Jenny Brown replied:
> I'm trying to think of one that didn't. Obviously, to start a list, the
> Brits in India, the Brits in the Americas, the French in the Americas, the
> Americans with African slaves and again and again with Black culture--to
the
> point that Bernice Johnson Reagon of SNCC once said (to exasperated gasps
> from the audience) that America is, culturally, a Black country.
And the Americans put a Native American on the penny (and a bison on the nickel). This isn't a subject I know much about, but it seems that all kinds of contradictory imagery concerning native peoples shows up in American popular culture.
Also, isn't it more complicated than one people "robbing" from another? Is "culture" something that each ethnic or racial group needs to keep locked up in a box, and that no one else can have? No one can stop cultural exchanges from happening, anyway. I think a lot of this borrowing happens initially at "street level," through person-to-person contact between ordinary people belonging to the oppressing and the oppressed group. Cultural cross-pollination of this kind is actually a good thing. Couldn't it be said, for example, that the "appropriation" of aspects of black culture by white Americans helped in some way to erode segregation? What did blacks lose by the fact that many whites found aspects of black culture attractive, and chose to imitate and adapt them? (It's also well-known that members of minority or oppressed groups, especially elites, will imitate and adapt aspects of the dominant culture).
There are outrageous injustices, of course, as there always are. I think, for example, of black blues artists who died in poverty while white rock stars got rich playing their songs. The problem there, though, isn't the cultural cross-pollination itself, but the social and economic structure of the society within which it occured.
Anyway, I don't see what's wrong with Israelis eating falafel.
For the intermingling of cultures, Jacob Conrad