I saw a beautiful picture of a girl with short curly hair and many arguements blew up in regards to why is this white girl wearing an afro? She aint black! (she looked hispanic tbh) and stuff like that confuses me. Why is it so important to not share things? Why be seperated?
Do you really wish to know how deep this rabbit hole goes? Alright. Fine.
The people who cry out cultural appropriation base their identity around what is distinctly physical. They claim to speak on behalf of entire groups of people based on race or sex. Their world view isn't based on "that's jerry and shauna," it's based on "that's a white man and a black woman." It's collectivist and holds its origins from some of the more extreme wings of the old left, which crept into movements like feminism in the 70's & 80's and fully manifested itself from the 90's onwards. It's why everything is intersectional now too, and why there's a race to victimhood: The greater the victim status, the greater the level of power one has in the identity game. Because now, your individual value as a human being doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if you landed a probe on a comet, if you wear the wrong clothes as a white male? You're a bad person.
If black people do a thing, and white people want to do that thing too, that's white people trying to steal black culture: Not an individual holding a fascination with something. Samantha buys a kimono because she has a fascination with Japanese culture? Here, just put on these PC glasses: Now it's white women stealing Japanese iconography and making it their own! Cultural imperialism! Samantha is a terrible person now!
The entire cultural appropriation movement is built on collectivist thinking trumping individual value. You, as the individual, do not matter. Your life does not matter. The circumstances under which you acquired the fascination doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is which social class you belong to. Which, for the cultural appropriation tag, is based on your race and sex. You're dehumanized to your skin tone and gender, the fact that you are more than the sum of those parts is irrelevant.
Perhaps the worst crime is they don't want to allow culture to evolve. They want to ziplock bag n' freeze every culture on Earth the way it is, and not allow it to progress and become better through interactions. Cultures are as rich and diverse as they are
because people intermixed ideas and practices throughout the centuries. They don't want to allow white people to adopt motifs from black culture, because that might mean white and black culture in the United States will start to mix together and, after a certain point, become indistinguishable from one another.
You know, that very thing necessary to tear down the racial walls and improve and promote understanding? To heal the grievous wounds that still fester the US on a social level?
Yeah. They want to stop that, because they want to preserve black culture at any cost. Even to the detriment of everyone else.
