As a musical artefact, “Jolene” is hard to top. It’s an epic bit of Americana, the karaoke song of choice for many an amateur show-off, as well as a favourite for professional artists who want something to cover. What makes it fascinating, however, isn’t just its challenging melody, but its message: the narrator of “Jolene” knows she cannot compete with the song’s titular antagonist, and has no intention of doing so. Instead, she makes a plaintive appeal to the other woman’s sense of decency, and maybe even her vanity. “You could have your choice of men,” Parton sings, “But I could never love again, he’s the only one for me, Jolene.” (That the man in question isn’t exactly a catch is never said outright, but heavily implied; this is, remember, a guy who talks about other women in his sleep.)

Hence the excitement this month when a cover of the song appeared on Beyoncé’s new album, Cowboy Carter — and the stir when it was discovered that Bey had changed the lyrics, and with them, the character of the song. Beyoncé isn’t begging anyone not to take her man, thank you very much. What she’s telling you is, if you try, there’s going to be trouble, perhaps even violence: “I’m warning you, don’t come for my man,” she sings.

These changes are not so surprising. Beyoncé’s “Jolene” begins with a spoken-word intro by a 78-year-old Parton: “Hey, miss Honey B, it’s Dolly P. You know that hussy with the good hair you sing about? Reminding me of someone I knew back when.” The hussy in question is “Becky with the good hair”, an unidentified woman with whom Beyoncé’s husband, Jay-Z, had a much gossiped-about extramarital affair; although the celebrity couple have always been cagey on the details of Jay-Z’s dalliance, Beyoncé periodically references it in her work.

It’s unclear if Beyoncé’s “Jolene” is meant to be yet another jab at this woman specifically, or simply a warning to anyone who had thoughts of following in her footprints. Its message, however, is unmistakable — which is to say, trite and predictable. As The Atlantic‘s critic wrote: “Beyoncé replaced the vulnerability that made ‘Jolene’ one of the best tunes of all time with a bunch of bad-bitch cliches.”

What’s interesting about those bad-bitch cliches is how often they’re employed in service of something that claims to be feminism, but in practice seems like the opposite. Threatening Jolene with violence instead of begging her for mercy is of course the more empowered choice according to the tenets of YASS-KWEEN feminism — but what kind of feminism reserves all its opprobrium for the woman who pursues a married man, while letting the man off the hook? Add to this Beyoncé’s peacocking, masculinised “if you try to touch him I’ll kick your ass” posturing, which paradoxically reveals how disempowered and insecure she is. If she’s a queen, as the song says, and has no doubts about her man’s devotion, then why is she threatening to throw hands at any woman who looks at him sideways?

But then, this brand of photogenic but ultimately insubstantial feminism is one that Beyoncé has long trafficked in, dating back at least a decade to her 2014 VMAs performance, where she stood in front of a screen on which “FEMINIST” was projected in giant block letters. At the time, all eyes were focused on the FEMINIST sign, but when I look at video of that performance now, what strikes me most is the faceless silhouette of her body against it: high-heeled, legs akimbo, virtually indistinguishable from the stock images that appear on the flyers for a certain type of establishment in Las Vegas or Atlantic City. Of course, when those places use this sort of imagery, it’s objectification and sexism. But it’s different with Beyoncé, for, you know, some reason.

It’s not that you can’t be sexy and also be a feminist, but there’s always been something a little strange about the circa-2014 idea that feminism itself is sexy, that this is its chief selling point. This same mindset has given us a culture in which diverse archetypes of female resilience have been increasingly replaced by the “badass”, a woman who has no feelings and no flaws, and who has little use for other people except as either casual sex partners or punching bags. It’s ironic, in a world where women can pursue ever more varied paths to fulfilment, that the representation of female strength in art has become increasingly narrow, one-dimensional, and masculinised. The self-rescuing princess; the emotionally aloof action heroine; the invulnerable, workaholic, commitment-phobic playgirl — an awful lot of “strong female characters” these days are basically just men, but with tits.

This category arguably includes the unnamed protagonist of Beyoncé’s “Jolene”, which makes the song an interesting example of the phenomenon whereby an allegedly feminist update ends up being less enlightened than the original piece of art. Parton’s song is actually, sneakily subversive, even as it fails the Bechdel test: these women are discussing a man, yes, but he’s more a prop than a person. Note that the singer doesn’t beg him not to leave; he’s not consulted, or even present, because he is not in charge. Instead, his fate rests in the hands of two women: the one who loves him in spite of herself, and the one who could have him, but hopefully won’t.

