I am confused as to why it is good or bad or neither. Genuinely confused. Please and thank you.
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It is using some element of a culture that is not yours, for your own purposes, which are not the same as that culture’s purposes for it.
Now, cultures mix, and borrow elements from one another, and sometimes the original significance of something gets lost. In my opinion, one big difference is in how you treat or think of actual members of the culture you’re borrowing from. Say you are dressing in a way that is done in black American culture, but you think black people are inferior, and you treat them badly. Using an element from a culture, without considering (or maybe even knowing) its significance in that culture can be problematic as well. This is the problem with white people wearing bindis, or wearing things borrowed from Native American ritual regalia. If a symbol has some meaning to you, it can be upsetting to see someone else use it in total ignorance of its meaning. And if you’re using a culturally important item or tradition to make fun of members of another culture, or to say things that are offensive to them, that’s obviously a problem.
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