What about the culture of Memphis or Vallejo?

Paper 2: Evaluation of Strategies and Fallacies
4-5 pages
Due: 7/26 11:59 pm
For this paper, you will evaluate the strength of an article based on an analysis of the article’s rhetorical strategies and its fallacies. First, indicate the overall argument of the article and identify the article’s target audience and purpose. Then, pick two important strategies used and explain how these strategies work in enticing the target audience. Lastly, pick two fallacies the author commits and explain their weaknesses in terms of the audience.
Structure:
Introduction and thesis
Breakdown of main argument, claims, evidence, audience, purpose
Analysis of one strategy
Analysis of one fallacy
Analysis of second strategy
Analysis of second fallacy
Conclusion
Works Cited

. Question: Is this cultural appropriation? Why or why not?
The question is inspired by a spasm of social-media cruelty that caught wide attention last week. A young woman in Utah bought a Chinese-style dress to wear to her high school formal. She posted some photographs of herself on her personal Instagram page—and suddenly found herself the target of virulent online abuse
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.
For once, the story has a happy ending. Good sense and kindness prevailed, and instead of her prom being ruined, the young woman exited the dance buoyed
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by worldwide support and affirmation, most of all from within China.
Yet the idea persists that there is something wrong and oppressive about people of one background adopting and adapting the artifacts of another. Sadly often, these stories end as successful power plays enforced by local bullies.
At Oberlin in 2015, a Vietnamese student shamed the dining hall into ceasing to serve
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its version of Banh Mi sandwiches.
Instead of a crispy baguette with grilled pork, pate, pickled vegetables and fresh herbs, the sandwich used ciabatta bread, pulled pork and coleslaw. “It was ridiculous …. How could they just throw out something completely different and label it as another country’s traditional food?”
The references to “baguette” and “pâté” in a food product of a former French colony might have tipped off the angry Oberlin student that the banh mi is not quite as traditional a Vietnamese food as she imagined. When this exotic remake of a classic pate en baguette was first sold in the streets of Hanoi, the vendors called it “banh tay”: literally “Western-style bread.”
A Canadian university cancelled
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its yoga classes as culturally appropriating—notwithstanding that most of the strenuous moves taught in a modern class actually originate in Danish gymnastics and British army calisthenics, which were in turn appropriated
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by Indian entrepreneurs seeking to update yoga from a meditative to an active practice for the body-conscious modern age.
The cultural appropriation police answer the yoga and banh mi objections with a familiar counter-argument: it’s about power. It’s fine for colonized Indians to incorporate European fitness regimes into their yoga; wrong for Canadians of European origin to incorporate yoga into their fitness regimes.
But the trouble with that argument is that—like culture—power also ebbs and flows. Customs we may think of as immemorially inherent in one culture very often originated in that culture’s own history of empire and domination. The Han Chinese learned to drink tea for pleasure from peoples to their south. The green flag of Islam was adapted
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from the pre-Islamic religions of Iran. The great west African kingdom of Benin acquired
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the metal for some of its famous bronze artworks by selling thousands of people as slaves to Portuguese traders.
All cultures have histories. Young people born in North America may imagine that their grandmother’s recipes or wardrobe emerged autochthonously in a timeless ancestral homeland. But that only reflects how thoroughly they have Americanized themselves, reducing other countries’ complexities to folklores to be fetishized rather than understood and evaluated on their own terms.
The Chinese dress young Kezia Daum wanted to wear to prom originated in a brutal act of imperialism, but not by any western people. It originated in the Manchurian conquest of China in 1648, an event comparable to Europe’s Thirty Years War in its society-shattering murderousness. Millions of people, perhaps tens of millions, lost their lives in the upheaval.
The new rulers of Beijing required Chinese men to adopt Manchurian styles of dress and hair, including the notorious pigtail. When the Manchu dynasty was finally overthrown in 1911, Chinese people found themselves free for the first time in 250 years to dress as they pleased. In the decade afterward, creative personalities in the great commercial metropolis of Shanghai devised a new kind of garment for women. They called it the cheongsam.
