On this episode of “The Federalist Radio Hour,” Assistant Editor Kylee Zempel joins Culture Editor Emily Jashinsky to discuss her recent article “Gwen Stefani Is Right: Cultural Appreciation Is Not Cultural Appropriation” and how the left’s definition of cultural appropriation skews discourse.
“I think what’s important here is that she did defend herself and that’s not novel. It’s not that we haven’t seen celebrities do that before, but her self-defense I think was thoughtful, and I think the fact that her work has held up over the course of a couple of decades, really more, it speaks to where the consumer is and where, you know, the listeners are,” Jashinsky said.
The discussion about cultures, Zempel said, is important but is difficult to have at this point in time.
“Now everything is racist,” Zempel said. “That’s really hard to recover from, and that would help explain why your take … is maybe that cultural appropriation is not really an issue anymore. Well, it’s not! Because we’ve just moved past that and have elevated our rhetoric to being, ‘Everything is racist.’ It’s not good. That’s not a good development.”
