The Moana Maui tattoo costume thing. The tattoos were fine when Maui was wearing them in the movie, but it seems that a mass-produced tattoo suit doesn’t align with the pacific island idea of the tattoo’s personal importance and meaning.
I vaguely recall that some (east) Indians protested when some pop star or another wore a bindi in a music video. It would seem that those specific Indians thought that the bindi has some sort of spiritual or cultural significance. I wouldn’t know, being an ignorant boob, but maybe they would.
I recall seeing pictures of rich people having costume parties where they dressed up as native americans. When I saw the pictures, my instinctive response was, “Well, if that ain’t racist as fuck.” But I guess I have no reason to think that they were trying to mock native americans, which in that case would just make it cultural appropriation.
And then that brings us to minstrel shows. Or are those just insane racism and nothing else?
To me there’s sort of a sliding scale between ‘mere’ cultural appropriation and outright full-on racism, and the difference is how knowingly and deliberately the perpetrators are about the misrepresentation/trivialization/mockery of the other culture’s elements. After a certain point you stop calling it cultural appropriation because you’re too busy using other words, but the term probably technically still applies.
Justin Bieber has a hit song right now, that’s a remix of a Spanish-language hit “Despacito,” and features Bieber singing a lot of the song in Spanish. That part’s fine. However, in a couple of recent live performances, for the Spanish parts, he’s been singing non-sense syllables, or random Spanish/Spanish-sounding words, like “burrito” or “Dorrito.”
I think that’s a pretty good non-whacko example. He’s taken a song that was popular with a particular demographic, profited immensely from it, and then uses that same song to make fun of the demographic that originally produced it.
I saw the video of him singing drunk at the club and it was stupid and offensive.
But this song is also an example of why cultural appropriation is a good thing. It presents Puerto Rican culture to white Americans. I think the song is awesome and Bieber is the worst part of it.
Nice analogy. Yes and no. It’s when that someone else is being or has been oppressed (most likely by the group you–the general you–belong to) and calling dibs on something which that someone else has. It would be like getting robbed and, while the bad guy already has your wallet and money, he sees your nice customized watch passed down for generations and takes it for the hell of it.
How’s that analogy?
Edit: Not actually sure if that someone has to be oppressed. But you get the gist. Hopefully. It’s disrespectful in general.
Terrible, because in all of the examples being put forward no-one is deprived of anything so “robbery” does not apply. The correct analogy would be that someone sees the nice customised watch you have and decides to make a variation of it for themselves.
I think that’s the perfect analogy, and nothing for the original owner to get worked up about even if, for instance, the watch was a family heirloom and so has a lot of sentimental value.
It may be another story if the person copying the watch was famous and so the watch becomes famous as well and so people assume that you’re the one who copied it. It would definitely be another story if the person copying the watch were famous and made up this story about how they created the watch themselves. But situations analogous to those rarely happen.
I see where you are not understanding. I’ll just say this then and forget analogies: the deprivation is respect. In many cases that I’ve seen that has people agitated there is no variation, just a renaming. That’s the insult.
I’m just giving insight if anybody wants it, which y’all do because you’re on the thread for the discussion.
This is a pretty poor analogy, because it shows a complete and total failure to understand both the definition of the term and the entire thrust of the discussion.
First, you’d have to consider your watch very very special and important and representative of you and your people. So we’ll put your family crest on it, with your name on it as well. And they the person decides to publicly go around wearing your watch, but as a cock ring.
There. That’s a little closer. Now, cue all the people saying, “That wouldn’t bother me at all! I care about nothing!”
If it is my watch how has he got it? did he steal it? in which case he is a thief. Did I sell it or give it to him? in which case more fool me and I have no right to tell him how to use it.
If it is a copy …then no…It wouldn’t bother me. Why would it? it is not the thing itself, it is a copy. Same reason why I couldn’t give a stuff about someone using a copy of the Peita as a toilet doorstop even though it is a work of tremendous significance to me and a emblem of the western European renaissance.
Yeah, it’s one of those things. Eventually the smoke will clear up and we’ll all know what the real deal actually is aside from the offensive aspects. I read an article that mentions the white burrito ladies, which I had no idea about before this thread, and I liked it. I like how it doesn’t discredit the notion–it actually acknowledges the problem–but it also warns about how “crying burrito” at every turn takes away from the merit of actual cultural appropriation. If you just google “cultural appropriation” I think it will be the Washington Post link. I don’t feel like going back for it but I can if you want.
At the same time, the article still doesn’t clear it up. I’m not one for internet digging outside of school research. I tire too easily. I’ll leave that to anybody’s who is curious enough.
That’s the other massive and obvious failure in this analogy. Cultural appropriation is never, ever, about an individual, or about an individual’s possessions, because the term isn’t “individual person’s stuff’s appropriation”. We’re talking about things like tattoos, bindis, and headdresses. Things where the culture doesn’t have just one of them, and where the dodge “it isn’t my specific possession, so of course I won’t care because nothing I don’t personally own is sacred to me” is clearly irrelevant.
I mean, yes, I get that that’s the dodge. “Nothing is sacred to me, so nothing should be sacred to anyone.” You don’t care if people turn the concept of Christ being held by Mary into a symbol of incestuous sex through a series of widely read comic books where Mary and Christ are boning, to the point where people look at the Peita and nod knowingly and say, “Heh, that ninja turtle guy was way into boning his mother, wasn’t he?” That wouldn’t bother you at all, despite the significance of the sculpture as an emblem of the renaissance having been stripped away entirely.
The thing about this ‘counterargument’ is, nobody cares if you personally are a stoic badass. If a person is kicking people, we don’t decide it’s okay because he personally thinks it’s okay to kick people. We check whether the people being kicked mind. Similarly, it’s not up to you to tell people they shouldn’t be bothered when important emblems of their culture are being treated in ways they don’t like.
The problem is, there’s always someone who is going to mind. You could give everyone in the world a free cat or dog and there’d be outrage from the people who were allergic to animals and couldn’t have one.
There’s a point where it has to be “Do enough people mind, and what percentage of the population are they?”, IMHO.