4 Answers

  1. In my opinion, this is a very strange concept. If you can call it a concept at all.

    Every concept exists in order to better understand or explain something, to offer new views, solutions, and useful consequences. What does “cultural appropriation”serve? – only reasons to be offended by some people and forbid something to other people. Such things are properly called ideology.

    So I don't agree with this concept. It seems to me that it is built on a very strange foundation.

    If you have expressed a certain idea, then your authorship is valuable, but you do not have ownership rights to it. Moreover, if other people have accepted it and started using it in some way , then this is already their idea. An idea is never someone else's, it can be either peculiar to someone or not. It's the same with culture: it does not suffer from the fact that it is used in an undistorted (at least maliciously) form. No one suffers from the fact that Dostoevsky is put on Broadway, and people around the world eat Oriental food with chopsticks. On the contrary, it is even flattering to many. Why, then, should Indians or Asians suffer from the fact that a modern European will wear a poncho or kimono? I don't understand.

    It's easy to take offense, and you can do anything. But with the concept, it becomes possible to justify yourself and try to prohibit others from doing something. But if your whole struggle for rights is based on “forbidding someone something”, then your struggle and your ideas are worthless.

  2. For us, Russians, this concept seems illogical. But we must not forget that the historical circumstances here are somewhat different from those in North America. The tragedy of Africans forced into slavery in the Americas with colossal sacrifices has long-lasting consequences and is very painful. It is this situation that creates a precedent: when white Americans use African-American cultural practices (and only a few decades have passed since the abolition of official racial segregation in the United States), it seems cynical. When white foreigners, such as Russians, enter the United States, they are automatically convicted of “cultural appropriation” in similar cases, which is not entirely fair, and therefore not common in Russia. Obviously, there are peoples who have experienced the pressure of the Russians as a large nation in the past, but it seems to me that their cultural customs and folk art are not used much on a national scale.

  3. White rap is a cultural appropriation. Only Negroes have the right to rap, write appropriate tracks, listen to this music and jump to it. And also wear low-cut wide trousers, dreadlocks, pendants-rings-chains, etc. And do the head so tynts-tynts right-left. If it is worn and done by a white man , then he takes away their cultural heritage from Negroes. Moreover, it doesn't matter what kind of Negroes they are – the descendants of the Yoruba and Kausa peoples who really invented rap – or any other people with dark skin color. Theoretically, a rap-reading mulatto or a black Tutsi also commits cultural appropriation, but social rights activists usually do not pay attention to such trifles. The main thing is that nothing should be allowed to whites – especially men.

    In the same way, non – Jews are not allowed to dance freilechs (7-40), men are not allowed to make faces like women when telling a joke, and no one but the Irish is allowed to dress in green for St. John's Day. Patrick and drink whiskey, the Irish can not again wear dreadlocks and tattoo their yin-yang.

    In short, this is a clinical delusion that is simply part of the modern libertarian European-American discourse, whose main goal is to establish a fascist dictatorship “nothing is allowed to anyone, especially white cisgender men” throughout the civilized world.

  4. This phenomenon is much closer than it seems. The heavy concept of” cultural appropriation ” is hardly familiar and understandable to a Russian person, but no matter how much the debate about it is older than in the United States.

    The example is simple-borscht. Whose borscht? Is it even someone else's or not? Radical Ukrainians are accusing the Russians of stealing borscht. More precisely, they “colonized” it. They appropriated it and took it to the northern forests, supposedly declaring it their national dish. In the West, White colonialists steal the culture of blacks and Native Americans, in our country, Russian oppressors leave Ukrainians without borscht… (And now let's think about who owns vodka…)

    The very idea of fighting against appropriation is that the culture of the “oppressed” is not a toy or a commodity, you can not portray a black person by painting your face or dressing up as an Indian/African/Chinese / Arab/”a representative of the wrong group.” in one interpretation, the symbols and attributes of these groups should belong exclusively to them. In other countries, any depiction of peoples/races/anyone is caricatured and stereotyped, and therefore offensive. It may seem counterintuitive to some that the proponents of multiculturalism advocate radical purity and separation of these cultures.

    “By portraying other peoples, you insult and humiliate them,” if in theory. The practice is even simpler: “If you are suspected of portraying oppressed groups, especially caricatured ones, you will not be satisfied.” It is probably clear to what absurdity the struggle with face painting leads…

    In the Netherlands, they got rid of one of the Christmas symbols – the Black Pete. Assistant Sintaklaas (local Santa Claus) appears smeared with soot boy, through the chimneys bringing gifts to children. On St. Nicholas Day, a crowd of Dutch people with black faces marched through the cities in a festive parade, at least this was the case before – this year the festive tradition is promised to be completely eradicated.

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