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The narrator of the original “Jolene” is decidedly not a badass — but this is the point, and something she is not ashamed to admit. She’s heartbroken at the idea of losing her man. But she’s no fool, either; she knows that her best chance of happiness requires playing on Jolene’s decency, woman to woman — or, possibly, pre-empting any man-stealing impulses Jolene might have had by respectfully flattering her into submission. Here I will admit that after listening to the song on repeat for the better part of a day, Parton’s lyrics started to remind me of the scene from The Hobbit where Bilbo Baggins attempts to disarm the dragon Smaug by bestowing upon him an increasingly flowery series of superlatives: Smaug the Magnificent. Smaug the Chiefest and Greatest of Calamities. Smaug the Unassessably Wealthy! And as such, Smaug who surely has much better and more important things to do than eat a hobbit of no importance.

Maybe the narrator of Jolene is truly the pathetic, simpering creature she pretends to be. Or maybe she’s just figured out that the best way to get what you want from a more powerful person is to make her feel magnanimous about giving it to you. And while the new “Jolene” struts around with its chest out, making superficially feminist noises (and, as such, acts as catnip for Beyoncé’s fans), it’s Parton’s that imagines women in the greater fullness, that recognises female power as it exists beyond the shallow archetype of the badass bitch. There is the soft power of the seductress, whose charms nobody can resist. And there’s the even softer power of the supplicant who — as another song would have it — ain’t too proud to beg.

It all started with “Heated”, a song in which Beyoncé raps about “spazzing on that ass”. Disability activists zeroed in on the verb, which is having a bit of a moment in American pop. Last month, Lizzo came under fire for using it in one of her songs; she altered the offending lyric. When the Australian woman who spearheaded the campaign against Lizzo was asked if she planned to make similar demands of Beyoncé, she answered the question with an op-ed in the Guardian: “When Beyoncé dropped the same ableist slur as Lizzo on her new album, my heart sank.”

This controversy was somewhat mystifying to audiences in America — where both Beyoncé and Lizzo were born and raised. The word spaz has different implications in American English — particularly African American Vernacular English, or AAVE — from the one it has in the UK or, it seems, Australia. In the US, it’s not uncommon to hear people use “spazzing out” to mean going crazy or malfunctioning; the idea that it could be a slur was met with bewilderment by American audiences. And in Lizzo’s song, “Imma spaz” is a warning: she’s about to go nuts. (The whole song, which is about getting in fights, eventually escalates to more specific details about what “spazzing”, as a verb, might entail: “I’ma go Lorena Bobbitt on him, so he never fuck again.”)

The battle over the word has also thoroughly upended the usual deference paid by progressive culture warriors to black women, particularly when it comes to the use of AAVE. The optics of a white Australian coming after Lizzo and Beyoncé, insisting that the black American cultural context for the word “spaz” is superseded by her own, are deeply weird. Lizzo hints at this injustice in her statement about changing her lyrics: “As a fat black woman in America, I’ve had many hurtful words used against me.” The subtext is clear: you may have successfully painted yourself as a victim this time, white lady, but we all know that this isn’t usually how oppression works.

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These linguistic misunderstandings are a hazard of global culture in which the same word may have different meanings depending on where you are, or what language you’re speaking. For example, the periodic public freakouts by parents who have just noticed that one of their child’s Crayola crayons has the word “negro” on it. They are invariably followed by the Crayola corporation explaining patiently, for the millionth time, that all the crayons include colour translations for Spanish-speaking children and “negro” is the Spanish word for black.

You might think that Beyoncé — a woman who wrote a song called “Sorry” in which she refuses to apologise for doing what she wants; a woman who has never shied away from making art that is steeped in black American culture; a descendant of slaves who was one of the most powerful and wealthy entertainers in the world by the time she turned 40 — would have at least as much gumption as the children’s crayon company when it comes to defending her work.

Instead, she capitulated instantly.

The lyrics in “Heated” will be altered, per a statement by Beyoncé’s team. Per a recent Spotify listen, they already have been: the new iteration not-quite-seamlessly replaces “spazzing” with “blasting”. Beyoncé herself hasn’t spoken about the decision, but it’s a fair bet that Lizzo, who is already encroaching on Bey’s status as an icon not just of pop culture but of politically conscious art, had pretty much greased the skids on this one. Beyoncé’s choices were to follow her lead or look like an insensitive clod by comparison.

