In Defense of Cultural Appropriation: A Selection from Susan Neiman’s Learning from the Germans (2019)

“People fought to get the blues played on mainstream radio stations; earlier it was called ‘race music.’ As blues and gospel and R&B and soul and hip-hop took over the airwaves, there was plenty of exploitation of the musicians who created it. But shouldn’t the first step be to recognize all that music as American treasure, then to thank the African Americans who created it by fairly distributing the spoils? There’s no fair way to do it, some say. That music was born from black pain and struggle, and it ought to remain in black hands. But I know of nothing more moving than Paul Robeson’s rendering of the ‘Partisan Lied,’ written in Yiddish as response to the Warsaw ghetto uprising in 1943. And the fact that he sang it in 1949 in Moscow, as Stalin’s anti-Semitism began to sweep the Soviet Union, shows he knew exactly how to use it. I don’t think a Jew could have done it better. It was Robeson’s use of that song, in Yiddish and Russian, to express a universal fight for justice that made it all so poignant.

There is a sense in which only an African American can understand the pain that photo of Emmett Till produced. Would it be the same sense in which only a Jew can understand the Holocaust? Here the ground starts to slip. I’m inclined to agree with Jean Améry that only a Holocaust survivor can understand the pain of the Holocaust; I do not think I can. Not by standing on the bone-white stones of Dachau or in the cold fog of Buchenwald. Not by reading memoirs, for even the best of them, like Améry’s and Ruth Kluger’s, leave me staring into a void I cannot fathom. Not by visiting a Holocaust museum that gives you a name on a tag to insist you identify with someone’s true story. Jews around the world were raised in the shadow of the Holocaust, but so much was drenched in myth that, for me at least, it always felt far away. Even when I sought the truths, the myth overshadowed. Even in Berlin.

If Améry is right, the Holocaust is only comprehensible, if at all, to other survivors. Born later to the same tribe, I am not one who will ever share the understanding of which Améry wrote. At best, I share understanding of what it meant to grow up in the wake of the Holocaust with Jews like myself—those who have tried to turn that wake into something alive and universal. Those who could grasp the Holocaust itself are not us, but survivors, be they Jewish or Roma or communist or gay. Understanding isn’t tribal, the stuff that flows in your veins. It demands either shared experience or very hard work. And even then there’s a gaping black hole that surpasses understanding in its heart.

Can a white woman understand the pain of Emmett Till’s mother—or Eric Garner’s, Trayvon Martin’s, Tamir Rice’s? If we cannot entirely understand it, aren’t we obliged to try? ‘All men are slaves till their brothers are free’ rang the words of the now-forgotten ‘Medgar Evers Lullabye.’ African American history in all its torment and glory is American history, and we cannot move forward until all Americans see it that way. Isn’t that why Mamie Till-Mobley opened the casket to begin with? . . .

The arts are the only thing that have the power to shake you up. All the facts in the world don’t matter until they move you, and the arts, broadly speaking, can do that better than anything else. . . . this is not an argument for Dana Schutz’s painting, but an argument for cultural appropriation—the only way we can begin to understand each other’s worlds. As Kwame Anthony Appiah argued in his powerful book The Lies That Bind, we’ve been doing it so thoroughly for so long that it makes no sense to speak of a pure cultural product at all.”—Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil (2019)