The funny thing is that modern Yoga isn’t ancient at all. It came from one fitness guru in 1960 and spread from there just like many other fitness and health fads did. I am a child of the 80’s. The next time I see someone in a leotard and high socks, I am going to call them out on it unless they are a pretty old suburban house wife (or Richard Simmons).
Evidence that PC goes too far. A thorough, irrefutable knife through the heart of every liberal apologist.
Do you practice to be that stupid?
You forgot the “bigot” part, Old sport.
Wow. OK, as long as “thorough” and “irrefutable” aren’t required to be understood in their typical usages.
Children, come quick!
That is the sound of deflection from the indefensible!
No. It was by any objective measure an astoundingly stupid post. Nice try at deflection, though.
It just sounds like some naive college students who are trying to do the right thing but are misinformed. Yoga was not culturally appropriated. India was not oppressed by the time it came over, and it was actual yoga masters who brought it to the U.S.
Still, I prefer people who try to avoid hurting people but go overboard to people who try to make trying to be nice into a horrible thing that is ruining our country. I at least hold out hope that the former will learn that they are hurting other people when they do this.
“No! I must stop the bigots!” John shouted.
The radio said “No, John. You are the bigots.”
And then John was a Donald Trump.
And yet in the same week we have Donlad Trump claiming the reason that the media aren’t reporting on the “thousands” of Muslims in NJ celebrating the 9/11 attacks is Political Correctness rather than the fact that that didn’t actually happen. A thorough, irrefutable knife through the heart of every conservative apologist.
Cultural appropriation is a concept that itself is PC run wild. It’s the college left going so far around the bend that they end up on the right. “Melting pot bad! Cultures should stay with their own practices! Mixing bad!” I’m almost expecting interracial couples to start getting harassed on campuses because of the “power differential” between the white partner and the minority partner. The college PC left basically seems to say that the fascists were right about everything, they just did what they did for the wrong reasons.
While people abuse the idea of cultural appropriation to complain about random shit, the idea itself isn’t suspect. We do have a history of just randomly taking cultural practices, keeping the parts we deem “cool”, stripping them of any meaning, and then being patronizing to the people who invented the traditions.
As with many things, people take the easy to understand idea (practicing something from another culture) and throw away the actual important bits (disrespect and minimization of the source culture), and it becomes a mess.
There are also, sometimes, riffs between second or third generation Americans descended from other cultures and the actual source culture on some of these things. Sometimes the very shallow-surface level assimilation is seen as a positive by the source country or culture (someone is noticing us! we’re exporting things! tourism! Sure, it’s only a cursory interest, but it might lead to them wanting to know more!) but are seen as a reminder of their “otherness” to the people whose parents or grandparents were of that culture.
It’s much like how “weeaboo” originally referred to people with an unhealthy obsession with Japanese things, to the point of projecting their own values on Japanese culture and assuming it’s always better. Then became an insult to throw at anyone who took a Japanese class in high school or watches anime sometimes. (Granted the insult has lost its potency now that people ironically refer to themselves as “weeb trash”).
The original “weeaboo” didn’t really care about Japan, not any more than anyone else at least, they just used Japanese stuff they liked as a proxy for fulfilling their own needs and desires. The actual culture just becomes a gross wish-fulfillment scenario where the actual people are pawns in their desire for <whatever> (usually social acceptance of some sort), “if I lived there, everyone would understand me and things would be better!” It reduced the culture to a series of tropes and traits that barely represents the real thing, and they don’t really care how the culture operates, they only care about Early 2000’s Anime About Little Girls, maneki neko, and the two or three Shinto myths they heard third hand one time, and from there generalize about the whole of Japan. The second definition of weeaboo is from people who just ran with the idea that people who like Japanese stuff are annoying losers without really getting why original flavor weeaboos were kind of gross annoying losers. (Not that anyone should have been throwing the insult around in the first place)
With cultural appropriation, it’s the same. If you’re interested in parts of a culture, fine. Things are always going to get misunderstood and misinterpreted, maybe watered down a little. But you have to be careful you’re not edging out the actual culture too much, and you’re willing to listen to people who still find the original practices important (and in this way, mass-market pop culture can’t really be “appropriated” in a meaningful way). Your job is to facilitate an actual melting pot, not making a smash and grab for whatever loose fashion trends or traditional rituals look nifty. And yes, sometimes it can be hard to tell them apart, and a lot of people are assholes about their particular (often overly-stringent) view of where the line is.
