Cultural appropriation - your thoughts

How about the damn Normans appropriating Saxon culture, and in Ireland becoming more Irish than the Irish.

Yes it's pretty damn racist. We call it mexican food for a reason. Go back home scrub.

I work on an endangered Native American language. It's not simply liberals, but just an average tribal person that gets offended by cultural appropriation. Language in particular is considered cultural property. In order to start or continue research, one has to be observant of that and deferential toward it. However, like others, I don't like it. There are some that would rather see their own language die out than have a White linguist work to document it. Ironically, the languages are dying because they can't compete with English. And English is so successful because everyone uses it. Everyone uses it because we expect everyone to appropriate it. Even more ironically, the language I work on was once a lingua franca for trading of horses throughout the American plains, so it is only a recent modern development that has made it into a thing of cultural property.





Edited by HackettFan - April 20 2016 at 14:00

Dean wrote: Hmmm. Where do you draw the line? Jazz, ragtime, gospel and blues, together with R&B and Soul, and thus hip-hop and rap, are the result of cultural appropriation. None of them bear much resemblance to the African music that they are derived from as they are the appropriation of Western music culture (European folk traditions, hymns & church music, Latin rhythms) into African song and dance traditions. [I would posit that this was possible because the fundamentals of harmony and meter within music are based upon inherent physiological human traits rather than learnt or passed-on cultural traditions, but that's a digression]. Here we don't use the seemingly derogatory word "appropriation" but the more acceptable "adaptation" or "fusion" because of the circumstances that lead to this appropriation of Western music by African-Americans.  This is White man's guilt: the embarrassment and shame that they bear for the slavery, colonisation, displacement and ghettoisation of other races by their forebears, even though those white-oppressors were the social elite who similarly exploited the less privileged of their own race and culture through the class-system, enforced transportation, work-houses and indentured servitude. My (white) ancestors were neither slaves nor slavers, (nor where they colonists or imperialists), but they were no more free as a consequence of that: general suffrage (as an indication of emancipation) in the UK is less than 100 years old, prior to 1918 no one in my family-tree was eligible to vote. Their political, social and religious freedoms were limited and their cultural identity marginalised and suppressed through many centuries of imposed social and religious conformance, though this wasn't as visible as the more politically motivated suppression of Irish, Welsh and Scottish identity. Much of what is now regarded as English cultural heritage and tradition is a romantic Edwardian/Victorian re-imagining. Therefore I cannot be 'embarrassed' by cultural appropriation because of the sins of someone else's father but equally I cannot appropriate for myself the offence felt by others of a different culture. If a Native American is offended by cultural appropriation of a traditional head-dress then so be it, if a middle-class white student is offended by it then I have to ask what offends them so?

Good thoughts , Dean.

JJLehto wrote: Blacksword wrote: JJLehto wrote: So embracing other cultures and taking enjoyment in what they have to offer is now a bad thing to some? Oi Liberalism like conservatism has a lunatic fringe and this is the loony liberal wing at work. They have much in common with their right wing counterparts in that they both seek to divide and control people and their overall desire is for an authoritarian system of government imposing their beliefs on others through draconian legislation, centering around the control of language and thought. Clever, but dark stuff.. Yeah we all know of the new "liberal" fascism taking hold in campuses all across the US (dont know about other parts of the world). The social media presence is very in your face as well. Very sad the mentality some, emphasis on some, liberals take on this stuff.  Read a great article about it on college campuses, and the author (a professor I believe) hit it on the head: In his day as a youth...it was the old conservatives that tried to stifle, divide, homoginize and youth/liberals fought against. Now they are the very ones doing the work for the old conservatives But yeah it's whack. I try my best to avoid it, which is a double win since it gives me a reason to be on/delve into social media less.  That said I NEVER swing to the other side. I've noticed the knee jerk reaction to all this is rational, sane, non hateful people I know (ranging from liberal to conservative) react in an equally bad way.  SJW!!!!!!  And use language and rhetoric that is borderline hateful and hate to say, often gets into weirdly racist seeming. And I know they're not, but like I said above, best to just ignore/laugh off like I do. Can't let the dividers get to us

I'm wondering if those "liberal fascists" actually do characterise themselves as liberals. If they do, then they need to look up the dictionary definition of what liberalism actually is, but I suspect many may regard themselves as being above and beyond the liberal/conservative paradigm. A new generation of socially aware pragmatists who know (or think they know) that positive change must be forced and coerced. It can't be merely encouraged. Of course they will have also defined for themselves what 'positive change' means and what it looks like...

I always considered myself a liberal, but these days I'm increasingly being made to feel like a fascist for thinking that others have a right to hold and express opinions that differ from my own, and what I should be doing is simply falling into line with whatever perspective has been approved and rubber stamped by the liberalista that week. In reality most people - in my experience - hold a variety of liberal and conservative views on different issues. You rarely meet someone who is so to the left they want to see everyone on the same salary queing up at soup kitchens everyday, or so to the right that they think anyone without a degree in business studies should be sent to death camps, but there eseems to be generation of 'my way or the highway' authoritarians being created in colleges to steer the world through the 21st century and into dictatorial ruin.

Either that, or I'm talking nonsense and worrying unduly. The jury's out for now..

I guess Caudasian-created state and city names like Dakota, Idaho, Toronto or Mississauga are now politically incorrect, because they've been "culturally appropriated"

A Person wrote: As far as I am concerned the people who make a big stink about cultural appropriation in regards to rather benign things are just a vocal minority. It is very easy to just paint all the people who are concerned with such topics with the same brush, but that is just doing the conservatives who actually do oppose them a favor imo. The whole anti-SJW/anti-feminist/anti-PC thing is very strange to me.

It's equally wrong to paint all those who question these ideas with the same brush. I don't think I know anyone, male or female who is not a feminist, or who is opposed to gay marriage, but equally none of them are blind followers of political correctness. That's because many are of the opinion that there isn't a good intention behind it.

A Person wrote: Blacksword wrote: A Person wrote: As far as I am concerned the people who make a big stink about cultural appropriation in regards to rather benign things are just a vocal minority. It is very easy to just paint all the people who are concerned with such topics with the same brush, but that is just doing the conservatives who actually do oppose them a favor imo. The whole anti-SJW/anti-feminist/anti-PC thing is very strange to me. It's equally wrong to paint all those who question these ideas with the same brush. I don't think I know anyone, male or female who is not a feminist, or who is opposed to gay marriage, but equally none of them are blind followers of political correctness. That's because many are of the opinion that there isn't a good intention behind it. I am not sure what blindly following political correctness would be. It's not like it's a religion.

Are you implying that people who disagree with those with a PC mindset are just looking for any reason to dismiss their claims just because?

A Person wrote: I am implying that lots of anti-PC stuff points out some of the worst examples and uses it to dismiss the entire thing.