The new garment was a fusion of old and new, east and west. Manchurian-style fabrics were tailored to a European-style pattern. In the past, upper-class women’s clothing had conveyed status and restricted movement. The cheongsam was equally available to women from a wide range of statuses—and enabled Chinese women to move as their western counterparts did.
The history of fashion is a notoriously contentious
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topic. The amateur is well-advised to keep a low profile and avoid strong declarative statements. But here’s what one can say: For whatever reason it happened, the idea that clothing styles should change regularly and often for no very compelling reason is one of Europe’s most distinctive contributions to world culture. Before their encounter with European culture, nobody else saw the point of it. Chinese costume was particularly conservative: Upper-class dress would change with the dynasties and hardly at all within them.
With the cheongsam, fashion in the European sense came to China. In the decades from 1915 to 1950, the cheongsam changed
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more than women’s costume did in the previous 250 years.
That moment of creativity did not endure. The communist takeover of 1949 restored the ancient practice: a new emperor imposes a new costume. Mao Zedong required his subjects all to wear the same unisex blue suit—and he so desperately impoverished China that few could have chosen otherwise even had they dared. Not until after his death would Chinese women recover any freedom of dress, and not until the 1990s could they afford to exercise that freedom. Today China has overtaken
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the United States, the European Union, and Japan as the world’s single largest market for luxury goods.
The cheongsam has come rocketing back, too, in a dizzying array
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of lengths and styles. But the freedom Chinese people have recovered is only a very partial one. The post-Mao rulers of China minutely police any flicker of regional resentment of rule from Beijing. They have by law insisted
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that the language of the North, known in the West as Mandarin, be recognized as the nation’s sole official language. “Cheongsam” is a Cantonese word for a South Chinese thing—but in almost every media report on the cyberbullying of Kezia Daum, the garment is given its Mandarin name, “qipao.”
It’s important to have these details in order to understand what is so deeply sinister about the claims now being made about the prom dress.
Like the idea that audiences should refrain from talking while music is performed, the idea that women should be able to move about as freely and easily as men is a cultural product—popularized by the North Atlantic world in the period after the First World War. If it’s wrong for one culture to borrow from another, then it was wrong to invent the cheongsam in the first place—because not only did the garment’s shape originate outside China, but so, too, did the garment’s purposes. It was precisely because they appreciated that they were importing Western ideas about women that the inventors of the cheongsam adapted a Western shape. They took something foreign and made it something domestic, in a pattern that has repeated itself in endless variations since the Neolithic period.
The policemen of cultural appropriation do not think that way. They have a morality tale to tell, one of Western victimization of non-Western peoples—a victimization so extreme that it is triggered by a Western girl’s purchase of a Chinese dress designed precisely so that Chinese girls could live more like Western girls.
In order to tell that story, the policemen of cultural appropriation must crush and deform much of the truth of cultural history—and in the process demean and infantilize the people they supposedly champion.
Consider, again, the Death Metal Cowboys. Despite their enthusiastic, wholesale adoption of costume and music imported into Botswana, they are unlikely to be accused of cultural appropriation. Why not? The would-be culture police build their whole philosophy on a single assumption of extreme chauvinism: that Western culture is universal—indeed the only universal culture. Western technology, the Western emphasis on individual autonomy and equal human dignity, and even such oddly specific Western practices as death-metal music—the cultural police take all this for granted as thoroughly as a fish takes for granted the water in its fishbowl.
You see this parochialism most clearly when someone living in a Western cultural context seeks to valorize a non-Western practice that might seem oppressive to other Western people. It is then, precisely when they imagine they are departing from Western ways, that they must rely on the Western intellectual tradition to justify their action. One random example out of hundreds that might be chosen, from an op-ed
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in The New York Times: “I see hijab as the freedom to regard my body as my own concern and as a way to secure personal liberty in a world that objectifies women … an assertive mode of individual feministic expression and rights.”
