So I’ve grown up pretty isolated due to ill health and am pretty naive. I genuinely don’t see why cultural appropriation is offensive. What happened to ‘imitation is the sincerest form of flattery’? And surely anyone celebrating/featuring/showcasing other cultures or traditions gives an opportunity for learning all around?
I remember people going insane when Bake Off did themed weeks from other countries. Please help me understand how learning about food from other cultures/places is a bad thing!
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The only people that have a problem are terminally online liberals
The imitation is often poorly done which can offend some people.
Imitation isnt flattery. People whould prefer their culture to be respected by others versus stolen and profited off of.
Themed weeks arent always appropriation but some people struggle to be respectful of others
An aspect of it is respect. If you’re going to do a week about mexican cuisine… do it at least half right, hire someone from there to come in for the week and teach the contestants. Don’t just say, it’s mexican week! Make us Tack-Ohs.
Also can be someone using very sacred, intimate or important aspects of your culture flippantly or as a costume or joke. It’s like if you had a very very important moment spiritually related to funerals or tradegdy but instead they sell parts of this tradition at party city.
>Please help me understand how learning about food from other cultures/places is a bad thing!
It’s not. And that’s very likely not what people were complaining about.
Learning about food is a great thing but HOW you use that knowledge and what you do with the food and profits you make is part of what matters.
If someone is just using another culture’s history or food or anything else to make themselves rich and not doing anything to share or give back then that’s exploitation and absolutely a form of appropriation that should be called out and opposed.
Japanese here; I’ve never really understood the issue with it.
Almost all cultures are themselves a product of appropriation, at least in part .
People always try to give me examples about things like ninjas, kimonos, etc but they are never anything that strikes me as actually offensive to my heritage. Always feels like it’s Americans getting upset on our behalf
The thing you need to keep in mind is that cultural appropriation is systemic issue, not a personal moral failure.
Like a classic example is how artists like Elvis and Vanilla Ice got famous for playing black music and being white. These artists took part of black culture, but could profit more of it because they where white. Certainly you agree that it is bad that more skilled black artists had less success? But at the same time it is not a moral failure as a white artist to play music in a style invented by black people. It is a systemic issue.
Ok, imagine you wore suspenders to school every day because you thought they were cool. And people teased you mercilessly for it so you sadly stopped wearing them. And then a few years passed and all the people who bullied you are now wearing suspenders and getting showered in compliments for it. That would suck, right?
Ok, so now imagine that it wasn’t wearing suspenders but wearing your hair in the way it grows naturally and you weren’t just teased, but disciplined and excluded from school and work opportunities because of it. Can you understand why people would be pissed off about people from other groups suddenly styling their hair that way and getting showered with positive feedback?
Context matters. No one, besides some 14 year olds online, care about who is eating what food. They care when aspects of a culture that have been marginalized are adopted by the marginalizing culture with zero recognition of how people of the originating culture have been ostracized and punished for it.
Because sometimes it can be offensive. If you are baking a dish I don’t think it matters, but sometimes you can be using deeply religious symbols as a Halloween costume, which some people might take the wrong way.
Some cultures are exclusionary.
That’s it.
Cultural appropriation is when you take a piece of culture and adapt it to use for profit, without any acknowledgement of the history attached to it
One big example was Victoria Secret’s runaway show using scantily clad models wearing Native American Chief headress, just because it looks exotic
Wearing a kimono because you like the way it looks and appreciate the culture it comes from is not cultureal appropriation, but a lot of people will confuse it.
Its a ggod idea, to always remind you, that people on the internet could be a fourteen years old and think that their opinion should be law. I personally hold the firm belief, that culture is for sharing.
“Cultural appropriation” is one of those terms that started with a reasonable meaning, that the Internet turned into insanity.
It became a commonly known phrase in the context of eg people wearing ceremonial Native American headdresses as fashion items. The idea was that it was culturally insensitive to take something sacred and important to a culture and treat it frivolously — eg how folks tend to respect religious symbols like the Christian cross or Star of David. “My culture is not your costume.”
