Commentary On March 8, 2021, the National Post reported that pop star Bruno Mars was being attacked for “cultural appropriation” of black culture and music because he’s neither African, nor African American by descent. This is just one more example of a growing chorus of cultural outrage from the left and from the fellow travelers of Black Lives Matter who would like to racialize all discussion of the arts in terms of identity politics (and make themselves the arbiters of what can and can’t be heard—a musical version of “cancel culture”). As someone trained in the field of ethnomusicology and who spent some years in Africa recording and studying traditional African music (and who was adopted by an African tribe because I learnt to sing their songs), I thought it may be time to explore this matter deeper. The first two questions that must be addressed are: is there a …