For those of y’all talking about the concept of people using cultural items from a “different culture” (like non-Japanese people wearing kimonos) being acceptable as long as it’s done “correctly”: What if the people wearing the kimonos “incorrectly” are themselves Japanese? (By “are themselves Japanese” I mean, they were born in Japan, learned Japanese as their native language in early childhood, have eight great-grandparents who were born in Japan and learned Japanese as their native language, and so on.) No doubt that would cause some harrumphing from the more conservative elements of the population about “the kids these days, not even wearing their kimonos properly, standing around on my lawn having Improperly-Worn-Kimono Parties!”, but why should we take that carping any more or less seriously if the improper wearing of kimonos is a fad among kids in Tokyo, as opposed to a fad among kids in Toronto or Timbuktu?
And we can fiddle with the parameters of “born in Japan, learned Japanese as their native language in early childhood, have eight great-grandparents who were born in Japan” almost indefinitely: How should Japanese-Americans wear their kimonos? (Or Japanese Brazilians and Japanese Peruvians and so on.) Or, “white people” who really like anime—under what circumstances are they permitted to wear kimonos, and how careful do they have to be about how they wear them? Or, a “white person” who speaks Japanese fluently, has lived in Japan for many years, and has a deep and wide-ranging knowledge of Japanese history and culture—what sort of kimono-wearing rules apply to them?
And even if the cultural item is something more “deep and meaningful” than a kimono, the same questions still apply. Religious traditionalists will of course be upset when Madonna Louise Ciccone uses imagery from the Catholic religion to make sexy music videos, but should we take the concerns of those religious traditionalists more or less seriously because it’s someone named “Ciccone” doing that, as opposed to someone named “Kobayashi”?
I would answer pretty much all of these questions by saying no, we shouldn’t take the concerns of the cultural conservatives or the religious traditionalists or the cranky old curmudgeons any more or any less seriously based on the “cultural identity” of the person using or misusing this or that article of clothing or ceremonial religious item or recipe for food.
Bad art is bad art, and bad food is bad food—although (barring food poisoning) those are of course totally subjective statements. Improperly worn kimonos (or tuxedos, or dashikis) are tacky, or “cool”, or whatever other totally subjective esthetic judgement each of us happens to make, regardless of the ancestry of the people wearing them. The (mis)-appropriation of a religious icon is rude, or funny, or a heroic attack on a reactionary tradition that oppresses women and LGBT people, or blasphemous—but I’m not much concerned with figuring out who is really “entitled” to wear a crucifix because they’re devout Catholics; or because they’re more “spiritual but not religious” but this was their grandma’s crucifix and they feel an emotional connection to it; or they just think crucifixes look cool and they really love all of that European stuff, it’s sooo much more interesting than boring old Shintoism!
There is something fundamentally essentialist—and even racialist—about this notion of “cultural appropriation”, because it requires us to decide who is “really” a _________ and who is “stealing” that identity, as if people have some kind of innate and immutable “culture”, which of course we do not.