Then the Internet grabbed it, and lathed it into stupidity like the Internet always does. So the phrase has been bastardized to just “doing anything from another culture,” which is obviously fine and encouraged, and how human beings have operated for the entire history of the species.
Cultures have taken other culture’s ideas that they like since the beginning of time. It’s not a bad thing at all.
I have no problem with politically correctness, or as the right calls it, “woke”. But taken to the extreme, it becomes asinine. If you’re doing to mock a culture, yes, it’s bad and should be shunned. But if you do it to honor and recognize a culture, I see no problems with doing so.
Don’t underestimate the ability of unemployed rootless Americans to turn everything into a problem only they have the solution to
It is only cultural appropriation if a white woman doesn’t like it.
IMHO:
Cultural appropriation is when you act and believe you are something, which you’re not.
In a way, white rappers, could be accused of it. It’s black culture, black music, yet they’re not.
I’m a huge fan of Japan, I own a Yukata, but I’d never wear it outside, since I’m not Japanese.
I don’t get it, personally, but I avoid it, so I do t have to hear anyone bitch/judge me.
tbh most of the time it just feels like some shit self righteous or attention seeking americans came up with to speak for other cultures.
It’s an interesting question. I’m a professional ukulele musician in Las Vegas and sometimes I won’t be offered certain gigs because I am not of Hawaiian or Polynesian descent.
All I know is that white girls look dumb as fuck in cornrows and box braids lmao
– Let’s say that in my culture, we make these elaborate cakes for when a family member dies. It’s to share with loved ones. Then, someone on a reality show tries to copy it and says, “I saw this thing where some people make funeral cakes. I’ve made something similar to that, but I used some leftover decorations to make it into a Halloween cake with little gravestones and skeletons. I’m trying to put the FUN in FUNERAL today.”
That’s going to come off as really insensitive to a culture, not honoring it. Doing something to pay respects to the dead can be a touchy subject and treating it like it’s something you can use for a goofy holiday decoration is going to be seen as mean-spirited.
– Sometimes people try to pass off their cooking as “authentic”, but then really change things around. Imagine someone says on the show, “I’m going to make a classic American burger just like they have for their Independence Day. But, I’ve decided to make it using chicken, which I’m going to cook medium rare, and instead of American cheese, lettuce, and pickles, I’ve decided to use Swiss cheese, sauerkraut, and kimchi, to give it a more international flair. {20 minutes later} Oh, this burger is really awful. Yeah, those Americans really don’t know how to cook, do they? Why do they think it’s okay to eat raw chicken? This is really gross. I feel sick.”
That’s just insulting to try to claim it as authentic, change everything, and present something that’s inedible. It makes the people from that area look really bad.
– There was a Great British Bake Off where they made “Japanese” food, but it really was a mix of other Asian foods. That can come off as borderline offensive to various Asian cultures that you think they’re the same.
They included pandas. That’s Chinese. China and Japan are two different countries. If you’re going to have an episode centered around Japan and Japanese food, it would be considerate to do some research to figure out what’s genuinely Japanese. They also included Indian food, which is even more distant.
It’s not automatically cultural appropriation and bad to cook food from other people’s culture, but if you do it disrespectfully, some people are going to be upset.
Imitation is more like cultural appreciation. That’s fine.
Cultural appropriation when you take another culture and say it’s yours.
>I genuinely don’t see why cultural appropriation is offensive.
This seems to be a common point of misunderstanding. It’s only cultural appropriation if you’re using something from another culture in an offensive way. If you think of an example that ISN’T offensive, then you’ve thought of an example that ISN’T cultural appropriation.
The key is understanding the difference between cultural diffusion and cultural appropriation. Cultural diffusion is great, finding elements of other cultures that you enjoy is awesome!
Cultural appropriation is usually complete bullshit unless the person is obviously mocking the culture in question. Many people are just looking for reasons to become offended by things.
One mans cultural appropriation is another mans compliment.
There is no such thing as cultural appropriation. We’re all humans. We all learn from each other. We all copy and mimic each other. Mimicking in the highest form of flattery.
