Indigenous Advocates Want UN to Outlaw Cultural Appropriation

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 sayIndigenous 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’ IllegalIf 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:

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?

Tags: Culture, Political Correctness, United Nations

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