“Maybellene,” General Tso’s chicken, and “cultural appropriation”

Jonathan Zimmerman, “On ‘Maybellene’ and General Tso’s Chicken” (The Chronicle of Higher Education):

we continue to imagine that every current-day practice descends from some kind of cultural Garden of Eden, where each ethnic or racial group existed in unalloyed form. . . .

Indeed, the mostly left-wing quest for cultural purity bears an eerie echo to the right-wing fantasy of national purity.

Don’t overlook the link to Ralph Linton’s “One Hundred Percent American.”

[As far as I can tell, Linton’s essay was published in 1937, not 1936.]