And as a woman who is both famously protective of her privacy as well as notoriously control-freaky about her public image — up to and including trying to get unflattering photos of herself removed from the internet — the move is hardly surprising. Naturally Bey would prefer to avoid finding herself at the centre of a cancel-culture maelstrom which is personally intrusive, professionally disruptive, and threatens to overshadow the release of the album she spent two years working on.

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That artists can now instantly edit songs because a few hundred people became outraged by the lyrics on social media is, of course, a recent thing, made possible only by the advent of streaming — and maybe one day there will be a black market for bootleg recordings of the “dirty” version of “Heated”, just as my childhood VHS copy of The Little Mermaid became a collector’s item after Disney edited out the now-notorious scene in which the priest officiating Prince Eric’s wedding appears to be sporting an erection. (The official Disney line, which absolutely nobody believes, is that it’s a poorly-drawn knee.) But even as the malleability of digital media means that we can retroactively edit out anything, anytime, for any reason, it’s hard to overstate how bad it is for art if the consensus becomes that we should.

The mistaken identity aspect of this particular controversy — the fact that activists insisted on ignoring the unique cultural context of “spaz” in order to take offence — certainly adds an extra layer of absurdity to the whole enterprise. (Imagine a group of American social justice warriors bewailing the horror of every scene in British cinema where someone asks for a cigarette using a certain f-word.) Additionally ridiculous is the part where Beyoncé is black, and writing in a racially-inflected dialect, which under any other circumstances would command absolute deference from the white progressives who are now demanding she alter her art to suit them. But the fact that it’s easy to make fun of this controversy also obscures what makes it toxic: a callow betrayal of the ideals and the legacy that have made American culture into a global force.

The US has always been a place where artists insist on their absolute freedom to create work that is provocative and daring and, yes, even offensive, and even objectively so. American music is Jim Morrison singing “girl we couldn’t get much higher” on the Ed Sullivan Show after being explicitly told not to, and laughing it off when an enraged Sullivan confronted him after the set. It’s Frank Zappa calling Tipper Gore and Susan Baker “the wives of Big Brother” during the Senate’s “Rock Porn” hearings, and railing against proposed legislation that “reads like an instruction manual for some sinister kind of toilet-training programme to house-break all composers and performers because of the lyrics of a few”. It’s Smack My Bitch Up, and Fuck the Police, and Papa Don’t Preach, and W.A.P. And as a culture, we have always fiercely defended the right of artists to engage in irreverence, heresy, and obscenity, understanding that these freedoms are necessary to the creation of fearless work.

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Meanwhile, the pressure to change a work of art to be more sensitive falls disproportionately on women, who are, for some reason, expected to be receptive to such demands. A list of musicians whose “offensive” lyrics were changed not only skews heavily female but shows the comparatively high bar a man’s song has to clear to be subject to the same sort of backlash; consider the nature of, say, Taylor Swift’s offence (“So go and tell all your friends that I’m obsessive and crazy / That’s fine, I’ll tell mine / You’re gay, by the way”) versus Michael Jackson’s (“Kill me, kike me, don’t you black or white me”.) ​​The double standard surrounding the lyrical depiction of women, and women’s bodies, is so wild that Meghan Trainor was savaged for not being body positive enough in her 2014 song “All About That Bass” — the same year that Drake, on Nicki Minaj’s Pinkprint album, received no criticism at all for announcing his predilection for Rubenesque women who “wanna suck you dry and then eat some lunch with you”.

But women’s contributions to the culture are less valuable, their work assumed to be eternally open to revision in a way that makes it less serious than men’s. What gives us the idea that if it’s a woman, we may not just demand but expect apologies for how she uses language in her lyrics? What are we to conclude when the most powerful female musician in the world is expected to compromise her artistic integrity lest she hurt somebody’s feelings?

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Meanwhile, the conversation surrounding this new album has swiftly come to resemble that cautionary fable about giving a mouse a cookie. A second alteration to Renaissance has also been announced — this one the removal of a sample of the 2003 song “Milkshake,” after singer Kelis complained on Instagram that the song had been stolen. (The two men who actually wrote the song had been credited — as had Kelis, for performing it.) At the same time, Monica Lewinsky suggested on Twitter that while Beyoncé is making changes, perhaps she should also remove a reference to Lewinsky’s affair with then-President Bill Clinton from her 2013 song “Partition”. And why not? “Partition” explicitly makes light of one of the most humiliating moments in Lewinsky’s life; surely she has just as much (if not more!) claim to righteous offence as the activists who cannot recognise that the word “spaz” might mean different things in different contexts (although this argument may be somewhat undermined by the fact that Lewinsky still proudly includes “rap song muse” in her Twitter bio).

