Vicariously Offended

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I wonder how much of the 'lazy Mexican' stereotype comes from a combination of an afternoon siesta (...to avoid the hottest part of the day, which could be deadly prior to air conditioning), and the chronic anemia that could be caused by hookworm infestations that used to be common in areas with poor sanitation (incl. the American south; some of the same stereotypes existed regarding rural southerners for many decades)?

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Yeah, but lederhosen are just kind of neat. Who doesn't like their men in short leather shorts, right? (Seriously though, the construction for very traditional lederhosen is kind of neat. I've tried it, and it's a challenge without being able to skive all your seams.)

Flying Squid

I'd say this goes a little deeper than that, because American black people literally invented the art form while being actively segregated from white audiences (and much of society in general) and then all the credit goes to a white Southerner.

acargitz

Using "cultural appropriation" to drag down regular people is kind of pointless, like freaking out at someone for putting the wrong recyclable type of plastic trash in the garbage.

Cultural appropriation matters at the corporate level, where media shapes what regular people do. Do you want to talk about cultural appropriation? Talk about Disney, talk about Hollywood, talk about Jeep Cherokee, and Decathlon Quechua. To keep with the recycling analogy: your problem shouldn't be ordinary people messing up their trash sorting, it should be vendors mass producing plastic trash for everything.

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I may be mistaken but I don't think I've ever seen a French guy painted in black. However I don't think it's in anyway related to historical reasons, it's mostly because it looks dumb and out of place.

Transferring your argument to the Sevilla parade where black faces were the norm last week, I believe they played a relatively minor role in the slave trade. And I have not seen a single black guy in the street the duration I was there, apart from one frenchman.

Flying Squid

I believe they played a relatively minor role in the slave trade.

Are you fucking kidding me?

Slavery in Cuba - Wikipedia

(en.wikipedia.org)

Only abolished by Spanish royal decree in 1887. One of the last European colonies in the Americas to abolish slavery. Only Brazil came afterward two years later.

Lemminary

Yeah, I wanted to set some parameters for it. I thought it'd be unhelpful without specifying where I draw the line.

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That's just racism and you're not going to fix it by isolating the immigrants more by chastising people that enjoy their culture.

It makes zero sense if the goal is to fight racism. If anything you'd want there to be MORE immersion and exchange of cultures so the immigrants are seen as part of the new fabric instead of separate from it.

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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.