique inventions in a given time and place. The actual inventor might be known and deserve credit (and payment). Even when that happens, the “cultural appropriation” argument is built upon a fallacy: the boundary of ownership is arbitrarily drawn to include people who did not invent it, rather than person(s) who actually did. It’s apparently acceptable for other Hawaiians to surf but not Fijians? What sort of ownership is that? The doctrine of “cultural appropriation” credits people who incidentally share something culturally but did not do the actual work.
Maher’s second point sarcastically echoes this: every Olympic sport was invented somewhere. By the doctrine of cultural appropriation none of the sports are legitimate, and what a strange world where we cannot share inventions or ideas.
I will take this to be the central claim of the AP article: “The Tokyo Summer Games, which open July 23, serve as a proxy for that unresolved tension and resentment, according to the ethnic Hawaiians who lament that surfing and their identity have been culturally appropriated by white outsiders who now stand to benefit the most from the $10 billion industry.”
Even if we overlook that Hawaiians did not uniquely invent surfing, and assume it was invented in Hawaii, Hawaiians collectively did not invent surfing; some person(s) invented surfing. If you don’t believe in patents, then “cultural appropriation” makes no sense. If you do believe in patents, then asserting that surfing belongs to Hawaiians collectively is to confess Hawaiians “appropriated” surfing from its actual inventor(s), which is just the sin in question here.
Notice how collectivism is smuggled into the argument: “Hawaiians” is taken as the right-sized collective, not the person(s) who invented surfing, not their family, not their village, not their particular island, not all Polynesians, not all cultures on the ocean, not programmers writing code simulating fluid dynamics for better design, but “Hawaiians”. Maybe the author would revise that claim up to “Polynesians”, but she is unlikely to round it down to “village”. That would not serve the purpose of identity politics, which is to find a supposedly aggrieved group.
“Cultural appropriation” makes no sense. It denies recognition to actual inventors, denies access to the rest of the world, and instead assigns nominal credit and ownership to a racial or cultural aggregation, which is to be exploited for grievance politics, not for incentivizing or rewarding actual innovation.
