The Fallacy of "Cultural Appropriation" and its role in Fiction

The argument (or whine) goes like this:

You can't write in the first person narrative a fictional character of a "culture" different from your own, as the author.

Further, how can you presume to express the thoughts of someone from another culture? You would have to be a black lesbian in order to write from their perspective.

This barbarity is referred to as Cultural Appropriation.

The logical consequence of this statement is devestating for the world's body of fictional literature.

If we cannot represent or portray a different "culture" (a misnomer for ethnicity), then what makes that the case is also the case for any fundamental difference between individuals. This is because the raw argument is that you have to be X to portray X. If you are Y, you can only portray Y.

The CA argument is logically bound to hold for all individuals who are not you.

Every single great work of fictional literature could not exist if this statement were enforced.

Not even the Bible, Koran or Torah are immune (where if not considered works of fiction themselves, these works certainly make great use of fictional characters in parables to teach lessons and doctrine).

Behind the argument is the necessity that you cannot represent anyone who you are not yourself.

This must include women writing for men, authors writing for various professionals (as lawyers, accountants, generals, soldiers, killers etc etc). Adults writing as children. Gays as straights. Caucasian and Asian. The innocent as murderers. The modern writer as an ancestor. A Republican as a Democrat. A butcher as a surgeon (although granted these two are similar).

Clearly, the entire body of fictional literature is destroyed, past present and future, by the CA argument.

The entire point of writing fiction is to represent a range of characters, themselves representing all walks of life, all creeds, all ethnicities.

It is a catastrophic premise.

Now, there is some merit to the argument, but also some untested assumptions.

There is merit in a person of one ethnicity not being another and therefore cannot know what it is like to be the other ethnicity.

The only meaningful principle implicit in the argument is that one cannot portray any character they are not.

So, not only is all fictional writing destroyed, but also all fictional films, plays, songs, poems and other forms of expression that portray characters different from their players by sex, gender, ethnicity, creed and all the rest.

This fascist dictum even comes so close to many laws and policies, advocacy and charity that claim to represent the Other, that on cursory scrutiny they may also need to line up against the wall of the SJW firing squad.

Imagine the world after all that excision from life.

It is also a wonder that this abhorent illogical behaviour has lasted this long through history without protest or abolition.

But there is an assumption within the concept that can be attacked with equal verve.

CA assumes that no one can be represented or portrayed at all under any circumstance.

The necessary assumption makes it impossible to relate to anyone who is not exactly you.

It negates sympathy, empathy and basic human understanding between people.

This is because, if you cannot represent or portray anyone, then you cannot sympathise with them, you cannot understand them, grieve with them, have laws that cover behaviour across people, you cannot advocate for them, you could barely understand a word they said.

Thus, the decree of CA is utterly destroyed by the first test of its most fundamental principle.

Thus armed, if you ever experience this phenomenon, kill it on sight with extreme prejudice.