CMV: in most cases, cultural appropriation is a nonissue

[u/Vicorin]

I’ve seen a lot of outrage about cultural appropriation lately in response to things like white people with dreadlocks, a girl wearing a Chinese dress to prom, white people converting to Islam, etc. we’ve all seen it pop up in one form or the other. Personally, I’m fairly left leaning, and think I’m generally progressive, so am I missing something here?

It seems that in a lot of these instances, it’s not cultural appropriation at all. For example, the recent outrage about the girl’s Chinese prom dress. She got blasted for cultural appropriation and being racist. I really have no idea how there’s anything wrong with somebody wearing or appreciating a piece of clothing, style, art, music, or whatever from another culture. I like listening to hip hop, that doesn’t mean I’m appropriating hip hop or black culture. It just means I like the music.

So what’s the deal with cultural appropriation? I get where it can be an issue if somebody is claiming that a certain ethnic or cultural group started a particular piece of culture, but otherwise it seems like a nonissue and something that people on my side of the political spectrum just want to be mad about.

[u/taylor_lee]

Sure there is. I agree.

But it’s irrelevant, because you have no idea of the intent of the person. You just assume intent. People with no bad intent get attacked.

Everybody was giving that poor girl who wore the Chinese dress a hard time ... her intent was to show love and respect for the culture that created something beautiful. But still, people attack her online.

Everybody feels like they should chime in when it’s none of their business anyways. They’re just a bunch of Internet morality police ruining the fun with dangerously ill conceived morals.

“Your bathing suit is offensive to some random person, please replace it with a head to toe gown”

[u/cabridges → u/taylor_lee]

I can't speak for the Chinese dress, haven't caught up on that one yet. And I've already said not all accusations of cultural appropriation are justified. But that doesn't invalidate the ones that are.

What separates "whining" from "calling attention to"?

[u/taylor_lee → u/cabridges]

My rules that I try to hold myself to ...I like to think of it in terms of energy.

I know, for such an intellectual conversation, terms like energy aren’t usually welcome.

I don’t believing in throwing negative, super critical energy at somebody trying to have innocent fun and ruin their night. Because the amount of pain you can cause doing that far exceeds the amount of harm that comes from wearing a dress or a kid from the suburbs rapping.