Cultural appropriation
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Of fuck this endlessctedious bullshit about hairstyles. Members of each and every race rip off hair styles of another. I am over the endless bickering. Grow the fuck up, everyone.
PC culture doesn’t allow people to enjoy Mexican food? Or a Turkish bath? I think you just made all of that up.
That’s not at all what cultural appropriation is.
The point of that made up example was explaining how ridiculous it is. Which it is.
So there’s enjoying Mexican food, and then there’s, say, a white lady such as Paula Deen stealing traditional Mexican recipes and re-branding them as her own, with no reference to Mexican culture, and making a lot of money off a cookbook.
Ok and? One can sell Mexican food without talking about Mexican culture. It isn’t the end of the World. If that offends someone they need some counseling to calm down.
And some people would consider that cultural appropriation. You can have a different viewpoint on things without insisting that other people’s feelings are invalid and they’re stupid or crazy or ridiculous for having those feelings.
Being respectful of others really isn’t THAT difficult.
There are a few different slices of cultural appropriation and the line does get a little blurry but ultimately it comes down to as Kate mentioned – taking credit for ideas passed through a culture without referencing said culture. If Paula Deen was touting her Chicken Soup and included savory dumplings made of crushed up water crackers with a little salt pepper and onion to taste I’d be all “that’s a damn maztoh ball and you know it you racist bigot”.
There’s also the appropriation that we shall soon see this Halloween when people dress up like “Mexican” or “China Girl” or “Black Person”. Remember folks, if you are not black by the gods please no blackface. Really, not ever. There’s no reason. I don’t care if you’re going as Frederick Douglass… no blackface.
It makes me uncomfortable that we had a person of, I think, African American heritage on here giving a very reasonable response about what might and might not be considered cultural appropriation, and then several white people saying it’s ridiculous and doesn’t exist, without asking more about it or trying to understand.
We’ve long had terms for ripping off and claiming as your own things invented or created by other people: plagiarism, theft, patent and copyright infringement. Cultural appropriation is a crime made up by college professors in the last decade.
I would argue that that’s because we’ve improved a lot in terms of how we treat minorities (past couple years aside). Also, not past decade, more like past 40 years.
Cultural appropriation is a relatively recent subject of academic study. Although the term is not thought to have first been used in academic circles until the 1980’s[32] the concept is considered to have been explored in earlier discussions such as in ‘Some General Observations on the Problems of Cultural Colonialism’ by Kenneth Coutts‐Smith in 1976.[32][33]
It’s not new but it’s been given an appropriate framework. There’s a difference between making up a story that you’re a drug addict and getting on Oprah as a recovering addict and darkening your skin and taking a job as the head of the local chapter of the NAACP and speaking on behalf of African Americans when you have to go seriously far back in your DNA profile to get to your African roots.
There’s a difference between plagiarizing a piece of jewelry shaped like a US State and selling it in your chain of stores and copying breastplates and feathered headdresses worn in religious ceremonies and selling it in your chain of stores.
If university professors are classifying dickish behavior -making it easier for people to understand why some behaviors are shitty to an individual (plagiarism) but other behaviors are shitty to a whole bunch of people (cultural appropriation)- that’s something I can support.
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