Cultural Appropriation

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Cultural Appropriation

twodot: Aug 7, 2005; You are objectively correct that this person is dumb and has said dumb things

Mandy Thompson posted:

One problem with wearing dreadslocks is that for white people, they are being rebellious, so lots of white people wearing them gets it labeled as rebellious and "unprofessional" and honestly they look terrible on white people so when actual black women wear them because that is how their hair is, they get pointed to a policy that ethnic styles are unprofessional

Isn't the problem here that anyone thinks that people's hair styles matters at all?

# ¿ Mar 24, 2015 21:37

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# ¿ May 9, 2024 07:28

twodot: Aug 7, 2005; You are objectively correct that this person is dumb and has said dumb things

Mandy Thompson posted:

Whether its fair or not people do judge you by the way you dress and wear your hair.

Yes, but to the extent the problem exists, the problem is that people think dreadlocks are unprofessional, not that sometimes white people have dreadlocks and that somehow forces people to judge dreadlocks as unprofessional.

# ¿ Mar 24, 2015 21:49

twodot: Aug 7, 2005; You are objectively correct that this person is dumb and has said dumb things

Space Gopher posted:

Sure there is. Go ahead and try to put your own spin on Star Wars, Mickey Mouse, or the Coca-Cola logo out there, for your own profit. See how far you get before the lawyers slap you down.

http://www.teefury.com/measley-mouse
Let me know when the lawyers show up.

# ¿ Mar 25, 2015 16:56

twodot: Aug 7, 2005; You are objectively correct that this person is dumb and has said dumb things

paranoid randroid posted:

I do not believe that a singular, overarching "culture of humanity" is possible or even desirable.

I don't understand how you define culture such that there isn't by definition a culture of humanity. All cultures can be arbitrarily subdivided.

# ¿ Mar 25, 2015 19:52

twodot: Aug 7, 2005; You are objectively correct that this person is dumb and has said dumb things

Obdicut posted:

So anyway, why is 'racism' a useful term but 'cultural appropriation' uselessly vague?

The reason we classify things (x is racist, y isn't, x is cultural appropriation, y isn't) is that we want to treat things in the category one way and things not in the category another. Racist is useful because it denotes a category of things we want to stop/fix. I don't understand what people want us to do with things in the category "cultural appropriation". Like "People who wear clothes of cultures other than their own are appropriating culture" looks like a logically sound statement, but I don't understand why I should care.

# ¿ Mar 30, 2015 23:02

twodot: Aug 7, 2005; You are objectively correct that this person is dumb and has said dumb things

CarrKnight posted:

Agreed.

I don't get this. Practices have an origin, and some people performing a practice might be more or less similar to that origin. I agree that being close to the origin isn't intrinsically good, but it is a thing.

Unrelated, but PF Chang's isn't even American Chinese, they have pad thai, spring rolls, and sushi.

# ¿ Apr 17, 2015 17:28

twodot: Aug 7, 2005; You are objectively correct that this person is dumb and has said dumb things

Ormi posted:

Maybe just stop and give your opponent the benefit of the doubt instead of sticking them with the stupidest thing you can find from a completely anonymous source. It's already intellectually dishonest, but there's a documented history of people making fake tumblr and Twitter accounts to post things just like that and manufacture outrage. That account in particular was one of them IIRC, that's why it was censored in the screencap when redistributed.

If this is what's happening, it seems pretty straightforward to say "Oh yeah, those guys are idiots, here's how to distinguish us from them." The problem is the natural understanding of cultural appropriations is that it would include things like eating sushi, and it seems like a typical response is "No one actually cares about that." It seems reasonable to only talk about things that people care about, but it's also basically a request to go on an idiot hunt, and if all you have to do is locate an idiot to make your point, that's a pretty low bar. If we're going to talk about things that not-idiots care about we need a mechanism to distinguish them.

