The question is stupid, anything is acceptable. In people’s effort to be “sensitive” they have gone up their own assholes and become the offensive bigots they claim to hate.
Nothing means anything really, identity and culture are nonsensical constructs of human minds with no basis in reality. No one “owns” anything, no person has a greater claim to a hairstyle, food, clothing, music, anything. As long as it isn’t copyright infringement you owe no one anything.
People need to get over themselves.
BRB I need to scold some black Elsa’s on facebook, grow up.:rolleyes:
While I agree that statement I made was too vague and extreme, you can still enjoy life and doing things.
And aside from something intentionally offensive and inflammatory(Halloween costume say of a orthodox Jew with vampire fangs and Christian babies (baby dolls) drained of blood tied to you Blood libel - Wikipedia ) no one should have a problem with cultural appropriation.
The thing to keep in mind is, who is actually being harmed or deprived? And the answer is no one. No one is harmed if people start assimilating aspects of another culture. No one “owns” aspects of culture, you can say something originated somewhere or argue about how authentic a recipe is to the original, but no one owns it.
I have seen this idea related to a lot of bands in the music industry, a band spends a month in Jamaica and their next album has a reggae influence. Some people will say how dare they use another culture’s music, of that they have stolen something. It is crap and like I said unless it is actual copyright infringement there is nothing wrong with it.
If a Chinese production crew decide to make a sci fi movie involving desolate outer rim planets with smugglers and robots in it, have they stolen anything from George Lucas?
Mind you: if she had worn faralaes and tried to include flamenco moves, Spaniards might have changed the expression “like a Belgian dancing flamenco” (to indicate something sad, lacking in chutzpa and style, with all our love to Belgians but most of them dance flamenco about as well as I do, and I don’t) to “like Katy Perry dancing flamenco”. I just don’t see her pulling it…
One of the examples given in the OP, US-style-Halloween, is of something which isn’t, from the point of view of the cultures doing it, “appropriation”, but more viewed as “buying anything that you saw on TV”. There is local backlashes against it, from people who see it as, and I cite, “so it is wrong and traumatizing to take my children to put flowers on their grandparents’ graves, and to tell them that death happens, but I am now supposed to dress them up as zombies? The teacher, I’ll dress up as a zombie!”
Is the wave of sushi restaurants in Barcelona “cultural appropriation”? I don’t know, but the Japanese chefs teaching a lot of those cooking curses don’t seem to mind. My own take on seeing tapas bars all over the place is that so long as you know the singular is tapa (not tapas) and understand that it’s a way of cooking and not a book of recipes, it’s all kosher… there’s a tapas bar in Helsingborg I’m perfectly happy to recommend, and quite a few ones in Spain I won’t set foot in.
Oh, I don’t know, given that a pancho is a dude called Francisco, wearing one for Halloween sounds eminently appropriate so long as it’s done tastefully. Sounds like something from From Dusk till Dawn, actually…
Even if a costume isn’t intended to be racist, in this day and age, most of us should have the common sense to know that certain things probably WILL offend your co-workers.
Any sensible person should know by now that dressing like the Frito Bandito probably WILL infuriate Hispanic co-workers. Why would you WANT to take a chance on pissing off people you work with?
Seems that we are combining discussions of “cultural appropriation” per se with issues in the realm of good taste or offensiveness in depiction of other cultures (or sub cultures) or in what influences we adopt.
IMO the examples of using Kali or the stereotypical Mexican “Pancho” as masquerade dress are not really “cultural appropriations”, they’re using the caricaturing of a religious iconography or ethnic identity as part of a merely recreational expression, which may be offensive to those who are of that ethnicity of belief community and live by its values (*). Cultural appropriation to me is more along the lines of outsiders pretending to represent the culture or displacing the actual representations or members of that culture with an “adaptation” thereof, or relegating it to “exhibition piece” status and using the motifs and representations of that culture as mere style accessories.
(* Now, it’s true that a lot of us Liberal Westerners consider it evidence of the superior advancement of our society that we mostly consider blasphemy a non-issue, Buddy Jesus is just funny and silly, and can’t wait for the day every other culture Gets Over It about their religions – but at the same time many of those same LW’s would still be all riled up if it were about ethnic caricaturing. But that’s another debate)
When I think of cultural appropriation, I think of someone becoming the self-appointed spokesperson of a culture–or allowing themselves to be viewed as the spokesperson–even though their connection with that culture is tenuous, at best.
Or they are someone who borrows something from a stigmatized culture to profit from it, while being sufficiently insulated from the burdens experienced by members of that culture.
My mind always goes to that Alice Walker short story “Everyday Use” when this topic comes up. The narrator’s daughter has adopted a melange of stereotypical African features–changing her name and her clothes–to portray herself as more sophisticated. And if that wasn’t enough, she wants to showcase her mother’s quilt as “folk art”–thereby “appropriating” the rural “down home” culture she’s tried so hard to disassociate herself from. She doesn’t want to be bama, but she still wants to profit from her bama roots.
