"Cultural Appropriation"

[The Grand Nudger]

Cmon jamaica we got a bobsled team!

@Em...low rent shakespeare on the mic. The guy is good.

[bennyboy]

I presume you are talking about Rachel Dolezal. I don’t know all the specifics other than the headlines. It appears she was presenting herself as something she wasn’t in other to attain something she could not otherwise get from a group of people for whom certain criteria were important. It seems to me that Ms. Dolezal engaged in a kind of fraud but that is between her and the people she was apparently trying to fool.

I wasn't talking about her, but she is a very extreme example.  After being caught out as not being black AT ALL, she's told the world that she chooses to "identify as black" and that since she grew up around a lot of black people, and currently has a lot of black people in her life, she's justified as doing that.  In other words, she thinks its possible to be a black woman trapped in a white woman's body or something!

I believe she "came out" shortly after Bruce Jenner decided he was a woman.

[The Grand Nudger]

-aaaand that's how it fits.  A person who, from her own account of the situation...comes from an oppresive or colonial culture...who has appropriated the cultural items and paraphernalia of another, victim culture....minimizing their actual contribution to that and referring instead to -her- experience of "being black".

That abcd question is still hanging in the wind.......

[bennyboy]

So what is your opinion about the Portland ladies that were shamed into closing their taco stand? It seems to me that two enterprising and resourceful ladies in Portland managed to replicate the traditional recipe for tortillas by asking questions and careful observation, even if it did involve snooping around. So what were they supposed to do? Pay royalties? To whom? And with whom could they have negotiated?

Yeah that was one of the other examples I had in mind when I opened this thread. Are fish tacos a sacred symbol, an unalienable cultural property of all Hispanics?

I gotta come way down on the negative side on that one, and I really can't believe that any community allowed that to happen.

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-aaaand that's how it fits.  A person who, from her own account of the situation...comes from an oppresive or colonial culture...who has appropriated the cultural items and paraphernalia of another, victim culture....minimizing their actual contribution to that and referring instead to -her- experience of "being black".

That abcd question is still hanging in the wind.......

Yeah I think she actually ended up as head of the NAACP, and this article says she once sued a mostly-black school for discrimination!  Man. . . she's just too good to be true!

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/former-naacp...-find-job/

[The Grand Nudger]

Clearing air, theres a reason that the alt right and the "sjws" or "the far left" end up sounding so similar, getting the same shit wrong, and doing the same weird shit......while obviously hating each other and not picking up on the similarities.

They share an ideological pedigree. Neoconservativism and Trumpian facism, both, spring from the font of american liberalism.

It's just sad when people don't seem to realize who they are or where their talking points came from.

[bennyboy]

and what of the glow in the dark one ? [edit. . . he's talking about dildos here!]

Those represent space beings, so you are culturally appropriating this guy!

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Clearing air, theres a reason that the alt right and the "sjws" or "the far left" end up sounding so similar, getting the same shit wrong, and doing the same weird shit......while obviously hating each other and not picking up on the similarities.

They share an ideological pedigree.  Neoconservativism and Trumpian facism, both, spring from the font of american liberalism.

It's just sad when people don't seem to realize who they are or where their talking points came from.

Yeah, tbh I think ironically that almost all the nuts in the US are guilty of appropriation-- they are non-peacelovers stealing the words of the founding fathers and wearing them (sometimes literally) with no fucking understanding of the point of any of them.

Sad!

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What about people who are like 1/16 Cherokee and get a scholarship to college for that even though they know nothing about the culture. I would say that's something to be offended by.

I totally agree.  I'm 1/16 or maybe 1/32 Huron, and tbh I think I probably could have gotten assistance.  When I was young, I was on the street as a teen and eventually on welfare, and really could have used extra assistance.  However, even then, I would have stood in a hundred more soup lines before I claimed a culture that I didn't really belong to.

[Neo-Scholastic]

Now what is sometimes is objectionable is trivializing, disrespecting, or desacralizing symbols that are important to others. With respect to dream catchers, I went on made-in-china.com and saw that one could buy all kinds of dream catcher merchandise. Dream catcher ear rings for $0.80 each with a minimum 1000 piece order. Dream catcher temporary tattoos for $.10 each with a minimum 3,000 piece order. And my personal favorite for this discussion…a yoga matt with a dream catcher image printed on it ($9.89 each for a minimum 50 piece order)…a Chinese product for practicing Hindu rituals decorated with a Native American symbol! Do these trivialize the ceremonial aspect of dream catchers? Yes. (btw I don’t think uber-liberal Minimalist worries too much about the meaning his avatar had to ancient Egyptians.)

Hmn, trivializing a sacred object is a real problem, but stealing and exploiting sacred objects of other cultures...the very essence of cultural appropriation......isn't?  Something seems amiss.

You are trading on multiple connotations of the words stealing and exploiting. If Ghuongzhou Trading Company makes dream catcher earrings in no way does it impoverish any Native American. Even if Ghuongzhou took advantage of the opportunity to make a ton of money selling dream catcher trinkets it doesn't mean Native Americans cannot keep for themselves the meaning they assigned to dream catchers. Nor are Native Americans prevented from continuing to use dream catchers in traditional ways. They have lost nothing and no one can take anything away from them.

That is how symbols work in a free society. People get to decide for themselves what things mean to them and express themselves however they choose. It is only in totalitarian societies where people are told what they must think things signify and what types of expressions are permitted.

[Ravenshire]

That's just my point a dream catcher in my culture is not just art it's a sacred ceremonial object . And using it as a wall decoration is as awful and disrespectful to it's role in my culture as the above .

Maybe, before chastising us, you should convince the other member of your culture that selling "sacred ceremonial objects" to white tourist who don't understand the roll they play in your culture is a bad idea. For fuck's sake, you can buy those things everywhere from native as well as non-native sellers. How in the fuck can we appropriate what's essentially been given to us?

[Neo-Scholastic]

That's just my point a dream catcher in my culture is not just art it's a sacred ceremonial object . And using it as a wall decoration is as awful and disrespectful to it's role in my culture as the above .

If some teenage girl in Wichita puts a dream catcher over her night stand, how does that affect your use of dream catchers or the meaning that symbol has for you? Besides, as a non-believer you have already personally disavowed the spirituality that gave meaning to the symbol. You can't have it both ways.

[Thumpalumpacus]

Cultural appropriation does make things better sometimes though, led zeppelin took all the songs they stole to a better level than what they were.

Lol, that was not cultural appropriation, but artistic mayhem. Go listen to some Howlin' Wolf and tell us again how Zep did it "better".

Oooooh, the guitars were louder!

What they did smacks of cultural appropriation, but worse than that, they lied about authorship. No one would think Page / Plant et al had actually worked on a killing floor ... but they cashed the royalty payments all the same. That's theft of intellectual property.