US Politics on Sidechat | I really hate how “cultural appropriation” is treated like a bad thing no matter the context. It can be neutral or bad. Thinking that people should only be a part of the culture they were born in is weird and antithetical to a multicultural society.

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US Politics 7w

I really hate how “cultural appropriation” is treated like a bad thing no matter the context. It can be neutral or bad. Thinking that people should only be a part of the culture they were born in is weird and antithetical to a multicultural society.

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Anonymous 7w

By definition cultural appropriation causes harm because it is done without permission, understanding, or respect

Anonymous 7w

How can you simultaneously believe that the appropriation of another's culture can only be neutral or bad and support multiculturalism?

Anonymous 7w

Like cultural appropriation is very much dependent on the knowledge, proximity, and respect of the culture. If someone is living in Vietnam, can make the food correctly, and has respect for Vietnamese culture then it doesn’t matter where they were from or what their ethnicity is.

Anonymous 7w

Like we are Americans. Our culture is inherently a product of the mixing of African American, Native American, and Asian cultures with European ones. We aren’t just those ethnicities transplanted across the ocean, we learned and adopted from each other. Like obviously you shouldn’t be putting on sacred headdresses from native tribes but like barbecue was invented by native Americans and innovated by Africans, what’s more American than that?

Anonymous

#1 7w

Wouldn't multiculturalism by itself posit that the intermingling of cultures is good?

Anonymous

#1 7w

I mean morally neutral or bad. Multiculturalism to me means that I think it’s beneficial to live in a society with people from different cultures and ethnic groups living together, which seems pretty difficult to dispute because the only monocultural societies that I know have been isolationist dictatorships that disallow all forms of nonconformity. Individual acts of cultural appropriation could be morally good if they normalize intercultural knowledge or exchange.

Anonymous

OP 7w

I'd opine that living together successfully as a human population group always requires some level of shared belief systems that you could call culture.

Anonymous

OP 7w

Like if a cultural anthropologist went to different countries to study a particular phenomenon or if an American museum owner set up a gallery of Korean American art to further people’s knowledge of the Korean American community.

Anonymous

#2 7w

Being an American and avoiding cultural appropriation is so difficult. It would require checking and rechecking government records of your ancestry and carefully researching every food and every clothing you find to the point where people would just assume you’re racist. Everyone lives in a multicultural society so it feels wrong to see people conflate intercultural exchange with racism.

Anonymous

#1 7w

Yeah, but culture is less of a single thing that you can have and more like a mosaic of things and to think that different cultures are so incompatible that they can never live together is most likely to be false. People as far as Oceania and Spain have been in some form of contact for the past 1400 years. Most modern day countries are the combination of much smaller and much older countries.

Anonymous

#3 7w

1. What definition? 2. Does permission, understanding, or respect not make it cultural appropriation? Also who gives permission?

Anonymous

OP 7w

Via Encyclopedia Britannica: “Cultural appropriation takes place when members of a majority group adopt cultural elements of a minority group in an exploitative, disrespectful, or stereotypical way.” I think you may be mixing up cultural diffusion and cultural appropriation. Cultural diffusion isn’t always bad, but cultural appropriation is