Before the next chapter begins, you might find it interesting to know that someone I just met was actually telling me about a Scouts camp she works at which is based on Native American tribal land (she brought this up before I ever mentioned anything about DEI here at Lebanon Valley College), and she said that they're trying to remove the Native American traditions from the Scouts because non-Native Americans are getting offended by those traditions, even though the Native Americans like them...turns out white people can actually appropriate (or perhaps "incorporate" would be a better word) Native American culture and have Native Americans like it, however, you would never know that from what they give you to read at this college...maybe white people should stop getting offended on behalf of other people so much.

I would have thought there'd be more pronoun options here...

Once again, I guess the white man just came and scarred groups of people and didn't help them at all...

Wait a minute, part of the tradition is falsifying the tradition?...

Actually, the way you have presented it does make it less meaningful than other traditions.

I do not find it necessarily insulting to call someone "primitive"...in fact, the more I read this book, the more I wish I was primitive enough to not know that this book exists. I like watching more primitive things and studying them, and I can still call them primitive without insulting them...

Oh, come on, you were actually giving an interesting story there, did you have to go back to this again? What does "indigenous peoples" even refer to here, exactly?

This sounds a lot like the music industry today, which is interesting -- but not overly surprising.

So, who is to blame for this?...I mean, it sounded like some people other than white people were going to get blamed for doing something bad, like Japan vaguely got blamed for before, but if this was supported by the US government, are we still blaming white people for this?

Well, at least we had a small and interesting break before we returned to how bad white people are...and of course, the only way white people can do anything good, such as restoring the arts, is if they are doing it for some ulterior motive...

Really feeling the "white people are evil" energy here...I hope the author is eventually going to mention the fact that slavery already existed way before white people enslaved these people, and, once we get to how the evil whites enslaved the poor Africans, I hope she'll point out the fact that many Africans were already enslaving other Africans before the white man ever got there and started the slave trade there...where black people traded/sold their slaves to white people...I'm sure she's going to bring all of that up in the context of how that affected music and culture...right? Or are we just going to keep pushing the idea that white people are horrible beings who just go and enslave other unfortunate and helpless communities and appropriate their cultures and pillage and plunder them all for the sake of their own greediness?

Why are my parents paying for me to go to a college to read this?...This is ridiculous...there is no such thing as a difference that is the same, so this "scholar" is simply saying that there's a slight difference here. And I suppose this could be a way to show power over somebody else, but where is your evidence that this is in fact what Debussy was doing?

Feeling that white guilt yet? Don't worry, I'm sure there's much more to come that will really make that sink in for you...

So you're saying that Debussy integrated something new into his culture and kept it there?...I thought white people didn't do that because they're so horrible and against diversity in their culture...huh, turns out they're not so bad after all...

"What are we to make of this? We can't say the guy stole anything...and we could simply call it a situation where a guy liked a style and tried to mimic it like people of all races often do...but then we wouldn't be able to use this to show how bad white people are! Therefore, we must conclude that this is a matter of the white man wanting to stomp on the poor "people of color" and show his power over them, although we don't have sufficient evidence to support this claim. Sound good? Great!"

Debussy was racist now...how so?...this is DEI at it's finest right here, shoved at me by the fine institution known as Lebanon Valley College...

No, based on that quote, he is not saying that at all...he's saying that the additions of "all those weighty counterpoints" separated the songs from their origins. That doesn't mean that they can't be altered at all...most cover songs are not "divorced" from the origins of the songs they're covering, and yet, they do alter them.

This is actually quite interesting, I'm glad the author pointed this out.

Yeah, because nobody ever studied the customs of a group of people before colonialism occurred...