I think a lot of accusations of cultural appropriation are misguided and yet understandable. If your culture has been denigrated and stigmatized for a real long time, and some young Turk comes along and borrows from it and suddenly becomes a face of that “thing”, then of course there will be accusations of “thievery”–even if that young Turk actually pays proper respect. On more than one frustrating occasion, I’ve heard people proclaim Elvis or the Beatles as the founders of rock and roll…even though Elvis and the Beatles went through great pains to honor the more melanistic artists who they borrowed from. It’s really just the “mainstream face” that people remember though. If this happens over and over again, where the mainstream “representative” becomes the appointed king (or queen, you’re logically going to have a lot of people feeling resentment about how mainstream culture treats other cultures and peoples.
All I’ve seen was rolleyes, and that includes from Mexican coworkers… then again, that particular professor was better color-coordinated in a poncho and jeans than with his usual getup.
You’re reminding me of when some moron executive decided that Speedy was offensive to Hispanics. Would seeing a foreigner dressed as Buffalo Bill or Uncle Sam offend you?
Here’s one I’ve been wondering about…The British maintain the institution of the tea dance, a weekend afternoon gathering where people dance and drink tea, often to older styles of music (say Victorian or 1920s). In America, this tradition is mostly gone, and the term tea dance nowadays is generally limited to the gay male community, and means an afternoon gathering, with alcohol and optional dancing, predominantly or exclusively for gay males.
I would say the tradition has been not so much appropriated as pushed totally aside. If you wanted to have an afternoon gathering for all types of humans who enjoy tea, old style music and dancing today in America, what would you call it?
It might be called fair game that gays have taken over the term tea dance, since it was originally a heterosexist social institution. Then again, it’s not any more inclusive as understood in America today - it is, I gather, strictly their thing.
I agree, and am very much in favor of it. I love the diversity of human culture, and some of the best stuff comes from the mashups.
What I think is jerkish (and much less rewarding) is taking the signifiers of someone else’s culture without ‘assimilating’ anything meaningful of that culture into yourself, or vice-versa–without making any effort to understand context and how it all works.
I normally hate this word, but I’m going to use it here. I see a ton of privilege in this thread. Why do you guys think you get to determine what is and not offensive to the groups in question?
When I think cultural appropriation, my mind goes directly to Avril Lavigne’s Hello Kitty video, which plays heavily on the stereotype of “Asian culture is just so weird.” She’s pretty much a Weaboo, with no real idea of what Japanese culture is. Yet she’s appropriating it.
Another thing that comes to mind is the American Indian feather headdress. It is an important symbol to their culture–you earn every single feather. It’s not a decoration. It’s a part of why a lot of sports team depictions are offensive.
Who am I to tell these people that they shouldn’t be offended? Why am I so paternalistic, telling them how they should think?
For once in my life, I’m actually going to say this, because I think it needs to be said, and I’m talking to people who should understand what it means. Check your privilege, people.
I believe every single item on your list is perfectly acceptable and many are even laughable (not eating/cooking food from other cultures??? Seriously?).
There is absolutely nothing wrong with cultural appropriation (I guess someone could find some convoluted hypothetical where it would be an issue, of course). There’s no reason not to borrow whatever you like from any other culture. At the contrary.
Social warriors or whatever who came up with the idea that “cultural appropriation” is a bad thing are busibodies. They’re free not to eat any pizza until they get Italian citizenship if they want, but I’m not going to listen to their lecturing.
And why should we care about these people being offended? There are plenty of people who are offended by plenty of things other people do.
Some guy somewhere might be offended that I don’t take seriously enough feather bonnets. And some other guy that I don’t take seriously enough Christian symbols. And some other that I don’t take seriously enough past uniforms, and so on… Why should I care? I’ll dress up as an Amerindian warrior, a catholic priest or a napoleonic soldier if I feel like it. Busibodies be damned. There are some rare things I wouldn’t dress up as, because it would bother me. They can similarly avoid wearing a feather bonnet, a biretta or a shako if it bothers them.
Sure. Because if your skin is dark, you somehow own jazz, even if you can’t sing in tune. And similarly, only Austrians should ever play Mozart, obviously.
That would really be a shame if a talented Chinese musician would “appropriate” either and produce good music. He should obviously restrict himself to the 12 pitches and the pipa.
Let’s imagine : they could even produce music based on several influences or using instruments from different traditions to create something new. How could we accept such miscegenation?
Everybody knows that proper, politically correct, music is based solely on longstanding and unchanged tradition, always impervious to any external influence. And that what matters the most wrt music is the skin colour or citizenship of the mucisian and composer.
I could dress up as a fake soldier complete with fake stripes that I’ve never earned and who really cares. Similarly I could don a fake feather head-dress with feathers I’ve never earned…big deal.
What would make me stop and think is if I were wearing a real sacred head-dress. i.e. the actual physical item. That would cross a line for me. The ersatz version of anything? nah! don’t care, perfectly fine no matter who is offended.
as masquerade dress are not really “cultural appropriations”, they’re using the caricaturing of a religious iconography or ethnic identity as part of a merely recreational expression, which may be offensive to those who are of that ethnicity of belief community and live by its values (*). Cultural appropriation to me is more along the lines of outsiders pretending to represent the culture or displacing the actual representations or members of that culture with an “adaptation” thereof, or relegating it to “exhibition piece” status and using the motifs and representations of that culture as mere style accessories.