Re:Is Cultural Appropriation Always Wrong?
by strangecasts on Friday October 02, 2015 @04:06PM
(#10320957)
And then it's more a matter of degree than black/white.
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.
Re:Is Cultural Appropriation Always Wrong?
by civilian on Friday October 02, 2015 @03:26PM
(#10320680)
Rich people drinking out of mason jars isn't cultural appropriation of poor class! IDK about your family, but my family is wealthier because we have a long habit of being frugal. There's no need to buy something new if you can use goo-be-gone on the leftover salsa jars. Fuck!
Re:Is Cultural Appropriation Always Wrong?
by djtriptych on Friday October 02, 2015 @03:32PM
(#10320725)
It's an absurd statement: "My family is wealthier because we have a habit of being frugal". How do you know poor people aren't frugal, let alone that they are _historically_ not frugal?
Re:Is Cultural Appropriation Always Wrong?
by civilian on Friday October 02, 2015 @03:37PM
(#10320769)
Right, I meant it as clarification for how my family got wealth, not as a reason why poor families are poor. "Civilian's family became wealthy because we had good jobs and were frugal with our money. As oppose to other families, who started a massively successful business."
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.