Cultural appropriation: manufactured outrage or actual issue?

Politics and religion
21

I think this is quite a bit different.

In many of those cases, you are taking material wealth from the area, often through use of force against the population there.

This is clearly different than someone observing your practices, and mimicking them, which essentially doesn’t affect you at all.

Consider a recent example of the claimed cultural appropriation, where a singer was accused of it for wearing a particular dress.

That dress was produced by someone, and sold to the actress. Those are the only two people involved in that transaction. Some other asian person does not have some sort of ownership in that dress, capable of objecting their opinion of the sale into the transaction.

In other cases, we aren’t even talking about material goods are all. Some of these claims are talking about “appropriating” music. The idea that people cannot be influenced by other musicians, is absurd on its face… Because that’s how all music is formed.

All of these claims are inconsistent in their underlying rationale, ultimately just picking isolated cases of behavior and determining it’s bad in order to attack someone that they wanted too attack anyway, while obviously not criticizing the behavior in a general sense because doing so would essentially put a halt to normal human interactions.

If something is actually exploiting someone, then that exploitation can be criticized on its own, and can be criticized universally.

But simply taking an element from a different culture is not exploitation.

Imagine some chef took an ethnic dish from another culture, and started serving it, and got a ton of money for doing so. Is that somehow exploitative of the original culture? No, not at all. It wouldn’t hurt them in the least.

Likewise, if a fashion designer took some traditional dress and manufactured and sold it, that doesn’t harm the culture the dress type originally showed up in. Indeed, it may benefit it’s members by acclimating different societies to their practices, and reduce xenophobia encountered in the future.

22

I mean again, it comes down to specifics. Like i get a bit chuffed when I read someone whining about Taco trucks as if this is the first time Mexican food was invented because from the California based point of view this is the first time (i guess?) they’ve ever seen a taco, and therefore white people making tacos is somehow cultural appropriation? Sure, that’s going too far. (Especially when TexMex has been in Texas for at least 50-100 years, and is generally a blend of several cultural backgrounds, not specific to any one cultural group).

OTOH, the founder of Taco Bell really did just go to the shop next to his, learn what a taco was from a Mexican family, then go on to found a massive franchise. How much of that process is cultural appropriation? According to the interview they had of the original shop’s descendants, nobody took it hard and wished him well - probably because they could no more claim ownership of “Mexican” food than anyone else (so the authors of that article, looking to pin the tail on the Taco Bell donkey so to speak, couldn’t really do so).

Again it all comes down to the specific context and process of acquisition.

23

But like you say, it’s applied by idiots all the time, against ridiculous things, like selling food… As though only Mexican people should be allowed to sell Mexican food.

Such ideas are not only superficially idiotic, they get more idiotic when you delve deeper. Mexican food is not a monolithic institution… It has all kinds of regional differences. Can a Mexican from one region sell food usually associated with a different region? Or are they “appropriating” it? Obviously that’s nonsense.

Anyone who wants to can make a taco… Or wear any clothes they want… Or sing any kind of music they want. There is no one vested with the authority to determine otherwise. There’s no culture king who gets to decide who gets to do what in these cases, and the idiots who are complaining about it are just trying to seize undeserved power for themselves, and anoint themselves that King.

24

Well arguably Get Out, the film, is entirely about cultural appropriation, in that case literally black bodies by white people. Since i have 0 interest or overlap with pop culture today it’s not something i can comment on even slightly intelligently, but being aware of it isn’t the end of the world either, just that many people see this today in various places that, as it seems, i don’t interact with or have knowledge about at all. So i have to accept that it might well be happening in places and ways that i literally have no knowledge about.

25

Now imagine all the white chefs doing this because they have the economic opportunities and social advantages that allows them to do so while black chefs do not. It’s a symptom of systemic racism and you’re reducing it in scale in order to dismiss it.

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom was a pretty good exploration of this happening in the history of recorded popular music. (Too stagey a film for my tastes but the ideas being explored were fascinating.)

26

That’s not the fault of the chefs cooking. They are doing nothing wrong.

Your angst is misplaced. If you want to complain, then complain about the bankers racist practices giving loans.

Just like if you had a rich Black person who opened a restaurant, using their wealth as an advantage over a poor Black person.

The problem is the banker refusing a loan to a deserving person, not a guy who recognizes that soul food is delicious, and enjoys making it.