Having signalled that she’s willing to edit her work to avoid giving offence, Beyoncé can expect every single song she releases from this moment forward to be scrutinised. And perhaps more importantly, so can everyone else. Beyoncé and Lizzo have kicked this door open; there’s no telling how many other artists will be expected to walk through it.

And Beyoncé’s Renaissance, far from being a transformative and unfettered explosion of pure expression — a work that allowed the performer, during the pandemic, “to feel free and adventurous in a time when little else was moving” — has been marked out as a place where creative freedom lost ground, and where the censors won. This moment has been stolen by self-appointed culture cops who neither understand nor appreciate what they’re tearing down, and who are drunk not on the power of the music, but on the petty power trip of successfully blackmailing a famous, gifted musician into changing her art because they said so.

Except, if you knew about the #FreeBritney campaign, this felt like something else. Not a tech-flavoured parable about the commoditising effects of the pop industry, but a straight-up retelling of a story about Britney Spears, who for the past 12 years has had no legal control over her life while her family has made every decision for her. In 2008, Britney — who by then had been shockingly famous for a decade, since the release of “… Baby One More Time” — had a very public breakdown. She shaved her head. She attacked the paparazzi. She lost custody of her children for a time. She was taken into hospital strapped to a gurney, and all this was harrowingly documented by the eager press.

Around this time, I woke up in the middle of the night, turned on the World Service, caught the latest update on the Britney situation, and semi-consciously decided that the first thing I would do the next morning would be to write Britney a letter inviting her to stay with me. She just needed someone to look out for her for a bit, and boy am I good at looking out for Britney, who I’ve loved since the first time I saw the “Baby” video. I put a poster of Britney in her teenage bedroom in my own teenage bedroom and had to, excruciatingly, un-out myself when this led everyone to assume I was mostly into girls.

No pop star has ever arrived with such a perfect statement of what they are, and what they mean. Here’s the former Disney Mousketeer, now 16, surrounded by a pounding Max Martin production, big-eyed in school uniform and moaning out every word, absolutely desperate with desire — with love, because Britney’s S&M-skirting invitation to hit her (figuratively!) one more time is all directed at one baby. And of course, we all knew she was a virgin. That was part of the sell. She had to be in on it, didn’t she?

Maybe my 17-year-old self was making some generous assumptions about how far Britney was directing this, but don’t teenage girls always make generous assumptions about their command over the world? Anyway, the Britney template was established: half unstoppable purpose (hit me!), half hopeless supplication (when I’m not with you I lose my mind!). On top of this, by her second album, the irresistible phoniness of this confection was being acknowledged in songs like “Lucky”, a ballad about a “Hollywood girl” who’s “lost in an image, in a dream.” She had to be in on it. Didn’t she?

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The best of Britney’s fame songs is probably “Piece of Me”, which was released in November 2007. In it, Britney — by then well into her “hot mess” era, with two broken marriages and one abortive rehab stint — goes in on her tabloid image. “I’m Miss American Dream since I was 17… Mrs She’s Too Big, Now She’s Too Thin,” she chants. The refrain is classic Britney, part come-on and part threat: “You wanna piece of me?” It sounded like someone throwing her own coverage back in the media’s face and taking charge.

A few months later, she was strapped to that gurney and in charge of nothing. From that point, amid rumours of mental illness and substance abuse, she was put under a court-ordered conservatorship, which gave her father control over essentially her entire life — her finances, as well as her physical and mental health. In the public account of the Britney story, this is where the show got back on the road. Head shaving: out. In: mammothly profitable Las Vegas residencies. I saw the touring version in Scarborough, in 2018, and God she was good when she was performing.

When she wasn’t in motion, though, she seemed a little vacant, and I’m not fully sure she knew she was in Scarborough (the best we got was a “Hello UK!”). This is where a second version of the Britney story cuts in, the one that’s been assembled by supposition and guesswork. This is the version the #FreeBritney campaign is working to. For them, Britney, like fictional Ashley O in Black Mirror, has been wholly co-opted by the people around her — her family — who they believe are exploiting her for maximum financial gain. The ACLU has even offered to support her in challenging the conservatorship arrangement. Her latest attempt to remove her father from her affairs was just deferred by a court till 2021.