The only people upset about cultural appropriation are white liberals, who are perpetual victims.
This is my first post on here btw, thank you so much for all being so reasonable and good at explaining 🙂
It’s the bull trying to be mindful in a china shop.
The west is so big, such a huge cultural power over everything, that we can accidentally decimate an entire culture by accident.
Take, for instance, the Native American Headdress. To us white people it’s just a silly hat, to the American Indians it’s one of the highest honors they can bestow on someone. Sense white people greatly outnumber natives in both population size and institutional power, it is in danger of becoming a silly hat.
Or, for instance, there was a guy who did irreparable damage to the Scotts language by writing Wikipedia articles with a Scottish accent and not real Scot.
Essentially most cultures take ideas from others, its been happening forever, lots of people use US style clothing around the world
The leftists are just looking for ways to be offended for themselves and for others, there were some people who dressed in traditional clothing of certain cultures and went to areas where those cultures lived and asked them how they felt and they were flattered by it, not offended
The media attacked a caucasian looking child for having native american garments on at the NFL game, his family member was a chief or something and thus he was part native, they also chose to get a pic from a certain angle to make the child look racist
The left just wants to make everything racist
If you profit off a culture and do not acknowledge or show respect or some level of knowledge about it, then theres a high chance thats appropriation.
I think the first argument is that nobody who exercises it usually gives a true s*** about what they’re using it for other than entrepreneurship and viewership/box office/attendance.
Things like the Washington Redskins and the Cleveland Indians, and the Atlanta braves selling foam tomahawks at their games. If you prioritize good taste and goodwill respecting native American tribes in the general sense, you will be in contrast with the mission statement of these organizations.
Mass media also gives you a lot more potentially upsetting examples than a reality TV baking competition: the movie horizon by Kevin Costner that was released last year, repurposes a character stereotype of “magical native americans”, and get a significant screen time of these characters only when they’re speaking in terms of using their dream interpretations as a means of fortune telling, using rituals for the future, etc. There is zero honest attempt of doing anything you describe as your defense for cultural appropriation as it appeared in that film through those characters and through that screenplay. and that is almost always the case when has come to depicting native Americans in anything.
And there’s also other examples like from Disney that are from the last 30 years, not when they made overtly racist cartoons. For example they wanted to host the premiere of Disney Hercules in 1997 at the Acropolis in Greece, the Greek government told them the f*** off because they hated what they did with their movie in terms of respecting any kind of accuracy of Greek mythology, there was inherently nothing about that movie that was sincere about being educational. And i say this while still saying its my favorite movie of all time
Cultural appropriation, in its true meaning, specifically isnt learning about other cultures; it’s seeing their cool things, taking it, and claiming it as your own invention
True cultural appropriation is the practice of taking something from a different culture and profiting off of it in a way that is either negligent (such as claiming credit for the idea) or detrimental (such as the overharvesting of endangered white sage for metaphysical shops)
To put it in a scenario:
Imagine you invited someone (we’ll call them A) over to your house to show them your favorite food. This food is a secret family recipe passed down for generations, and making it for the family is considered a big bonding experience
A tastes the food, decides they love it. Instead of asking you if they can come over more often to continue enjoying dinner with you, they sneak into the kitchen and steal your family’s recipe while you’re busy with something else.
A then goes on to publish the recipe in their own cookbook in which they state they came up with the recipe on their own. They did not ask for permission, nor did they credit your family, and they may have even stolen your story of making this dish at family gatherings for generations. A makes millions off of the stolen recipe, and never looks your way again.
Instead of simply asking you for the recipe, or asking if you’d like to publish it, they stole it from you and profited off of it themselves. That’s what makes it bad; they took something important to you, removed all of the importance and significance, and profited off of it themselves
This issue is black and white with a gigantic gray area in which people will argue endlessly about. What one person calls respectful and flattering another calls disrespectful and blasphemous. There’s good arguments on both sides, and the best answer often only applies to a specific case. It’s easier these days to avoid it, which I think is a shame because we’re all better off when we openly appreciate one another.
the whole quote is “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness”