Judging by the Twitter feed, he still has a few more years before getting to that point. Looks like a whiny, racist kid to me.
Yes. What made his comment a bigger deal is that he got himself a nice little twitter mob to attack the girl. By himself he’s a pissant.
As a Chinese American, for one data point I’ll weigh in with, “I couldn’t possibly care less,” and the people complaining about it are fucking idiots. That people other than Asians can see beauty and value in the Eastern aesthetic is both flattering and an absolute nothingburger. Of all the ignorant, racist shit people have ever done to Asians this is where you pick to make your stand, random guy on Twitter?!
Oh my god! Attacked by a Twitter mob! I hope she’s okay.
The fashion police are not about cultural appropriation BTW. They are about socks with sandals and white shoes after labor day.
Why are you using the internet? Did you invent it?
A few days ago, he blamed all his problems on white people; now he’s singled one out.
Considering all the western stuff that China bootlegs, this discussion about a freaking dress should end now.
I should think one could respond that, if cultural appropriation had been an issue for the owner, they wouldn’t have dropped it in a goodwill bin now would they?
But who can say how it got there? It could be someone bought it on holiday in a foreign land, as in it was actively being marketed to tourists, then is it still cultural appropriation? Or support for local craftsmen and industry? Where’s that line get drawn I wonder?
But the amount of valid mockery that seems to surround claims of cultural appropriation really makes me question whether it’s a coherent and valid idea at all. The concept of intellectual property is usually applied to a specific creator(s) and specific work. Cultural appropriation seems to want to extend this, but it runs into problems in two senses:
(1) “Culture” in a broad seems pretty much by definition to mean something that has passed into the public domain.
(2) How do you define the boundaries of the “community” that “owns” it? In this example, just how “Chinese” do I have to be make use of Chinese culture - is it defined by birth, by genetics, by what exactly?
Lots of them for sale at Alibaba. Some even have Westerners modeling them.
Hey Octoputz, how you been? I’d missed you. I was afraid you finally got your head too far up your ass to breath. Glad I was wrong. Take care bro.
The concept isn’t so much concerned with such technical points, but rather, it’s more about power dynamics. It’s a general, sociological idea, and was never meant to be applied to things at such a specific level.
That’s why the people who complain about the dress are missing the point, but also so are people who make the false equivalency that if an enthincially Chinese person takes on a “western” name it’s exactly the same thing. Existing power relationships set a context that belies such supposed equivalencies.
Can you give examples of when the concept really means something valid and important?
I thought part of the issue too was that she made some sort of stereotypical Asian gesture in a picture. I am too lazy and don’t care enough to look for it though.
Let’s weigh the power relationships in this case–while China has the second-largest economy based on nominal GDP, it has the largest economy based on purchasing power parity. And with a population of 1.39 billion, Chinese outnumber Americans 4.25 to 1. So I’d say those are pretty darn even power dynamics.
According to comments on some of the sites I linked in the OP, they were posing in memes from some YouTube channel called H3H3productions that I had never heard of. H3H3 has responded.
I love it when people toss around “cultural appropriation” and such like terms. Helps me quickly identify the morons hiding amongst the progressives.
I can understand Indian nations objecting to the ornamental wearing of war bonnets, because it looks like stolen honor.
But this was a cheongsam. It’s old-fashioned now, but it was an extremely common kind of dress in much of the Chinese world for ages. Denouncing a white girl who wears such an incredibly ordinary sort of women’s clothing for “not learning about whiteness” sounds exactly like denouncing a Punjabi girl who wears a blazer and slacks for “not learning about Hindutva.”
Jeremy Lan is a troll. Y’all been trolled.
I don’t know what WaPo’s excuse is. The Mary Sue is a clickbait site, and yet* you’d think they’d know better.* I don’t pay attention to most of the British press, but it looks like the Independent is some kind of river scum like much of the British press.
Are they all just being trolled?
Or do they really think this nonsense makes sense? Anybody serious about this sounds like a Nazi to me. These nazi twits, these *Twitstaffel, *do they even realize what they’re saying?
What the hell is a stereotypical Asian gesture? I can only think of bowing and I don’t think that’s Chinese.
Also, while trying to not delve too deep down various rabbit holes, I believe that cultural/economic power differential is central to the idea of cultural appropriation. I think one would be hard pressed to make the argument that Chinese culture (and the ability to control its meaning and/or profit from it) has been taken from the Chinese in this case.