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What’s actually going on with Britney is difficult to say, because the hearings on her conservatorship are all closed, and her family deny any charge of acting against Britney’s best interests. Fans have been left picking over her social media for clues, which is, it’s fair to say, opaque. But even the most generous guess at what’s happening leaves a bad taste. If this is a woman who really is incompetent to run her own life, and has to be overseen in every particular by her guardians, why was I squealing away in the stands watching her do hot Thatcherite self-determination anthem “Work Bitch”?

Being a hypocrite, I guess. Being a fan. Getting my piece of her. Other artists play off their persona and their private lives in their music: Gaga, Beyoncé, Taylor Swift — in fact, all the most exciting pop stars since Britney have followed her in making their music primarily a record of their relationship to fame. But with Britney, it seems as though the image long ago outran the woman underneath it, and even the supporters who want to free her still want her to be their Britney.

The most heartbreakingly implausible bit of that Black Mirror is that the pop star character gets her liberation, because it’s hard to see Britney’s way out. If she succeeds in cutting her father from the conservatorship — even if she’s eventually deemed too competent to be released from it entirely — what does freedom look like for someone whose entire adult life has been spent being famous for being Britney Spears? The most constricting part of celebrity isn’t the people who hate you: it’s the people who think they love you, and who think that love means they own you.

Pugh recalled how she hadn’t heard of “cultural appropriation” until a friend informed her of its supposed meaning and “the history and heartbreak over how when black girls do it they’re mocked and judged, but when white girls for it, it’s only then perceived as cool”.

After acknowledging her “white fragility” and “white privilege”, Pugh expressed how “truly sorry” she was for the “offence” she caused and “profusely” apologised that it “took this long” for her to realise her transgression.

If you are au courant with the latest trends in pop culture, then you would know that Florence Pugh has not been the only celebrity embroiled in charges of appropriating and defiling the culture of ‘marginalised’ groups. Over the past decade, figures such as Justin Bieber, Madonna, Katy Perry, Scarlett Johansson and Jamie Oliver have all been accused of being “culture vultures”. Recently, The Simpsons have announced they will no longer use white actors to voice non-white characters. Other white voice actors have recused themselves from voicing black characters on cartoon shows, saying they should be voiced by black actors instead.

White people aren’t the only ones who have been condemned for such cultural transgressions. Beyoncé was accused of “appropriating” from Indian culture because she wore a rather glitzy sari for Coldplay’s “Hymn For the Weekend”. The social media editor of Marie Claire lambasted Rihanna for allegedly “appropriating” the Chola aesthetic from Mexican culture for donning thin eyebrows — even though thin eyebrows have been used across the world, from southern Africa to 1920s New York.

One would be wrong to assume this nonsense is simply consigned to the absurd summits of celebrity culture, however — it’s trickling down to the whole of our cultural discourse. For instance, in 2018, American student Kenziah Daum was subjected to a vicious social media backlash, simply because she wore a traditional Qipao to a Prom night. In 2019, Indigenous musicians in Canada were at each other’s throats over the Cree artist Cikwes’s use of a traditional Inuit singing technique, because according to Inuit “spokespeople” she did not have “permission to… take something that isn’t hers and make an album, and put it on iTunes, and have it for sale”.

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“Cultural appropriation” is an academic concept that originates from the esoteric realm of post-colonial and decolonial studies, but has now become a pop cultural phenomenon and a mainstream political issue.

The argument is that exploitation of the cultures of colonised peoples by colonial structures is analogous to theft and plunder, like the lawless seizure of land, artefacts and treasures. As currently interpreted, it is also a form of erasure, emotional violence against the colonised subject, rendering them invisible, to cement total subjugation and control over all spheres of their subordinated existence.

Too often the argument has nothing to do with anti-racism or a critique of colonialism, but identitarian gatekeeping — the enforcement of customs of etiquette over who can use a particular cultural form in any particular context. This “cultural insiderism”, to borrow a phrase from Paul Gilroy, empowers self-appointed guardians to establish a cordon sanitaire around cultures and appropriate the right of license, hence entrench their own social power.

