Morning Ed: Diversity {2018.03.15.Th}

DavidTC in reply to North says:

Also I have yet to read a simple consistent objective and reliable way to apportion out “ownership” of those various concepts and mores to specific cultures.

This is because the entire concept is so poorly explained that you don’t have a good grasp of it. (Which is not your fault.)

The entire premise of cultural appropriation is _supposed_ to be how certain things are restricted in certain cultures. They are ‘sacred’ things, aka, they are ‘set apart’ from normal everyday use, and hence people from outside using them casually is very offensive.

Like Native American headdresses, for the ur example. Headdresses are basically civilian/military honors, and it’s rather disrespectful to just make them up and put them on.

There’s stuff in other cultures that people should show respect to and not trivialize by using however they feel like it.

It’s the same way that non-Christians, or at least people who are not part of a Christian culture, should probably not wear crucifixes because they think Jesus on the cross ‘looks cools’. That’s a specific symbol that means things to people. (Note the rules change when you’re _part_ of the culture and using it in a subversive and offensive way.)

However, no one actually seems to understand these sort of sacred things are few and far between. It’s not everything to do with a culture, it’s not even most things to do with a culture. (1)

The way to check if it’s cultural appropriation is pretty easy: If you, a foreigner to that culture, were to move to the culture, would they be okay with you doing what you are doing?

And the answer for, for example, food, is always ‘yes’. Of course they expect you to cook and eat their food, hell, they’re probably more comfortable with you doing that then you cooking your weird foreign food. Same with dressing in the same sorts of clothes. Etc, etc.

Would they be okay with you harvesting some of their sacred plant to get high? Creating a mockery of a religious practice? Making a copy of some ceremony robes that are only worn four times a year by certain people, and wearing those around in public? Survey says…no, no they would not be okay with those things, so don’t do them there…and don’t do them in America, either.

That very thin slice of things is true ‘cultural appropriation’. The rest is silliness by people who don’t understand the concept.

Admittedly, sometimes this is hard to figure out from outside a culture…if you find yourself stranded several hundred light years from earth and can’t, you know, just _ask_ them.

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To complicate things, there are also at least two different things that are bad, and get called ‘cultural appropriation’, but are not technically that.

The first is cultural mockery, where people take stuff that it would be okay to do seriously, but everyone is doing it in a stupid and mocking manner that is clearly making fun of the original culture. For example, if you really were visiting an Native American tribe readying for war, you participating in a war chant they were doing would be fine, as far as I know. I don’t think outsiders would be excluded from that, although admittedly I am not an expert, and obviously there are a bunch of different tribal traditions of the tribes that even have something like that.

But everyone doing it over-the-top in a parodying manner for a baseball game, however, is something else. Copying non-sacred things from another culture in a serious manner is one thing, copying it in mockery is…not respectful at all.

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And the second is what is better called cultural mis-accreditation or non-accreditation, aka, which is what I am talking in my post. For a more obvious and probably less divisive version of that(2): White people in America have basically, for an entire century, repeatedly stolen newly invented musical genres from black people. That’s almost the entire history of modern music, frankly.

That’s sucks. That’s bad. Let’s not do that anymore, and let’s makes sure black artists gets the credit they deserve and have a discussion about how, while the music industry is learning (Only after they failed to steal rap.), the rest of the the entertainment industry is still pretty sucky at race relations.

But…that’s not cultural appropriation. It’s actually sorta the opposite.

1) As I mentioned way back when we talked about a Japanese-American who was talking about how people were ‘appropriating’ kimonos, which are…just clothes that Japanese people sometimes wear, and they don’t give a damn who wears them. It’s like us getting upset over Japanese people wearing tuxedos.

2) I always feel like a bit of an ass trying to correct the history on ‘soul food’, even when true, because there’s a boatload of crap black people did invent and didn’t get credit for. But let’s not counter the original mis-attributions with new mis-attributions! Let’s try recording actual history for once.Report