Indigenous Advocates Want UN to Outlaw Cultural Appropriation
“and to do it quickly”
The progressive concept of cultural appropriation has gone international. A group of advocates for indigenous peoples wants the United Nations to make the practice a crime. What could go wrong?
The CBC reports via Yahoo News:
Cultural appropriation: Make it illegal worldwide, Indigenous advocates say
Indigenous advocates from around the world are calling on a UN committee to ban the appropriation of Indigenous cultures — and to do it quickly.
Delegates from 189 countries, including Canada, are in Geneva this week as part of a specialized international committee within the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), a United Nations agency.
Since it began in 2001, the committee has been working on creating and finishing three pieces of international law that would expand intellectual-property regulations to protect things like Indigenous designs, dances, words and traditional medicines.
The meeting takes place as concern grows worldwide about the rights of cultures to control their own materials. In the U.S. this week, designer Tory Burch agreed to change the description of one of her coats for women after Romanians protested that it had been described as African-inspired when it actually appropriated a traditional Romanian garment.
Speaking to the committee Monday, James Anaya, dean of law at the University of Colorado, said the UN’s negotiated document should “obligate states to create effective criminal and civil enforcement procedures to recognize and prevent the non-consensual taking and illegitimate possession, sale and export of traditional cultural expressions.”
Jim Treacher of the Daily Caller has done a great job of explaining why this is kind of dumb, so I’m going to appropriate some of his article:
Hey, Let’s Make ‘Cultural Appropriation’ Illegal
If you’re alive on the planet Earth in the Year of Our Lord 2017, you’ve appropriated stuff from other cultures. For example, if you can read this, you’ve appropriated from the English. If you see the number “2017” and recognize it as the current year, you’ve appropriated from Christianity. Hell, the word “appropriated” itself is appropriated from the ancient Greeks.
Twitchy has collected some clever responses to this as well:
I had a salad for lunch. Concerned I may have appropriated vegan culture.
— Luxury Yacht Owner (@CounterMoonbat) June 13, 2017
This is illiberal, ridiculous, and downright dangerous https://t.co/uhNQQmJ41e
— Alex Griswold (@HashtagGriswold) June 13, 2017
Who gets to determine who gets to do what? How many generations back to we go? How is this going to be enforced? This is absurd.
— Stephen Lowe (@TheWikiHowGuy) June 13, 2017
It has to be said…again.
What a stupid time to be alive.
— Anmarie (@LiberalHeretic) June 13, 2017
I shudder to think what it's going to be like in twenty years.
— Macedoniancracker (@ironhorse384) June 13, 2017
Do you ever get the sense that leftists stay up at night trying to think of new things to be angry about and how they can try to force other people to live by new rules?
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Comments
They should call the new law the “Full Employment for Lawyers Act of 2017.” In which case we can argue it was stolen from US culture.
Well, all these Muslim immigrants should not be allowed to use our hospitals, our courts, not allowed to drive, take trains, buses, planes, walk on our sidewalks or roads, use any air conditioning or heating systems, electricity, telephones, cell phones, computers, or otherwise appropriate any of the benefits of our culture.
We will be more than happy to give up the benefits of their culture (let me know if there are any…)
Just trying to get with the program.
Eh?
If you’re a leftist staying up at night thinking up new things to be angry about, be careful.
You could be accused of cultural appropriation…by insomniacs!
Typical, leftists everywhere want control. Lets make up a bunch of crap, and have the most corrupt international organizations enforce it. Yeah, that’ll work. NOT!
On my to-do list for today: Pinpoint inventor of the wheel and sign him/her/them/zie/sie/em/ver/ter/em [*] up as my first Cultural Appropriation client; once I have that, my target-rich environment is boundless.
[*] I think I’m correct here with this list as my source is an impeccable loon source, the LGBT Resource Center at the University of Wisconsin (Milwaukee).
I’m told that I should be ashamed to have used “my” and “I” in my post. Well, I’m not.
Yo PFG, I invented the wheel. When do I get paid?
I will take them seriously, when the “indigenous activists” file these complaints without appropriating the internet and other electronic communications media that my culture (specifically: nerds) created…
Oh. Who am I kidding. I’ll never take them seriously.
I’m an American — “Cultural Appropriation” *is* my culture. We call it the melting pot and the marketplace of ideas.
Wait, I thought Algore created the internets! Are you trying to appropriate his genius?
Al Gore is 97.5% Cherokee.
And if anyone objects to the phrase “melting pot” we’ll keep using it but add “mixed salad with Russian dressing!”
No more tacos for you!
This is so stupid and ignorant that the UN will most likely approve and pass it in the General Assembly.
However, I wonder, if it does pass will Rachael Dolezal not be a black woman anymore?
