I am confused as to why it is good or bad or neither. Genuinely confused. Please and thank you.
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Appropriation is when you disrespectfully steal an idea from someone else and use it for your own purposes. For example, if a friend of yours sent you a draft of a deep, philosophical novel they’ve been working on for several years and you decided to edit it into a teenage romance story with dinosaurs and vampires and self publish it online, that would be appropriation. Basically, to tell if something is appropriation, ask yourself two things: was the idea stolen from somewhere else, and is the way it’s being used disrespectful to the originators?
Cultural appropriation is appropriation of not just a single person’s ideas, but a whole culture. For example, Americans have appropriated many things from the culture of the indigenous peoples that originally occupied their land. We use imagery of Native American chieftains for brands of margarine, we name our cities and states after the very tribes they displaced and destroyed, we get tattoos of Native American art without understanding its significance, we talk about our spirit animals like they’re a kind of astrology, when they’re actually a deeply meaningful coming of age tradition for many native tribes.
Often we get into debates over whether something qualifies as cultural appropriation, because whether the adopted usage of some cultural element is “appropriate” kind of falls down to opinion, and often when a group of people feel like their culture is being threatened by another group, they will tend to get offended at any borrowing of cultural elements, regardless of whether they are used respectfully or not.
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