Vicariously Offended

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As with most things, it's a continuum. Some assimilation is good, a hairstyle, a clothing style, food, even customs. Sometimes certain people can go too far, and it gets more problematic. Think the jeweler in Snatch that isn't Jewish but pretends to be. The episode of The Neighborhood with Nicole Sullivan. Rachael Dolezal.

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If you can't unravel the knot of cultural ownership, then does anyone really own it? It would appear to me that "everyone" owns it at that point and can partake in it freely and adapt it to their wants an needs. And no matter the culture, there is always socioeconomic disparities within that group. No matter how small or downtrodden they may appear to you. Someone is always going to be a little bit better off than you and someone else is always going to have a little more power than you.

So is Tostitos racist for not mailing checks to every Mexican person everywhere? Because they sure as hell are making bank selling those chips and Salsa to you. OMG! are YOU part of the problem?

zqps

Great, let's retread the right-wing's favorite progressive strawmen for teh lulz. Any other culture war bullshit I should feel unjustly attacked over?

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According to you.

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I was with you until the last sentence. Can't say I agree with the n word being a beautiful expression of English.

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You're being trolled, there's nobody saying that unless online trolls convinced them. It's concern trolling to stoke division.

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This. The social Justice warriors that are peddling the cultural appropriation line are not representative of the culture or the people of that culture, their opinions, or feelings on the matter.

What we, as a society, need to do, is let cultures be offended when they feel offended, and not assume that they will be offended by something that we think they should be offended by.

Short version is: don't be offended on behalf of someone else.

You don't know them.
You don't know their culture.
You don't know what they see as offensive.

Stop assuming you do.

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Kimono literally just means "thing to wear".

I've heard multiple Japanese people tell me how funny it is how much foreigners concern themselves over wearing... Clothes.

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Good thing I'm not part of the "dominant culture". Would hate to speak for you. Just speaking for myself.

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I think a big part of appropriation is either pretending the thing is from a different culture or just divorcing it from any existing cultural context. People just don't think about what an actual effect is so just knee jerk accuse anything vaguely similar of cultural appropriation.

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As a Quebecois, I like that Canadians like poutine. I don't like that they pretend they have invented it. I also like that they like maple syrup and the traditions surrounding it (cabane à sucre). I don't like that they appropriate it as a thing of their own (we produce 90% of global maple syrup).

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And katana just means "one-sided blade." But when you deliberately use a foreign word in English to describe something, you're talking about a specific kind of that thing.

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Idk if I'm just old now and it's not the parties I go to but I'm sure glad that "sexy native american" isn't really a Halloween costume anymore.

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Exactly, just like when you have bullies in high school. Don't assume that just because someone is wandering around mocking and relentlessly making fun of another student that the other student isn't ok with it. We need to leave space for the victims to come forward if and when they feel uncomfortable, and not use our positions of authority to try to provide social support to people who we view as victims. After all, it worked for Anita hill and everyone who came after.

See I can make a stupid argument too

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That's an interesting one. It's not like you can stop music and explain the instrumentation in the middle of a song. I have seen in live shows when they use uncommon instruments they'll explain it either at the start or between songs.

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It's mainly just that, since information can be copied without removing access to the original from the current possessor of that information, I don't see a good justification to restrict use of it. If you steal something, the original owner loses while you benefit. Since the unexpected loss is probably felt worse, this is a net negative and therefore a bad thing. But, if you copy information (which IP by nature is), you can give it to an arbitrarily large number of people without even taking it from the original, enough benefit to in my opinion outweigh the frustration that loss of control causes. Capitalism adds another element given it also ties monopoly over a given bit of information to artist compensation, but even without capitalism, I don't think information should be seen as property

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No, that's an entirely different thing

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"Wie de schoen past trekt 'em aan."

If you feel spoken to by this comic then maybe you got a problem...

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When I was growing up in the 80s and some frat-bro types ran around town dressed like the Three Amigos while swilling beers and fumbling their Spanish, parents and teachers would call it "tacky" and "annoying" and "juvenile".

Now, in the 20s, the children of those frat-bros puts on the same outfit and does the same stupid shit. But their peers are the ones rolling their eyes and telling them that they don't look cool, while the parents clap and take pictures and get off on a romanticized youth lived vicariously through their frat-bro kids.

So the frat-bros become resentful. They go home, pull out their crayons, and make up a naked brown man to give them permission to behave miserably. And then they go on podcasts and make Instagram reels explaining how - um, aktuly - if you don't think the tourist-trap Spirit Halloween tier get-up I'm wearing on Cinco-De-Drinko to celebrate getting wasted is cool, you're the real racists.

Then Budwiser releases an "Authentic Mexican Logger" and the same frat-bros lose their fucking minds because their favorite beer company just Went Woke.

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But that’s not as controversial.

It IS controversial. Its just controversial for the same chuds who demand the right to throw on brown-face and call it cosplay. As soon as a beer company starts releasing their label in Spanish or putting a foreign flag on a product or otherwise identify with the wrong kind of foreigner, a big segment of the population loses its mind.