Let the General Assembly pass whatever it likes; it has no authority over anything and its resolutions are irrelevant. WIPO, on the other hand, does have some authority, under the treaties most nations have subjected themselves to. It can’t unilaterally change those treaties, though.
So do he-shes appropriate female culture?
Sure, as soon as you guys stop using our internet.
And pants. No more pants for you indigenous people!
Uh huh…so the US is NOT this vast “melting pot” of “rich culture” and “many peoples” the learned masses have been mewling about all these years after all?
Isn’t the whole concept of a “melting pot” that all learn from everyone else? That we are expected to learn “their” culture – whomever “they” may be – and blend it into our own lives by trying “their” food, “their” music, “their” art, “their” ideas and philosophies, etc. so as to enrich our lives – if not our mere existence?
…and do so as “they” learn from us?
…or was that all just the horse crap that we thought it was all along?
In other words, the U.N. wants institutionalized stupidity.
1) The U.N. does not make law. It’s not a government.
2) THIS is why a world government is a terrible idea.
3) When they fail to get a law out of this, they will claim that that failure is proof that one is needed and they would have succeeded if not for those horrible racists in the U.S.A.
4) See #2.
And just HOW does the Useless Nitwits intend to enforce an illegal law against the American people???
Fifty Shades of Irony
From this point forward, everybody who is not American is no longer allowed to wear denim jeans. I demand they stop appropriating my culture, we invented jeans for crying out loud! Is this too much to ask?
It’s clear that life has gotten too good, for everyone. Seems like we need some real things to worry about–if this is what is actually being considered.
I guess we’ve gotten hunger, poverty, cancer, etc. all solved-up!
If they do the U.N. will have to outlaw itself and disband as their next action – because the U.N. is the most egregious example of “cultural appropriation.”
Defund our contribution to the UN. James Anaya, dean of law at the University of Colorado… Dean of a law school ? CHEEEZ LOUEEEZ !
Gay as a descriptor for same sex preferences is itself cultural appropriation. Something brightly colorful or highly decorative is gay and to call it gay should not be deemed 0ffensive unless the dictionary itself is offensive.
Referring to an individual as gay, until the GLBT LSMFT culturally appropriated the word, gay meant the person was happy and carefree. If referring to a person’s sexuality, male or female, gay meant heterosexually and indiscriminately very active.
” our hospitals, our courts, not allowed to drive, take trains, buses, planes, walk on our sidewalks or roads, use any air conditioning or heating systems, electricity, telephones, cell phones, computers, or otherwise appropriate any of the benefits of our culture.”
Now, you know where that claim would go: all of this was invented thousands of years ago, by ancient Egyptians (or were they Chinese, or Zulu?) but their technology got suprressed because European colonialism.
So, YOU stop using this stuff. Unless you start paying a fat licensing fee to do so, of course.
Alright. Let’s forbid all indigenous peoples who want to attack the rest of us for “appropriation” from using the following:
(1) Non-native medical materials and university-trained physicians.
(2) iron.
(3) All foodstuffs that came with the Columbian interchange.
(4) Buttoned clothing.
(5)modern construction methods.
(6) modern information and communications technology.
(7) The English language.
(8) firearms
(9) Any textile made from material not present in the ancestral patrimony prior to the Columbian Interchange.
(10) And let’s start the whole thing by moving the Navajo and Apache back to the Alaskan and Yukon Ur-Heimat of the Na-Dene peoples so the heirs of the Anasazi may reclaim the land; and the Bantu-speaking peoples back to the Nigeria-Cameroon borderlands so the Khoi-San and Bambuti may reclaim their ancestral patrimony; all who identify with Han Chinese culture to their hearth in the Loess Plateau and mid-reaches of the Huang, so the Thai-Kadia, Hmong-Mien, and other peopless may reclaim the Chang Jiang basin and areas south; and, of course, everyone identifying with an Arabic-speaking, Islamic culture should be moved back to the Hejaz and Empty Quarter so the Amazigh, Copts, and Aramaic-speaking Christians and Jews may reclaim northern Africa and the Fertile Crescent; the Turks may move back to Central Asia; and all who identify with a culture using an Indo-European language may return everything west of the Weser and east of the Volga to the Basques and whoever…
[sarc]
Seriously, this PeeCee stuff has grown downright thtooopid, as we used to say when we were kids.
The so-called “indigenous peoples” (the human race is indigenous only to Africa), are engaging in cultural appropriation in attempting their goal, since the United Nations is a product of non-indigenous European white culture.
Or we could just stop buying indigenous products. No more blankets, Kachina dolls, pottery, serapes, Mexican leather goods, ethnic foods from ethnic restaurants…. You get the picture. Financially boycott these jack asses.
This is all aimed at ending war in the Middle East.
The AK-47, the weapon favored by most of our enemies in the Middle East is clearly Russian.
All Ak-47’s not made in Russia (some are made in China, N Korea, Iran, etc) must no longer be used.