Of course, Islamic covering was not invented as a mode of individual feministic expression. Very much the opposite. The various coverings voluntarily adopted by some women in North America and Western Europe evolved in societies where 90 percent of the population still agrees
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that women must obey their husbands at all times.
Happily, the Western defenders of covering do not live in such societies. They live in a culture of autonomy and choice. Their individual decision to wear (or cease to wear) a traditional garment has already changed that garment’s cultural context and put it to a new and very Western use.
Which is fine! It’s a free society, do what you like! But please remember, as you do so, that this “freedom” you use is itself a cultural product, with its own origins in precisely the culture you traduce.
The Western culture of personal autonomy and equal dignity is a precious thing precisely because it is not universal. Those who participate in that culture and enjoy its benefits may hope—do hope—that it may someday become universal. They may hope that their culture will shape the shared future of all humanity. But it is not a universal inheritance, and it is not the universal contemporary practice. If anything, that culture is at present in retreat, challenged and assailed both at home and abroad. It needs defending, and to be defended effectively it is vital to understand precisely how non-universal it is.
To the extent that the cultural-appropriation police are urging their targets to respect others who are different, they are saying something that everyone needs to hear. But beyond that, they can plunge into doomed tangles. American popular culture is a mishmash of influences: British Isles, Eastern European, West African, and who knows what else. Cole Porter committed no wrong by borrowing
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from Jewish music; Elvis Presley enriched the world when he fused
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country-and-western with rhythm-and-blues.
How to draw the line between that and America’s ugly tradition of minstrelsy, in which subordinated peoples are both mimicked and mocked—as Al Jolson mimicked and mocked black music in his notorious blackface career? There is no clear rule, but there is an open way: the values of respect and tolerance that draw precisely on the rationalist Enlightenment traditions both rejected and relied upon by the cultural-appropriation police. Those traditions are the spiritual core of American culture at its highest. And those values we should all hope to see appropriated by all this planet’s peoples and cultures.

ow Hip-Hop’s Generation Gap Became a War for Its Soul
By Stereo Williams, THE DAILY BEAST
Updated Jan. 20, 2018 8:36PM ET Published Jan. 20, 2018 8:35AM ET
Much has been said about “today’s rappers” and what they are (and aren’t) doing for “the culture.” People are very, very worried about the proverbial “state of hip-hop.”
But that’s not really new, is it?
Common’s 1994 classic “I Used to Love H.E.R.” helped re-establish the rapper formerly known as Common Sense after he’d debuted two years earlier as a wisecracking speed-rapper from Chicago. “…H.E.R.” was one of the first major hip-hop tunes that looked back through the genre’s history and pondered where things were headed. At the time, fifteen years after “Rapper’s Delight,” Death Row Records was at its height and Bad Boy was rising fast. Mainstream hip-hop had become increasingly obsessed with guns, blunts and “bitches and hoes” misogyny. Common wasn’t sure if hip-hop had sold its soul.
Fast forward almost 25 years, and people are still asking the same question. Except now they regard the era Common was so concerned with as if it represents the greatest period the genre’s ever seen.
Whether one agrees or not, there’s no harm in celebrating a genre’s “classic” period. But treating the contemporary as though it’s at odds with the classic has bred hostility between the hip-hop generation that worships at the altar of DJ Premier and J. Dilla, versus the kids who grew up in the era of snap music à la D4L and first-wave trap sounds like Young Dro and Waka Flocka Flame. In the fall of 2017, for instance, legendary producer Pete Rock waged a war of words with Waka Flocka after Waka called out hip-hop elders for distancing themselves from younger artists and not imparting wisdom or respect. In many ways, Rock’s rebuttal reflected the kind of contempt that led to Waka’s dismissal.
