Vicariously Offended

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Well I can be quite clueless you know No need for hyperbole there, we're not on Twitter

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A good example I heard once was concerning the tagelharpa. It's an Estonian instrument, historically used in Estonian culture, however if you hear it you'll probably think Vikings. The modern viking/pagan/neofolk music scene uses it prominently, and as it has a much broader reach than Estonian culture, this has lead (through no fault of the musicians I must add) to situations where many people think of it as a "viking" instrument, even though it never was. Thus, a piece of Estonian culture is widely appreciated as belonging to another culture, due to popular media influence.

I don't know if this is really an example of cultural appropriation, but that example helped me grasp the concept (if it is a good example).

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I think the more important factor is taking ownership over something that originated elsewhere.

Even though it isn’t sacred, I would argue that the association between Great Britain and tea comes from appropriation. It wasn’t necessarily appropriation for the Portuguese to bring tea back to Europe, but it certainly was when the British used Chinese seeds and cultivation techniques in India to push China out of the trade.

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So if I want to open a Pinata factory, I can only sell them to Mexicans? Or can I sell them to anyone, but only to non-Mexicans at a profit? Or must every Pinata be made at home by a loving Mexican Grandmother for her Grandchildren only?

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If I had and it was easy, we wouldn't have this neverending stream at someone getting offended because someone did something associated with a culture they don't have obvious blood ties to.

I think there is asshole behaviour that could be described as cultural appropriation, but I think the vast majority of them also fit under "exploitation" or "racism".

It's also apparent that if you tell people "cultural appropriation is bad", you get pretty silly outcomes. Suddenly you have protests because a restaurant serves sushi without being ethnically japanese, or someone yells at you because your post a photo of a california roll.

Given those examples I should probably go have lunch

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So is every company making and marketing tortilla chips and salsa appropriating culture if their from New York City? Is every pizzeria that isn't in Italy profiteering off of Italian culture? Is a French Bistro in Kansas City wrong? Is it wrong to wear a Scottish Kilt made in Viet Nam?

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I'm telling you how people feel, I'm not writing a manual towards a post race society. When people feel ostracised because they look Mexican, they get salty about the same society who routinely rejected them and made them feel like outsiders gleefully housing down Mexican food and cosplaying at being Mexican.

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That's really interesting! Nice sounding instrument

But what are you suggesting? Was it bad of the musicians to use this instrument? Is it bad that people liked the music?

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It's awesome, racists and progs have the same end goal

Segregation.

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Everything means dick in Spanish if you try hard enough

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It's called White Savior Complex.

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Nobody has ever yelled at me for eating or posting a picture of my American Midwest grocery store sushi, get the fuck outta here.

The irony here is that the term cultural appropriation has been politically appropriated, the same way that many of these explorative racial theories are, like woke, like social justice, like critical race theory. They are taken from their academic settings and eventually used to suppress actual concerns raised by denegrating it and reducing it to something that is both laughable and fundamentally not what it is.

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In the end, progressives and racists shared the same end goal: Segregation

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It's not. People use stuff from other places and call them different names all the time

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I think each of the described situations has a different specific answer because the topic is nuanced. As stated above, it can sometimes to be messy to say who owns some piece of culture. But beyond that, the most useful tool is an examination of socioeconomic power dynamics.

If there is a cultural group that is poor, and an outsider from a rich/wealthy group commodifies and sells their culture, while giving nothing to those people, you'd probably agree that that's a shitty thing to do. Their culture obviously had some kind of material wealth value that they received none of.

However, if you take a situation where both parties are well off it seems a lot less shitty. Especially if the cultural group in question is already commodifying and profiting off the same piece of culture.

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Yeah and one of the reasons why we will never get again paper Mario references in other Mario games

God-damnit

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Rodríguez cousin knew how to pack heat

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It's called White Savior Complex.

"Only I, a white person can save you from-- pick a thing. Because I believe you are incapable of fending for yourself, I shall be offended for you!"

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I am Latin American. We couldn't even give an atomic sliver of a speck of fuck about gringos using part of our culture.

If anything it's enjoyable, one more for the family.

And if we get offended? Don't worry. We don't need anyone from a "dominant culture" to look down on us or speak for us.

We can speak and do speak for ourselves

zqps

Sharing culture isn't cultural appropriation.