[Julie Steiner]

Dave, if someone were to claim the English language as English-only, would they have to give all the loanwords and calques back? Heh.

And if we're getting technical, the casting of Hamlet wouldn't be just restricted to Whites, but to Whites of Danish ancestry, in which case a lot of White English actors would still be out of a job.

Seriously, though, I don't see why no Black Hamlets would be allowed. There's a long tradition of resetting Shakespeare in modern times, the 1920s, etc., in which multicultural casts make sense. And also a very long history of women playing Hamlet, including women of color. It's way too late to put that genie back in the bottle.

I'm pretty sure we won't be seeing any more blackface White Othellos for awhile, though. However long that tradition is. Current casting and costuming decisions are less a matter of whether a White actor can do justice to the role, and more about the troubling history of blackface. And to a lesser degree, about giving non-White actors Shakespearean leading role opportunities, which have not been available to them until relatively recently.

Speaking of cultural appropriation, there's a reason we've yet to hear Danes complain about exaggerated ethnic stereotypes in Hamlet, or Scots complain about them in Macbeth. Or Greeks about depictions in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Etc. And that reason is that exaggerated ethnic stereotypes of Danes, Scots, Greeks, etc., aren't there. The anti-Semitism in the depiction of Shylock is, but so is Shylock's humanizing speech. Whether those two things really offset each other is debatable, of course.

In recent years, I've attended two productions of Mozart in which the libretto's sexism and/or cultural appropriation was obvious. Both productions chose to present those depictions as in the original had had them, but with significant pauses added for the audience to softly hiss or throat-clear after the now-offensive lines. I thought that this expression of solidarity by the audience made these productions far more meaningful and engaging experiences for everyone, including the women and the members of the appropriated culture, than censorship or tinkering would have.

Mark, here's the bit I missed in your post--probably due to an editing error on my part rather than a later addition:

You sidestepped Roger's hypothetical about Gorman translating Rijneveld, calling it Bizarro World because Gorman doesn't speak Dutch.

I called Roger's hypothetical a Bizarro World situation not because Gorman doesn't speak Dutch, but because Whites in both the United States and in the Netherlands are pretty much the default, and Blacks in both are the exception. Or one kind of exception. Definitely not the default, anyway.

What about a more generalised hypothetical. Following a social media campaign, a black, Dutch translator is pressured to step down from translating a collection by a white Midwestern farmer poet. Some campaigners claim it's because the poet wrote mainly in form and the translator mainly in free verse but the original essay prompting the uproar mainly focuses on the poet's status as a role model for working-class Mid-westerners and his strong white identity which no other group could possibly identify or empathise with. What do you imagine yours and the general response would be? Quite rightly, one of upset and indignation I would imagine. Because investing whiteness with quasi-mystical properties is something that only neo-Nazis and white supremacists do. Of course, I understand that historically oppressed and marginalized groups will justifiably be invested in a sense of their identity more than historically privileged groups, but I don't think it is something that should reasonably begin affecting editorial decisions.

In order to engineer a truly equivalent situation, you'd first have to reverse which race is the majority and minority in each country, and then reverse the races of the poet and the two translators. But reimagining the racial composition of two entire countries is so unwieldy that at that point the thought experiment ceases to be a meaningful exercise at all.

BTW, in my view, there is absolutely nothing wrong with White people taking pride in their own race or ethnicities or religions or other cultural signifiers. It's only when they feel the need to sneer at, suppress, exclude, or discriminate against other people's races or ethnicities in order to feel secure about their own--which is what neo-Nazis and White supremacists do--that I have a problem with White pride.