National Post: 'It’s now about race, religion, ethnicity and staying in your lane, lest you presume to know something else. It’s the small-pretender syndrome.
'Imagine that world. Once we celebrated the end of history. Now we fear the end of imagination.
'In that world, no one will be free to see anything outside his or her “lived” experience. Martin Luther King, Jr., a Black, could not write a doctoral thesis on Paul Tillich, a German-American philosopher, a white man. David Blight, who’s white, would not write a splendid biography of Frederick Douglass, a Black man.
'Ken Burns, the acclaimed filmmaker, could not portray Benjamin Franklin with superb commentary from Christopher Brown, who is Black. It would not matter that Brown knows much about colonial America, the British Empire and the slave trade. No, the purists would ask, who is Brown to have an opinion of the fabled Franklin, founding father? It’s cultural appropriation!
'As libraries ban books and institutions remove names and take down statues (sometimes right, sometimes wrong,) what kind of world does this leaves us?
'A world without imagination and artistic creativity, creating a new, frightening segregation of the mind.'