A college birthday party featuring tequila, piñatas and sombreros is branded “an act of ethnic stereotyping.” The perpetrators are branded racists, their party deemed an act of “cultural appropriation.” Thus begins writer Lionel Shriver’s piercing critique in The Guardian of Identity Politics and its sweaty-palmed encroachment on the realm of fiction.
If we embrace narrow group-based identities too fiercely, we cling to the very cages in which others would seek to trap us. We pigeonhole ourselves. We limit our own notion of who we are, and in presenting ourselves as one of a membership, a representative of our type, an ambassador of an amalgam, we ask not to be seen.
My sister and I, back in the innocence of the early 60s, loved to comb through a trunk of colorful clothing in order to “dress up” as “gypsies.” Two lily-white-skinned little girls clad in long skirts, hoop earrings and bandanas prancing around an attic playroom—oh yes, we were serious emerging racists.
Or were we simply making believe? Applying our growing and eager imaginations to the task of pretending to be something, someone exotic and other just to see if we could convince ourselves of fictional identities. Yes, that was it. We were exercizing our imaginations—the intellectual skills that would guarantee our ability to envision new things, empathize with new people and beings other than ourselves.
The strangle-hold of academia’s repudiation of play, fictive theatrics, not to mention colorful and original dress codes, has almost destroyed whatever might remain of open minds and creative inquiry. The lock-step of identity politics has exceeded its 15 minutes. Confining individuals in stockades of broad bandwidth “identities,” pretty much guarantees that students will be unable to discover who they might have been before they were caged in generic silos.
Those who embrace a vast range of “identities†– ethnicities, nationalities, races, sexual and gender categories, classes of economic under-privilege and disability – are now encouraged to be possessive of their experience and to regard other peoples’ attempts to participate in their lives and traditions, either actively or imaginatively, as a form of theft.
Shriver speaks for me, and many others who are weary and beyond impatient with the persistence of intellectual censorship when she hopes that, “the concept of ‘cultural appropriation’ is a passing fad: people with different backgrounds rubbing up against each other and exchanging ideas and practices is self-evidently one of the most productive, fascinating aspects of modern urban life.”
I’d add that this flirtation of and with difference is the most fascinating—and foundational—aspect of fictional literature, drama, filmmaking, painting, composing, et al. Without being able to imagine characters different from ourselves, or from anyone we’ve ever known, our consciousness – and our ability to dream other worlds – would atrophy.
