A half dozen times a year, Sharon and I make our way to the Schermerhorn Symphony Center to hear classical music in downtown Nashville. It’s situated just a block from the deafeningly raucous Lower Broad, where such live music establishments as Bootleggers Inn, Tequila Cowboy, and Margaritaville (often with big side windows wide open beside the band) compete for customers from the crush along the sidewalks—the same district where country singer Morgan Wallen threw a chair from the sixth floor of the recently-opened Chief’s Bar, owned by fellow country singer Eric Church. Adding to the din is the honky-tonk music blaring from the “pedal taverns” and other conveyances full of drunk bachelorettes bellowing and twerking from on high as they make their way down the street.  

It's amazing that you “can hear a pin drop” in the concert hall, thanks to world-class acoustical design—external barriers and internal configurations. There we listen to selections from Beethoven and Shostakovich (this spring), Mussorgsky and Elgar (last winter), and Brahms (last fall). That Brahms program also included guest artist, Awadagin Pratt, playing Johann Sebastian Bach’s Keyboard Concerto in A Minor. And, boy, could Awadagin play! As I often say to Sharon on such occasions, “How in the world can they do that?” 

Not surprisingly, he’s in high demand, with artistry that’s taken him twice to performances at the White House (for Clinton, and then Obama), with the New York Philharmonic at Lincoln Center, and on Sesame Street, where he took turns at the piano with Big Bird. But there was a hitch in my spirit as he played: I was triggered by his blatant act of “cultural appropriation,” he a black man in dreds leeching off the creativity of a white, German, baroque composer of the eighteenth century, one who wore a white powdered wig. (And I’ve read that Pratt sometimes wears Van Gogh socks for his performances, thus filching off a white, nineteenth-century, French post-impressionist. Has he no shame!

The other day, I saw where a white girl was taken to task on social media for wearing beads in her hair. And if she’d gone with corn rows, Fulani braids, or Bantu knots, forget it. There are strict protocols for such stylistic borrowings, and woe to folks unwilling to walk on eggshells to get it right. 

But fair is fair, right? Shouldn’t Awadagin Pratt have made a disclaimer before sitting down to play? I have in mind an expression of sensitivity to the possible offense to be found in what he was about to do.

I turned to woke Wikipedia for guidance on this matter, and the scales fell from my eyes. Consider the opening paragraph:

Cultural appropriation is the inappropriate or unacknowledged adoption of an element or elements of one culture or identity by members of another culture or identity. This can be especially controversial when members of a dominant culture appropriate from minority cultures. According to critics of the practice, cultural appropriation differs from acculturation, assimilation, or equal cultural exchange in that this appropriation is a form of colonialism. When cultural elements are copied from a minority culture by members of a dominant culture, and these elements are used outside of their original cultural context—sometimes even against the expressly stated wishes of members of the originating culture—the practice is often received negatively. 

Ah, so that’s the deal. The old “critical theory” dance, in which there are only two sorts of partners on earth, and I don’t mean men and women; rather, the “oppressed” and “oppressors.” This is the conceit that insists that blacks can’t be racists since ‘racist’ implies power, and blacks, lacking “white privilege,” don’t have it.

Of course, that’s linguistic bilge—self-serving fiction. Truth of the matter is this:  If you despise another racial group per se, those with different pigmentation, you’re a racist. Black are just as apt to do this as whites. Full stop. Also, what’s this “colonialism” business? I thought the colonizers were the ones who made you act Western, e.g., making indigenous folks dress more modestly, learn a European language to advance in the civil service, or give up widow burning. That sort of thing. Now it’s “colonial” to adopt indigenous looks and ways. How convenient to think that if you’re determined to be miserable and willing to rewrite the history and the dictionary to feed your victimism.

A couple of decades ago, I did some research for a Christian publishing house, studying ethnic-focused periodicals for points cultural insight and points of contact, and I remember some immigrants’ delight in growing patronage for enterprises associated with their people, e.g., the rapid proliferation of Taco Bell franchises, even outstripping some burger brands. They may have thought the fare to be a lame version of their native dishes, but they weren’t grumpy that the Americanized version was increasingly popular. (Yes, they did object to the “Yo Quiero” chichuahua in the ads, but that’s understandable.) 

I also think of the South African vocal group, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, singers who very pleased to “be used/appropriated” by New York Jew Paul Simon on “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes” for the Graceland album. Their TV appearances were exuberant. I could go on, but let me just say that it seems odd to get huffy about folks’ using your stuff and vice versa, so long as copyright is honored and there’s no cheap-shot mockery involved. 

Granted, I’ve used an aesthetics anthology wherein a black writer says that white guys have no business playing jazz or blues, given their lack of requisite suffering. But, on the other hand, at the Smithsonian’s Museum of African-American History and Culture, on a wall listing black musicians of note, I’m almost positive that I saw seriously white Dave Brubeck posted in the mix along with Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Chuck Berry, and Marian Anderson. I know he’s honored at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, where they note that he had a long record of relying on and  promoting black musicians, so they counted him as kosher. It was a case of mutual appropriation.

Appropriation is endemic to our “mutt” language, English. We steal from the Dutch (boss), Hindi (bungalow), Arabic (algebra), Japanese (karaoke), Italian (paparazzi), French (déjà vu), German (kindergarten), Greek (nemesis), Spanish (siesta), Chinese (yin and yang), Native American (Kansas), etc. Our gain. And you don’t hear the Bantu complaining that someone’s playing the “banjo” at the Grand Ole Opry. They’re more likely pleased that the word and instrument came out of Africa. 

Our junior high band played an albeit-clunky scoring of Herbie Hancock’s “Watermelon Man.” Awadagin Pratt sported dreds playing Bach. No harm, no foul either way. 

And don’t think Pratt’s a sellout for playing white music; his angry cultural credentials are in place. At his website, we read, 


After witnessing the globally broadcast execution of George Floyd by officers of the Minneapolis Police Department, he published a podcast that quickly evolved into a multimedia musical experience. Performed primarily on college campuses across the U.S. [His] Black in America fuses the music of Bach, Messaien, and Liszt with still and moving pictures by filmmaker Alrick Brown and an original narration in which he chronicles his life . . . through graphic accounts of numerous police stops and arrests he experienced for Driving While Black. 

This narrative suggests that Pratt is a far better pianist than he is a dispassionate social commentator. To say that Floyd was “executed” (i.e., willfully put to death by the state or the mob, the locus of normal “execution” talk) overshoots the harsh but doubtful claim that he was “murdered,” i.e., killed on purpose. And I have to wonder if this refined, classical musician was really subjected to “numerous police stops and arrests” for DWB. It would be interesting to check the records beyond his testimony. Whatever the case, he shows his credentials as an indignant hombre, primed to talk Sharptonese.  

BTW, checking my 1954 edition of Victor Green’s The Negro Motorist Green Book (appearing the year I entered the first grade, and inspiring the 2018 film, Green Book), I see that, back in that day, Pratt might well have been pressed in Nashville to find lodging in the YMCA on Charlotte or the Bryant House on 8th Avenue South; and to find a meal at Martha’s on Cedar or the Peacock Inn on Jefferson.

We’ve come a long way. But we need to get on beyond this “appropriation” nonsense, embedded in toxic critical theory designed to enshrine pointless and ruinous resentment.