Dear Gavin,
In my last letter, I went into the origins of the authenticity jive. What we need to do now is analyze this a little bit more. If we do this, it will not stop our stereotyping and projecting, but it will help us to understand it a little bit better. We can at least come to understand our own internal reactions better.
Whenever you have an identifiable subgroup, the larger society outside that subgroup starts generalizing and making assumptions about any new member of that class that they happen to meet. They believe they have discovered a short-hand way of learning about the person before having exchanged one word with that person.
“You can always tell a Harvard man, but you can’t tell him much.” “Jews are good with money.” “Vermont farmers are taciturn.” “Cretans are evil beasts, lazy gluttons, and liars.”
All of this, of course, is what we now call prejudice, and according to our ruling etiquette overlords, prejudice is almost the original sin. You just don’t do that, not anymore. But pre-judgments are actually inescapable. Before your first visit to the UK, you are going to have certain conceptions in your mind about the Brits, assumptions you have garnered from your movie-watching habits. And when you go over there, some of those assumptions are going to be blown to smithereens, and others of them are going to be radically reinforced. It really is true, for example, that for Americans, a hundred years is a long time, and for the Brits, a hundred miles is a long way.
Certain cultural expectations about groups you don’t know very well are inescapable. Our current generation of whites now sneers at the assumptions of previous generations as racist, but this is not because we have abandoned all such assumptions. It is just that we have jettisoned unacceptable assumptions for more acceptable ones. Whites can still generalize about blacks, but they can only do so in acceptable directions. The problem is that they perform this maneuver while telling themselves that these acceptable generalizations are not generalizations at all.
Thus is it not possible for some white guy to reference a generalization that has been archived with opprobrium, like references to watermelon or fried chicken. That’s a career-ender, right there. But it is not the case that he is now free of all generalizing or “stereotyping.” No. He just stereotypes now in approved directions. When he does that, because it is an approved direction, what is happening is invisible to pretty much everybody. That kind of group think is not a career ender. You get a free pass. Well, you get a free pass for the time being. The woke are on the prowl, sure to make a problem out of everything.
Let me appear to change the subject, but I am not really doing so. It is easy to learn how to talk like a wine snob. It is not hard to learn how to swirl the wine in the glass, and to stick your nose in it. It is not difficult to say things like “I pick up traces of oak. Or licorice. Or boot leather.” You learn words like bouquet or terroir. Life is pretty simple.
But suppose some Nebuchadnezzar of a sommelier reverses the game on you, and does not ask you to interpret his dream, but rather to tell him what the dream was. Suppose you now have to taste various wines with the labels covered up, and tell everyone whether or not it was a Merlot or a Cab. It is a blind taste test, and all of a sudden the buzz word responses that you learned don’t do you any good at all.
Everyone knows that American congregations will spot a preacher 10 extra unction points if he has a British or a Scottish accent. In the case of Scots, it can’t be so thick as to unintelligible—the kind of accent you could spread on crackers—but if it is at Sinclair Ferguson levels, he gets those extra points. Now in the same way, and for much the same reasons, if a white audience is listening to a choir performing spirituals, and the soloist is a black woman who weighs two hundred pounds, if she is at all competent, she is spotted 20 authenticity points. White audiences will rave about it. I know that I could get convicted of a hate crime for saying it, but that doesn’t make it false.
And my point is not to complain about it. I think they should rave, and there is nothing wrong with it. Certain levels of such prejudice are actually beneficial. I rise to speak in praise of prejudice. You cannot outlaw all preconceived notions, and if you try, then the compliant among us will surrender all the positive ones, and you will be left with all the outlawed negative ones. When prejudices are outlawed, only outlaws will have prejudices.
But the woke among us are nevertheless hard at work problematizing everything, and if they have their way, then white audiences loving a black soloist will soon be as racist as black-face minstrel shows. So when the woke are done with their demolition work, the only people willing to utter any sort of prejudicial thought out loud will be the neo-Nazis. And I will stare at the woke with my best fat face, and say, “Don’t look at me. This is your work.” You can get decent middle-class folk to stop saying wetback, but you can’t do it without unleashing the whirlwind.
But this leads us back to Nebuchadnezzar, blind taste tests, and the problems of cultural appropriation. If you sat down a mixed audience of blacks and whites, and had them listen to twenty blues guitarists playing instrumental lead, songs they had never heard before, how accurate do you think they would be when asked to identify the ethnicity of the guitarists? If you did the same thing, only you played them a radio broadcast of a championship high school basketball game from somewhere, and then asked them to tell you afterwards which players were white and which were black, I think that everybody would have a rough go of it. I even think you could put together a Norwegian choir performing Go Down, Moses, and if you worked at it hard enough, pass them off as a choir from Antioch Tabernacle from down Mississippi way. In other words, cultural appropriation is often done badly, but it can be done well, and when it is done well, nobody should have a problem with it.
I will never forget the time when I was watching some rockumentary about the rise of soul music, and they were contrasting the “white bread” soul music from Motown, over against the throbbing and more much authentic soul music coming out of Memphis. The latter represented the true black experience. But then, without any self-awareness at all, they showed us the studio musicians from Muscle Shoals, the headwaters of this authentic black sound. It was a row of bubbas. I forget if any of them were in overalls, or had one of those green John Deere caps, but the effect was really startling. It was like getting hit in the face with a thrown cod at the Seattle fish market. Just like that.
Cordially in Christ,
Douglas Wilson