Good luck. It’s one of those bendy yoga knives.
I think the crux of the problem is
Everything else is just about what kind of asshole they are.
The right loves the melting pot. Lefties want multiculturalism instead, i.e. the salad bowl. Well, that’s the stereotype anyway.
It’s odd because everything about our society is cultural appropriation, even our days of the week. We’re just one big mutt culture.
No, it isn’t. This is what’s so annoying. People who don’t actually understand a concept will come up with refutations that wind up being strawmen.
I won’t argue that cultural appropriation never happened in the past. And the results do impact our culture today. But the same goes for wars of conquest and colonialism and minority discrimination. We don’t think those are okay today.
And, yes, I brought those three things up because those are the circumstances under which cultural appropriation can possibly occur. It can’t occur when both cultures are treated equally. Cultural appropriation requires some form of oppression.
Cultural appropriation is a form of stealing. Normal cultural assimilation does not involve stealing. If American Indian headdresses had naturally come from good relations between them and American settlers, that wouldn’t be cultural appropriation. But it instead came because we wanted to dress up like the “bad guys” and as a way to make fun of them. And they were too weak to fight back.
The headdress is, of course, the classic example of cultural appropriation. In it’s original culture, it’s like wearing a highly decorated military uniform. Every feather is earned. When people just use it to dress up like a stereotype, these Native Americans get offended. And seeing as our goal is generally NOT to make fun of them, it makes no sense to offend them.
These children only made a mistake. India does have a huge history of cultural appropriation, due to its status as a former British colony. There are aspects of their culture that were appropriated. It’s just that yoga was not one of them. It followed a natural cultural assimilation.
Cultural appropriation actually harms the melting pot. It creates division by having one side feel cheated and thus unwilling to share their culture naturally. That is why it is often lumped in with bigotry.
I already covered the strawmen that come from not understanding the concept of cultural appropriation, but I also have to respond to this. Because you’re also distorting what fascism is.
Preserving the culture of others is not remotely compatible with fascism. Fascism is xenophobic. Fascism forces a proper culture from on high. It seeks to either convert or remove other people.
Even if we were saying that all cultural mixing is wrong (which we aren’t–not by a long shot) it would still be incompatible with fascism as long as we let each culture do its own thing.
I’m not sure why this isn’t obvious. Fascism is a right-wing, nationalist, ableist, intolerant, and many other things that does not fit with modern liberal or progressive thought. Its goal of the destruction of all other cultures and ethnicity is completely at odds with the multiculturalism of the left.
I need to see your proof of Indian ancestry before accepting your culturally-appropriated joke.
Life as a modern liberal is fuuuuun.
Come on, with a name like political correctness who wouldn’t be against it? The term sounds like something out of Maoist China and the concept itself would be quite at home there. And the vast majority of the whining emanates from the PC side, as witness the daily idiotic examples in the media, the yoga BS being the latest.
Not really - you have to put up with an endless stream of conservatives misrepresenting your positions. It gets tiring.
Stalinist Russia, actually.
Confirmation bias is a harsh mistress. While there are plenty of idiotic left-wing examples, the “vast majority of whining” about PC emanates from the right - occasionally with some legitimacy but far more often as a result to being called on some particular bit of spectacular bigotry (or, as in the case of Trump, when a blatant lie is pointed out).
Frankly I think the thread title is backwards - if you’re a bigot you whine about PC, because otherwise you’d have to admit that your views are socially abhorrent. This tends to color all other instances of people whining about PC (valid or not) and everyone gets painted with the same broad brush.