An irony of this argument is that most opponents of cultural appropriation proclaim, often radically, to be for diversity, immigration and multiculturalism, yet they are same people who bitterly resent the actual results of such a symbiosis. Tribally marking off permission rights over who can use what cultural form, or whose “voice”, and in what way is puerile.  It attacks the main benefits of living in a modern, culturally diverse, cosmopolitan society: freedom of expression, cultural innovation and experimentation and expansion of one’s horizons and liberation of the imagination.

No culture is pure, uncontaminated, hermetically sealed, existing purely within its own universe. “The history of all cultures is a history of cultural borrowing,” Edward Said observed, and that Said’s magnum opus, Orientalism, has often been invoked by the culture warriors to bolster their arguments is something he would be aghast at.

This point is effortlessly made about European or Western culture, but it is also true of non-white cultures. Jazz is commonly thought of as invented by black Americans and appropriated by white America — yet, jazz itself appropriated from European classical music. That was cultural appropriation par excellence and we’re all the better for it.

Cultural forms can certainly be utilised in a racist and exploitative manner, the sordid history of blackface minstrel performances being an example. Black music historically has been derided as “race music” and demonised for being violent, salacious and primitive, while white artists were showered with praise when they play similar music. So it is true that intercourse of cultures doesn’t always take place on equal or equitable terms, but can be shaped by racism, inequality and oppression.

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However, as Amiri Baraka once observed, the issue here is not that of cultural appropriation at all, but of material exploitation: “The problem is that if The Beatles tell me that they learned everything they know from Blind Willie [Johnson], I want to know why Blind Willie is still running an elevator in Jackson, Mississippi. It’s that kind of inequality that is abusive, not the actual appropriation of culture because that’s normal.”

The ubiquity of campaigns against cultural appropriation reveal how social struggles, anti-racism for instance, are increasingly framed in cultural terms, rather than political ones; how cultural radicalism has mutated from promoting cultural liberty and freedom of expression to cultural restrictionism; how politics itself has been culturalised, hence why the recent statue wars and the removal of “unwoke” TV episodes have dominated mainstream political discussion over the past few weeks.

A recurring motif one detects in the campaigns against cultural appropriation is a primitive and moralistic hostility to capitalism and consumerism. Often the outrage is over the commercialisation and commodification of cultural forms, that in turn are mass produced and sold for a profit. According to these cultural “radicals” this process is abuse. Cultures becomes diluted, reduced to musical tropes and clothing styles that have been evacuated of authenticity and soul by market forces.

But it is precisely this commodification that lays the basis for a new radical cultural freedom, allowing people to choose elements from a mixture of traditions and create a new culture for themselves. The same process also makes it easier for people to stray from their “original” identities and to integrate into modern society. Uncommodified cultures stagnate, closed to outsiders, and raise the costs for straying outside their walls. Humans make culture, not vice versa. Because of this, cultures are dynamic, evolving and always intermixing, so to erect borders between cultures and police them is not just inherently authoritarian but inane.

It is not a coincidence that many agitators against cultural appropriation are socially-conscious people of colour, second and third generations immigrants whose ties to their heritage is precarious. You may feel like a foreigner in your home country, yet might as well be a tourist in the country of your parents. The best you can do is take the bits of your heritage that you value and assimilate it in yourself to have any connection with it all. Even then it feels distant and instrumental.

I am empathetic to this myself as a British-Nigerian, the sense of alienation and deracination many of my cohorts will feel. But I see this deracination, this proletarian “rootlessness”, however paradoxical it may seem, as the basis for a new higher form of liberation. One of the hard truths of modern existence is that there is no such thing as a rooted, stable and authentic identity one can reconnect with after seismic processes such as colonialism, migration and globalisation.

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Which is why I find the most irksome aspect of this argument the noticeable but seldom mentioned assumption that only white people have the liberty to break out of their “roots” and become universal, worldly, cosmopolitan, mobile and protean. But “people of colour” are particular, provincial, rooted in their ancient cultural and spiritual traditions.

The culture warriors aren’t even trying to expand cultural freedom and possibility for non-white artists. No, they want everyone to be provincialised, white people included. This to me can only produce inane solipsism and break down the possibility of having a shared universal conversation that transcends colour lines and cultures.

Crusades against cultural appropriation are not progressive, they are reactionary. Not only does it constrain exchange, inhibit the imagination, and threaten to deaden cultural expression and innovation, they undermine precisely what is valuable about a diverse and open cosmopolitan society. For the sake of art, culture and the human experience itself, let’s take a stand for true cultural freedom and unfettered imagination.