# ¿ Apr 24, 2015 21:17

twodot: Aug 7, 2005; You are objectively correct that this person is dumb and has said dumb things

Obdicut posted:

Again, focusing on the trivial aspects of cultural appropriation--like wearing a sari or not--doesn't erase the larger issues of cultural appropriation, just like focusing on trivial aspects of sexism doesn't erase the larger problems of sexism.

I think this is interesting. I'm not aware of sexism having trivial aspects. It certainly has minor aspects, like someone who thinks mothers are better for raising children than fathers is engaging in sexism in a relatively minor way, but it's not trivial, it's still bad. Wearing a sari is a trivial issue, I'm never going to look at someone wearing a sari and care whatsoever about it.

So does sexism have trivial aspects whatsoever? And if it doesn't, does that tell something about the utility of cultural appropriation as a term?

# ¿ Apr 27, 2015 19:02

twodot: Aug 7, 2005; You are objectively correct that this person is dumb and has said dumb things

Obdicut posted:

And sure, sexism has trivial issues, like the example of opening doors.

I don't see this as trivial, if someone is opening doors for women on the basis that they believe women are too weak to open their own doors, that person is an idiot and needs an education. I suppose someone might open doors for women just because it is traditional, but that act doesn't seem sexist, the tradition might have sexist origins, but again those origins aren't trivial.

quote:

And yet again i'm wondering what the hell anyone means by 'useful'.

I already engaged with you on this and you apparently didn't like it. We use words because communicating concepts helps us achieve goals. There are a variety of goals that words can help with, but there is no scenario where you say "Foo is cultural appropriation" and I care. "Foo is sexist" ok, "foo" is bad that's useful. "Foo tastes like pizza" ok, "foo" is delicious that's useful.

The whole reason for this is, as you have pointed out, cultural appropriation encompasses both trivial and non-trivial acts, for me to care about something that is cultural appropriation, you have to say "Foo is cultural appropriation and is bad in a non-trivial way", and if that's the case, why is that sentence better than "Foo is bad in a non-trivial way"?

# ¿ Apr 27, 2015 19:27

twodot: Aug 7, 2005; You are objectively correct that this person is dumb and has said dumb things

Obdicut posted:

The act is sexist: It treats women differently than men. It is trivial. That the origins aren't trivial really doesn't matter.

Treating women differently than men is clearly not sufficient for something to be sexist, there's a variety of contexts where different treatment is completely appropriate. If sexism did include anytime women were treated differently than men, then it would include trivial instances, which would degrade the usefulness of the word.

quote:

Oh, okay. To you it's not useful. To me it is. So... what's your problem?

If that's the case, I think you are an ineffective communicator, and everyone would be better off, yourself included, if your communication improved.

# ¿ Apr 27, 2015 19:46

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# ¿ May 9, 2024 07:28

twodot: Aug 7, 2005; You are objectively correct that this person is dumb and has said dumb things

Obdicut posted:

There's nothing appropriate about opening doors for women, though.

Ok, so you agree that there is some unnamed factor that makes it inappropriate, can you tell me what that is? Because I'm pretty certain any factor that makes something inappropriate is non-trivial.

I'll try to help you out here. Gender discrimination has trivial instances, a person who gender discriminates when selecting romantic partners for instance. Gender discrimination is sometimes bad, and our society is aware of this to the point that our court system has built a set of analyses for determining when both the government and people are allowed to gender discriminate. Without that framework (or a similar one) the concept of gender discrimination is useless. "Phil is engaging in gender discrimination" Ok. "Phil is violating the Civil Rights Act" That's bad. It's ok to have a category that contains trivial instances, but there needs to be a mechanism to distinguish the trivial from non-trivial.

It's turns out you have proposed such a mechanism:

Obdicut posted:

Don't be an rear end in a top hat, have respect for stuff that's important to other people.

The problem is that this is universally applicable. If we adopt this standard, why would we ever care if something is cultural appropriation or not when applying it? If it fails this standard, it's bad. There's no need to investigate who has the rights to which cultures, because even if they did have the rights (that is, it's not appropriation), it is still bad.

# ¿ Apr 27, 2015 20:41

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Cultural Appropriation