John McWhorter has an interesting essay defending the practice of “cultural appropriation.” Here is a short excerpt sketching out his thesis:

… the concept of cultural appropriation has morphed into a parody of the original idea. We are now to get angry simply when whites happily imitate something that minorities do. We now use the word steal in an abstract sense, separated from any kind of material value.

It used to be that we said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. But now there is new way to see the matter: Imitation is a kind of dismissal.

But does this idea hold up? I doubt it. If one is seen, and seen in an approving light, one will be imitated. This is what human beings do. The very faculty of language is, to a large extent, a matter of imitation. The idea that when we imitate something we are seeking to replace it rather than join it is weak. Think about it: Does that even make sense? It’s certainly up for debate.

Yet some will insist that we squeeze ourselves into the mental straitjacket and allow this as a “progressive” new take on what it is to be a human in a diverse society. But it won’t work. What’s the evidence? All of human history.

The grand old empires (including the ones in Africa) were all about rampant interethnic appropriation. Every language in the world is shot through with words and grammatical patterns from other languages—that is, signs of people in the past doing what we would call “appropriating.”