I am confused as to why it is good or bad or neither. Genuinely confused. Please and thank you.
In: 0
There are two answers to this – what it meant originally, and what it means now.
Originally it meant one culture claiming the culture and achievements of another as their own. For example, imagine Culture A, who carved beautiful statues on every street, and Culture B, who have bigger swords. Culture B comes in and conquers Culture A, taking their land. Culture B then starts going to all the other cultures saying “look at all our beautiful statues”. Even if Culture B doesn’t claim to have made the statues, they have claimed makership and ownership of a “collection” and claim credit for maintaining it. The achievements of Culture A have been appropriated – i.e. stolen, see also, the British Museum. Cultural appropriation can also take the form of a culture claiming another is a part of itself – “A isn’t its own culture, they’re a part of our glorious Culture B. Yes, people who call themselves A made the statues, but they’re really just a subculture of B”. See the US’ treatment of Native American culture, or how England treats Scotland, Wales and Ireland. These forms of cultural appropriation are very serious problems and they still happen everywhere, with people being suppressed and forced into constructed national identities that they don’t share.
The other meaning is… nothing. In some circles, especially online on platforms like Tumblr and pre-Elon Twitter, any time a person of one culture was seen enjoying an aspect of another – not claiming ownership or even being a part of it, just enjoying it, like a white person eating Chinese food – some crowds would accuse them of cultural appropriation. This is meaningless and should not be taken seriously.
Edit: to address some criticism and other comments in the replies to this, I’d like to clarify that I’m not dismissing cultural appropriation as meaningless. I’m dismissing the use of it to completely forbid or shame the sharing of cultures in any degree, which is the usage most people encounter (i.e. see screenshot and reposted constantly, rather than running into directly). But that isn’t to say that there isn’t a spectrum. I think we can all agree that the example I gave of a white person eating Chinese food is indeed ridiculous and nothing to worry about – but that’s because Chinese food isn’t a symbol of cultural identity, it’s just a part of the culture. Some things like the wearing of cultural garb (you might consider examples like a white person wearing a durag or a kimono) might be okay with some people of that culture and not others. Historical context is important. A white person wearing a durag or other symbol of black culture is more likely to be unacceptable because of the history of white people appropriating black culture – for example the brutal suppression of most of black culture while stealing and rebranding black music during the rock and roll era: trying to remove the “black” from “black music” to make it palatable to white audiences. A white person wearing a durag might be seen as another attempt to take their culture and strip it of its “blackness”, i.e. appropriating it; or at the very least as showing an insensitivity to that history of appropriation. There is no clear guide on what is or is not appropriation because the entire issue is mired in historical context that different people will consider differently. The best thing to do is to be aware of that historical context and try to get a feel for what’s okay before doing anything. Ask members of the relevant culture for their thoughts and see what they say. Be informed and only then make an informed decision.
Edit 2: This one ~~isn’t~~ wasn’t addressing anything I’ve read (turns out people were discussing that), just a corollary that came to me. It’s important to note that culture isn’t a stand-in for race. The examples I’ve used are all related to racial and national cultures but they are far from the only ones. Cultures form around many things – obvious examples include gay culture, trans culture, disabled culture, deaf culture, autistic culture. And people can belong to any number of these, even within the same areas (being biracial or having multiple disabilities, for example). All kinds of culture are worth considering.
Latest Answers