I understand not wanting to step on toes and put salt in old wounds, but telling me I can't (metaphorically) walk around other neighborhoods out of respect seems a bit much. Something has gone awfully wrong to get to this point and playing along instead of unwinding the stack is misguided.

Black people embrace Eminem but not Iggy Azalea. Black people embrace Teena Marie but not so much Miley Cyrus.

So what's the difference? What's being differentiated?

The melting pot is better when everyone melts into it.

> But it has never been easier to proceed with good faith and Google, to seek out and respect context[...]

and then seemingly striking it down with the Shamsie essay:

> The moment you say, a male American writer can’t write about a female Pakistani, you are saying, Don’t tell those stories.

but leaving out the part immediately preceding the quote:

> But it should be clear that the response to this is for writers to write differently, to write better, to critique the power structures rather than propping them up, to move beyond stereotype—which you need to do for purely technical reasons, because the novel doesn’t much like stereotypes.

which doesn't at all preclude discussion.

So, wearing a native american headdress as a fashion accessory is more probably wrong; wearing cornrows as a fashion choice is not really all that wrong (at least, I haven't heard of cornrows being an actual cultural symbol, I just always thought it was a hairstyle); and a more recent example, yuppies drinking out of mason jars is very probably not a "wrong" appropriation of "poor" culture.

The level of abuse can definitely be ignorant rather than purposeful - for instance, there might be good points about why a white person wearing cornrows might actually be wrong.

The baldest examples of wrong appropriation have been the attempts to take meaningful cultural symbols and then deliberately pervert their meaning as a weapon. Possible examples are the pagan symbols of christmas, or the swastika - although it's unclear to me whether the nazi appropriation of that was a direct purposeful attack on the meaning of the eastern symbol.

I dislike the yes/no framing of the question for that reason - it leads to people making slippery slope fallacies left and right, instead of acknowledging that it is possible to be tone deaf without necessarily intending to.

Anyone remember the story of the half-white, half-Japanese woman who was derided for culturally appropriating the Japanese because she, ethnically, looked closer to Caucasian/white than Japanese? I especially loved the part where the overly aggressive PC hate mob apologized to her. Except the apology never happened. Instead, they doubled down on her being in the wrong...

Increasingly, learning about a culture is becoming "cultural appropriation" to the PC extremists. Identity politics, of all forms, is a disease - from what I have seen it has only ever lead to negativity and conflict.

Your sense of smell smells like another manifestation of privilege. Don't allow yourself to believe you do not operate from a position of extreme privilege. Be human, but not delusional.

As for my supposed 'privilege', whose accomplishments are so ideologically pure that you can't trot out that old chestnut? Do I have to be a gay black irish trans jew to be able to take pride in anything I've achieved, or is there some other marginalized minority who is even more downtrodden that I should aspire to, if I want my accomplishments to mean anything to the workaday SJW?

Normal doesn't mean fair or right or harmless or good. That's what the article is about.

So why did he say it?

A person whining against somebody using "his" culture, blindly ignores the fact that "his" culture is crossbreed that is constantly changing and evolving.

This perspective likely varies widely based on the culture with which you identify. Some cultures have been explicitly exploited, generally along the same axes of privilege in modern life.

For the people that know that you cannot own a culture and there is no central authority which to determine how it can be used.

No. Simpler (for you) not to consider these things :)

Cultural interchange is inevitable yes, but is its effect on the human condition negligible? No. So why not talk about it.

Also they didn't appropriate it because it was fucking Germanic to begin with.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fylfot

You can't prove things like that, so why do you believe this stuff? Why do you present it as fact?

So? All culture is subjective. What is offensive in one culture can have a completely different meaning in other cultures [0]. Cultures are the result of human opinions and by definition that makes them subjective.

Human interpretation of actions, symbols, words, or what have you that defines is a culture is the direct result of a group of peoples' collective opinions given to those actions, symbols, words, or what have you. Cultural appropriation is taking something away from a culture and trying to give it a new meaning, particularly with a meaning that the original group dislikes.

Which is little more than "Our opinion on this thing came before your opinion. You're being rude by ignoring our opinion on this thing and we don't like that."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_sign#As_an_insult

The problem with modern cultural appropriation is anemic cultural identities coupled with one-directional appropriation. But that's only a problem for some cultures.

Is it fair for any culture to complain about this?

Isn't it drastically easier for people of more privileged cultures to assume identities of less privileged cultures?

Is that directionality ok?

Also does humanity win when cultural tradition, cultural _information_ is lost forever? Are we sure we are capturing all that is useful?

Is it really inevitable or could we _choose_ to assign more value to the preservation of extant culture?