No you shouldn't. If one wants to understand how best to create artistic expressions (or at least to understand how it is done) one should look at the best examples of it, not the ones that happen to have been done by people who happen to have looked a little bit like you. It is racist to attribute virtue to an activity merely because your ancestors or members of your race did them.
Conventional racism is the attribution of racial fault on others, but the opposite of unearned racial/cultural guilt isn't unearned racial/cultural pride. Those two are in essence the same idea... that you can tell how someone thinks, how smart he is, how valuable his work is, and how good he is by how he looks, and I reject the idea in both of its incarnations. The right alternative to "conventional racism" is a rejection of the notion that race has anything to do with virtue. The right alternative to the kind of anti-western/anti-white/anti-male bias entrenched in the "multicultural" movements is not to keep the idea (that personal moral and intellectual virtue can be had merely by having the right parents) but invert the evaluation, it is to scrap the whole idea that people and their ideas should be judged on the basis of the nationality, ethnicity, or race. We should hand out praise and condemnation of others (and ourselves) because of issues of right and wrong instead.
My position is not some kind of racist egotism that seeks to suppress anything no matter how good if it didn't come from someone with white skin. It is an objective evaluation of the situation. The problem in academia today is not "including" other cultures. I think that including a cosmopolitan study of the rest of the world is a good thing, and in fact, it is particularly Western thing. The trick here is that the educational system is substituting the study of Western culture and history with distractions of going through the motions of studying other cultures (or rather, absurdly unrealistic idealized versions of them designed to make them appear far better than they are). I can explain why it is important that students should have a substantial understanding of ancient Greek culture and history. Can you tell me why a student ought to understand Cherokee culture and history? I'm not saying that there's something inherently bad about learning about Indian tribes. I'm saying that it is a minor and optional topic of study, not one that ought to be placed at the core of how we understand the world and educate our children, and I think that's true whether you are of Cherokee, Chippewa, French, or Maori ancestry.
The fact is that "educators" are out there turning kids against the United States, against capitalism, against science, and against good art, and their favorite tools are the theory of "cultural relativism"/"multiculturalism" and moral and epistemological relativism. Such ideas tend to immunize kids against believing or even being able to understand the scientific, industrial, and politically liberal culture of the United States. Look at the "liberal" support that Islamic militants are getting on our college campuses. They don't like these guys because they are liberals. They are among the most sexist, militaristic, racist, and religious nutcases on the face of the earth. They like them because they are the enemies of the United States, and for no other reason. They are using the same fallacious reasoning to turn them away from good art as well and for the same reasons.
Lastly (as if it needed to be mentioned at all), there's no reason to think that the success with which people from this or that racial/ethnic group cannot fully understand or create art of the best kind will differ at all. Yo Yo Ma's ancestors were not cello players, but he does an excellent job. Placido Domingo's ancestors didn't sing in Italian operas and neither did Sumi Jo's, but they both do it exceedingly well. To insinuate otherwise is obviously racist, but you would be amazed at how often I hear just the opposite!