“Im [sic] gonna defend my older heads and tell you your not equal,” Pete wrote on Instagram
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in November. “Be as disrespectful as you want. Your not doing what we did, havent accomplished what we accomplished. Our generation didnt experiment with pills or syrup or anything synthetic. Its already written in history. Rock n Roll hall of fame, hip hop hall of fame and museums. Where are you at in any of that? The problem is yall never had respect from the jump. WE ARE THE REASON YOUR WHO YOU ARE AND DO WHATEVER IT IS YOUR DOING! Pay homage to who was before you. Problem is also yall want us to accept music that dont move nothing but the young, when you making music its to inspire everyone not just your era.”
This isn’t the first generation of hip-hop elders to be dismissive of the young ‘uns. The biggest fallacy in the way we approach this particular generation gap is presenting it as though hip-hop was a monolithic, single-minded culture prior to the emergence of trap music or “mumble rap.” That may be a convenient belief for hip-hop artists, fans and commentators whose perspective is New York-centric, but the rest of the country has always been quite diverse in rap tastes and approach.
Grandmaster Caz was one of hip-hop’s first truly great lyricists. As the standout MC of the Cold Crush Brothers and an uncredited ghostwriter on “Rapper’s Delight,” Caz helped set a standard for the clever quips of hip-hop’s late Seventies and early Eighties vanguard of rhymers. In an interview late last year, Caz was asked how he felt about the current crop of “mumble rap” stars drawing criticism from older heads.
“I’m happy for them. It’s all good. Anytime [a] black man get out of his situation and improves it, I’m good with it, I’m happy for him,” Caz told VladTV. “Now, as far as putting them in a category with lyricists or like true hip-hop people, nah—they’re a different breed of people. They’re a different generation, they do a different thing, they have a different agenda and their influences come from different places. So I’m not mad at them. Just don’t say they’re me or they’re Melle Mel. Because they come from a whole different thing. And as far as that mic is concerned, they don’t do nothing close to what we used to do or continue to do.”
But Caz also shared his thoughts on a generation of rappers that led to a controversial shift in hip-hop. The emergence of West Coast gangsta rappers in the late 1980s drew some scorn from the previous decade’s “Yes, yes y’all” generation for seemingly disregarding the pillars of hip-hop in favor of glamorized crime tales, violent street fantasies and degrading rhymes about women. Caz acknowledged that he wasn’t happy about those artists’ impact.
“N.W.A., I thought they were great for what they were doing,” Caz explained. “But I thought they were a definite detriment to our people and the message they was giving out.”
The same year that N.W.A. dropped Straight Outta Compton, political rap superstars Public Enemy released their own masterpiece in the monumental It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. Over the next three years, both groups would climb to the top of hip-hop’s hierarchy, even crossing paths in Ice Cube’s guest appearance on Public Enemy’s classic “Burn Hollywood Burn” and Chuck D and Flavor Flav’s appearances on Cube’s classic 1990 solo debut, AmeriKKKa’z Most Wanted. The quirky idiosyncrasies of the Native Tongues collective also became a part of hip-hop’s vocabulary via the Jungle Brothers in 1988 and De La Soul in 1989. The rise of gangsta rap didn’t instantaneously eradicate what had become a wildly varied landscape in hip-hop—in the same way that “mumble rap” hasn’t silenced more artistically ambitious approaches today.
Hip-hop media shares the blame for perpetuating that impression, though—for both shouting “fire” in a crowded room and for selling hip-hop’s landscape short by pandering to the lowest common denominator. The platforms tasked with disseminating this music to the masses decided hip-hop could only exist in a single space, instead of broadening the lanes for all types could flourish. Suddenly, diverse perspectives and approaches were devalued by most mainstream platforms, as popular rap became more uniform and anything that didn’t fit the image was relegated to “underground” or “backpacker” music.
But for almost a decade now, the landscape has changed. This isn’t the heyday of gangsta rap or the ringtone rap nadir of the early 2000s.
