Cultural Theft

My favorite news commentators on TV are Melissa Harris Perry, Laurence O'Donnell, and Bill Moyers. I respect great intelligence. But this morning Perry, a young black woman, did a segment that left me somewhat bemused. In her final minutes on air, she talked about the Harlem Shake, not a new form of popular dance but one that has caught new attention in recent weeks. She had two basic problems with this. The name "Harlem Shake" was being applied to all sorts of hopping around that did not deserve it (which I found interesting),  and the groups doing this were guilty of cultural theft. They were stealing culture from the black people of Harlem. Melissa Harris Perry takes this seriously., Although she has a white mother, she identifies herself as a black woman.

What made the last complaint--about cultural theft--odd is that Melissa Harris Perry delivered it in an Indo-European language. She is a full professor at Tulane, a strikingly successful inheritor of non-African cultures going back to the Middle East, Greece, Rome and Great Britain. I am not, of course, accusing her of cultural theft. By definition you can't steal what is free for the taking. We learn from one another. The contributions made to American culture by black people are endless in number, and so are the contributions made by other groups, including the Scotch-Irish, who gave us Princeton, where Perry worked for a while, and songs like "I'll Fly Away." Also they gave us the surname "Harris."






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