Cultural Appropriation, & Dumb Criminals (posted 10/10/22)

If there’s one thing I know about, it’s dim-witted English professors.  (No, not yours truly.  The other ones.) And so I’ll open today with the recent appearance on the Dr. Phil show by ASU English prof Neal Lester.  

The topic of the conversation between Dr. Phil and Dr. Lester – throw in Dr. Jill and you’ve got yourself a trifecta of useless doctors — was “cultural appropriation.” Lester, an African-American wearing long dreadlocks, was against it.

Lester claimed that adopting a style or interest from another cultural group is “reductive,” and he finds that “disrespectful” to that other culture. 

Of course this is one of the classic “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” bad-faith games that many leftists like to play.  If you don’t like rap, or celebrate black celebrities or cultural figures, or appreciate black clothing or food or speech patterns, you’re an anti-black racist. 

But if you listen to rap and you don’t conjugate “to be” conventionally, and you wear dreads and a Snoop Dogg t-shirt, you’re a culturally appropriating racist.

It’s the old, “Heads I win, tails… go f*** yourself, whitey!” conundrum.   

As someone who once — for a short but dark time in my youth — had a mullet, I am usually loath to cast aspersions on the hairstyle choices of others.  But find a pic of Neal Lester, and look at this guy’s dreads, and ask yourself how many people want to wear their hair like that. 

I mean, God bless, and you do you, but seriously. Not since the pudgy North Korean dictator forbade any other norks to adopt his monstrosity of a ‘do has there been so little to worry about, hairstyle-imitation-wise.

And by the way, who does this dope think he is to try to dictate people’s hairstyles?

It’s not even like he’s following his own arrogant pronouncements.  Because during the entire interview, he was appropriating whitey’s stuff like there’s no tomorrow.

He wore a suit (invented by Brit Beau Brummell in the early 19^th century), a necktie (attributed to Louis XIII, who liked part of the uniform worn by Croatian soldiers, which gave him the idea) and glasses (attributed to Salvino D’Armate in 1285). 

Granted, someone named “Salvino” probably isn’t Liz Warren white (#wemustneverstopmockingher), but he was a European, so not one of the dimwit prof’s favored Africans.  

Lester projected his voice through the use of a microphone (invented by Emile Berliner in 1877), and tv cameras (white guy Philo Farnsworth in 1927), on tv (the origin of which is disputed, but perhaps is best attributed to a fellow named Vladimir Zworykin – working for RCA — in the early 1930s).

And before you can ask: no, he was neither one of those rare black Vladimirs that you’re always hearing about in Kanye songs, nor one of the Kinshasa Zworykins. 

Also, Lester made his ridiculously idiotic arguments in English, a Germanic language which was pioneered by Anglo-Saxon types around 450 AD.  The Angles and the Saxons were both Liz Warren white.  And don’t get me started on the Jutes, who were as pale as Martha’s Vineyard in the off-season.  And the Frisians?  Wow. 

To summarize, around the time Rome fell, it was cracker city from one end of England to the other!

In fact, if you were a typical British guy from around 450-1200 and had a son, he would have looked like Harald Hardrada.  (Boom!  Obscure historical white guy reference for 1000!)

Later on, English grammar had an influx of vocab from French, Latin and Greek (white, swarthy-white, and olive-skinned white, respectively).

If Lester were judged by his own standards, he would have arrived in a dashiki, squinted at his surroundings, and spoken in an African language — Twi, Shona or Swahili, for example – thus making himself incomprehensible (but no less unpersuasive) to 99.9% of his audience.

Except that his audience couldn’t have heard his inanities anyway, since he would have had no microphone, and they couldn’t have seen him to appreciate his dashiki-and-dreads combo, because he’d have had no cameras.

I thought about making this story the next in my “Find a Mirror!” series, wherein I highlight some goofball who is totally lacking in self-awareness.  Neal Lester certainly fills that bill.

But alas, I cannot tell him to find a mirror.  Because the modern mirror was invented in 1835 by German chemist Justus vol Liebig, and I don’t want to offend Neal’s delicate sensibilities by asking him to look in a mirror invented by white devils. 

Speaking of dumb people, I’m always grateful to God that most criminals have AOC-level IQs.  If they’re not getting facial tattoos with their names and gang affiliations to make them stand out in a line-up, they’re posting accounts of their crimes on social media, or making other similarly bad decisions.

Consider the case of Zyeama Johnson, a 27-year-old New Jersey resident who had 11 bench warrants out for her arrest – for fraud, and failure to appear on multiple traffic charges – in Jersey and PA.  Apparently the fraud wasn’t paying the bills, because she recently applied for a regular job.

Sure, it probably wasn’t brilliant to bring two stolen credit cards with her to her job interview.  But she probably didn’t think the interviewers would be going through her purse, because why would they?

Well, they might do that if the place she applied for work was the Hudson County Sheriff’s Office. 

Yes, that’s the law enforcement agency that, among other things, specializes in finding and arresting people with active warrants.  And I don’t know if they checked her references, but they damn sure checked her criminal history.   And found her basket of active warrants, and arrested her at her interview.

And then found the stolen credit cards in her purse.

I feel sorry for her.  She looks so sad in her mug shot, and I really do hope that she gets her act together.

Besides, say what you will about Zyeama — I’d still rather have her as my president than the Scranton Stutterer.

Speaking of crime, and lefties not being good at dealing with it, let me close with a humorous tale of the funniest final line I’ve ever heard in a television show.  It comes from a sympathetic story on sex offenders in the leftist program Vice News. 

Okay, that doesn’t sound like a laugh riot.  But hear me out…

The program does its best to present a sympathetic take on the plight of sex offenders.  While it makes some good points about the obstacles they face when getting out of jail – the stigma, their difficulties in finding employment or housing, etc. – it struggles mightily to NOT see the elephant in the room:

Sex offenders have the highest recidivism rates of all criminals, and their crimes are especially devastating to the victims and their communities. 

The interviewer, Alice Hines, focuses on a paroled offender named Aishef, whom she follows through his struggles as he tries to get back on his feet, dogged by the legacy of his past crimes.  She is honest enough to show the way he tries to downplay or deny some of his crimes, and she does interview a victim of his, too. 

Her heart seems to be in the right place, as many leftists’ hearts are, but her ideology interferes with her ability to recognize the flaws in the advocacy position she takes.  Ultimately, her message about Aishef is clear: he is mostly a victim of a dysfunctional and unfair justice system.

At the end, she gives him what she intended to be the last, uplifting words, in answer to her question about his hopes for the future. He replies, “I ain’t going to let stuff stop me.  Not even this, or DNA, or a person’s opinion.  We all out here in this world, and we all gotta make it happen.  Ain’t nothing stoppin’ me.  I’m very hopeful, and confident.”

Then… wait for it…

“After this interview, Ashief sent a picture of his penis to our producer.”

And, scene.

I am breathlessly awaiting the announcement that Alice Hines has been nominated to become the new head of the Biden DOJ.

Avenatti/Ashief 2024!