The Sun Never Sets on the Woke Empire

Adele is the latest to be canceled, as American progressives impose their culture on Britain

By Tunku Varadarajan.

"Adele Adkins, a globally popular British singer-songwriter known most simply as Adele, courted danger on Sunday when she posted a photograph of herself on Instagram with her hair twisted into “Bantu knots”—small buns that are an African style of coiffure. She also wore a bikini top in the distinctive pattern of Jamaica’s flag, a gold saltire with green and black triangles. Her caption read, “Happy what would be Notting Hill Carnival my beloved London,” a wistful reference to a Caribbean-themed celebration that has taken place in London every August since 1966 but won’t happen in 2020, thanks to Covid. 

Then ensued a familiar reflex of disapproval: Ms. Adkins, who is white, was accused of one of the cardinal sins of our time. Ernest Owens, an African-American journalist, tweeted: “If 2020 couldn’t get more bizarre, Adele is giving us Bantu knots and cultural appropriation that nobody asked for. This officially marks all of the top white women in pop as problematic. Hate to see it.” Others followed, berating Ms. Adkins for her transgressive adoption of an African hairstyle.

Yet in all of this tyrannical cultural scorn, a pattern appeared to emerge: Adele’s critics on Twitter and Instagram seemed, almost entirely, to be “woke” Americans.

The global left, which has always included American progressives as fellow travelers, has long derided American “cultural imperialism.” A range of ideas and products are dismissed as vehicles of colonialism: Hollywood, American TV, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Starbucks, Google, democracy, free speech, the free market, human rights—these are all cast as American impositions. America’s “soft power”—to use Joseph Nye’s unhelpful phrase—is portrayed as a neocolonial Trojan horse.

And yet the latest manifestation of “cultural imperialism” comes from the American left, which has exported to foreign lands its gestures and memes of protest. A recently concluded series of cricket matches—played in Britain between the West Indies and England in the weeks after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis—saw the overwhelmingly white England team take a knee at the start of every game. The phrase “Black Lives Matter” was used as a logo on all match scorecards. The locals had little understanding of the quasi-Marxist organization of that name.

The political intolerance rampant on American campuses has been transplanted abroad, with British universities now showing the effects of stifled speech and policed thought. A recent report on academic freedom in the U.K. by Policy Exchange, a British think tank, has called for Parliament to pass an “Academic Freedom Bill” to protect intellectual dissent. Free-speech advocates in Britain want protection from the American Disease.

In all of this, Adele’s story offers a silver lining. As Americans attacked her for her Bantu knots, numerous Brits (and Jamaicans) rose to her defense. “The Adele cultural appropriation thing is just a perfect microcosm of American cultural dominance,” one writer tweeted. He bemoaned that “everything is analysed through the lens of one country and its tensions,”—meaning the U.S.—and that other countries weren’t allowed to have their own approach to integration.

“Yes, it’s very tedious,” a prominent historian responded. “The current prostration of large swathes of the British left before US cultural imperialism is really quite the irony.”

A rare instance of pushback, you might say. It’s nice to see the Brits take a stand against imperialism.

Mr. Varadarajan is a fellow at the New York University Law School’s Classical Liberal Institute."