Kendrick Lamar is the most critically acclaimed
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artist in hip-hop; Drake
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may seem to be a much more explicitly commercial rapper, but so was LL Cool J. Regardless, Drizzy isn’t “mumble rap,” nor is J. Cole. In the same way that “Whoomp! There It Is” made chart-toppers of Tag Team, or the way Coolio became one of the biggest-selling rappers of the 1990s, poppier acts now see a lot of shine and success in terms of airplay and visibility. The deterioration and commodification of radio has made the situation worse in terms of variety, but the internet gives fans all kinds of other options for finding new music. Lil Yachty isn’t the dominant voice in hip-hop—he’s just one voice. Why act like any particular subset of hip-hop represents some wholesale change in the genre when there is such variety?
Trap music and “mumble rap” are not the enemy. No more than gangsta rap or bass music were before them. Hip-hop has never been a monolith. When you fight for “the culture,” is it only the culture of B-boys in the south Bronx as it looked decades ago? What about the culture of Memphis or Vallejo? Do we recognize how multi-faceted and multilayered this rap thing has been and continuous to be? There is no need to try and force an entire culture into a narrow box. An artist like Future won’t ever be confused for a wordsmith, but he isn’t trying to be. Neither were Luke or Nate Dogg. They were still hip-hop. And they didn’t negate their more lyricism-driven peers.
Elders like Pete Rock and others voice their disdain for what they feel the game has become. But these younger artists are torchbearers for the music that spoke to them. That may not be what you celebrate personally, or what you regarded highly in years past. A forty-something hip-hop head from New York may not fully understand how much a Gucci Mane or a Jeezy means to another generation. But it’s arrogant to not even attempt it. As much as “real hip-hop heads” may love Boogie Down Productions or Gang Starr, that music never necessarily spoke to everyone either. Whose hip-hop “experience” has more validity?
Younger hip-hop fans and critics must also realize that the genre has value beyond what they may love today or even what they grew up with. For those who even consider becoming commentators on the music, there has to be more love and more commitment to knowledgeable critique. All eras of hip-hop are vital; each is a beautifully creative depiction of Black youthful expression. If you write about hip-hop, recognize the significance of presenting this music through more than a haze of nostalgia. Canonize and document where we’ve been, are and are going. Hip-hop’s early years matter, its classic era matters and its contemporary success matters. It’s all a part of the tapestry; youthful pomposity shouldn’t blind anyone to that.
This current rap generation gap only means that, for arguably the first time, the generation that saw hip-hop make the leap to mainstream dominance is contending with being told they’re irrelevant. This has happened to other rap generations, but more people were listening to hip-hop from 1996 to 2003 than ten years prior. And ten years before that, hip-hop came through block parties rather than recordings. Fans during the career heights of 50 Cent, T.I. and Lil Wayne in the 2000s didn’t seem all that interested in artists from the late 1980s/early 1990s, but there wasn’t constant chatter about their dismissive attitudes either.
Now, the generation that came of age when the hip-hop of the late 1990s/early 2000s dominated pop culture is contending with the dismissal of an era of music that was quite visible and more accessible across the board. It seems more outrageous because more people know enough to get mad. But if you didn’t care enough about Slick Rick to ever listen to an album, it’s hypocritical to blast a generation of kids who don’t really care about Biggie.
Times change and sounds change. Genres and cultures change. What has to be constant is respect for what came before, and an appreciation for what comes after. It won’t all appeal to everyone, but there can’t be such a premium on a single era, region or take. Hip-hop is a decades-old, global phenomenon. It’s gone through an abundance of permutations, and will continue to do so. Mumble rap doesn’t define it, but it isn’t trying to. These are just young creatives expressing themselves.
And that’s the common thread. If you don’t understand the music, visit the scene. Go watch how the kids react to it. Whether music inspires or serves as escape, it has value. Getting lost in the sound is still what it’s all about. The music is still taking listeners on a journey.
Don’t deny this generation their trip.

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