27

Yea, a lot of these arguments are rectifying or addressing appropriation that happened in the past - it’s just for modern internet people there is no past, only present (look at how the Cool Song of the Day, ELO’s Mr. Blue Sky, suddenly came out of nowhere to become popular again). Rolling Stone absolutely stole some “good old boy” song licks from black artists. But the thing is everybody always knew this, it isn’t discovering something new. What’s new today is the sudden, social media outrage upon a new generations’ rediscovery of past injustices.

28

But in this case… Every musician ever (including the black musicians) stole licks from some other musician.

29

It was pretty egregious though, as were several artists’ borrowings of underground music at that period. To the point where if they had done it to a top 50 artist today they would have certainly been sued, and certainly have lost as well.

But what the kids don’t see is that the 1960s just weren’t the 2020s, and sifting through the productions of out of the way artists was itself a kind of professionalism and love of craft that isn’t the same as Googling “Black Music in Mississippi” and instantly discovering 50 artists you’ve never heard of before.

30

If someone actually stole whole songs and stuff, then that’s intellectual property theft, and that’s wrong because it can be clearly defined.

But if it was really just chunks of songs… Then it’s real hard to nail down, because musicians can just subconsciously copy music from each other when they hear it.

31

I am, I can, and I do! But we can “complain” about more than one thing. We can recognize these problems and attempt to address them going forward.

Sometimes, in certain contexts, you’re right that the idea of cultural appropriation is bullshit. But that’s not always the case. I think it’s best applied in a broad sense looking back on history rather than in individual instances like dresses or movies or whatever.

There was some debate about Paul Simon for Graceland or Vampire Weekend but I love those artists and feel like they were more ambassadors spreading the word about African music styles rather than profiting from them unfairly.

32

Absolutely. But in this example, complaining about the chef who is “appropriating” the cuisine is wrong. He is literally not doing anything wrong. Indeed, what he’s doing is GOOD. It’s recognizing something of worth from a different culture. This is a good thing that we should encourage.

Imagine he didn’t do that, and never sold that food… That’s not going to help some Black person get a loan. It’s not going to benefit anyone. The world will simply be worse, and less rich.

But if that person opens a restaurant and sells that food to more people, then that cuisine will become more mainstream, and that will actually make it easier for sometime from that original culture to open their own restaurant in the future.

There often seems to be some wrongheaded idea that complaining about cultural appropriation could somehow result in just replacing a successful white person with a successful person of color… But that’s not something that would actually happen, in any sensible fashion.

33

Again, you’re looking at this in a vacuum and ignoring context. No chef does this thinking “I really like this cuisine and want to share it with the world, plus this is going to really raise the profile of this historically-marginalized group.” They do it because they can utilize something the marginalized group doesn’t have access to, whether that’s something tangible like a bank loan or intangible like name recognition, to make a buck. It’s literally exploiting something you don’t have any connection to so you can make money.

The moral action would be for a chef to help the originators of the cuisine make their stuff at scale successfully. That’s how one can show appreciation without appropriation. If he does what you’ve suggested, he is perpetuating a historical system of exploitation. If he does nothing, the status quo (which is still bad) persists.

I used to think cries of cultural appropriation were nonsense for the same reasons you do - sharing our cultures seems like a good thing! Why would anyone be against that? But it’s impossible to extract cultural identity from centuries of oppression, exploitation, and white supremacy. And nearly every time someone talks about “the good kind” of cultural appropriation, it ends up being the same kind of exploitation, just dressed up a little nicer with better intent or whatever.

34

They’re both a thing, an both inconsistently applied. So is economic theory. So is political science. Maybe social relations are complicated and not ruled by logic, but can still be studied by the scientific principle of observing and reporting.
Or you can come up with the equivalent to the perfectly informed and completely rational agent to model human behavior to axiomatic logic. Reality is still not going to care. And, ultimately, since materialism isn’t real, saying racism isn’t structural is the same as saying people are just born bad. And, again, reality is an issue, as the percentage fluctuates.
And, no, it isn’t the same as saying you can’t copy, incorporate, adapt, etc.

35

Dude, do you realize how insane you sound?

No chef opening a taco truck is doing it because he’s likes cooking food… Instead he’s doing it because he wants to exploit other people?

Really dude? Do you have any idea how hard it is to run any kind of food service? That suggestion of motivation is bonkers, man.

That’s absurd. Truly, you are entirely ridiculous here. The person is a chef, not a venture capitalist.

Indeed, if they acted like a venture capitalist, you would certainly complain even more about their exploitation of the person they were staking.

36

No, only one is a thing.

With actual intellectual property, you are talking about something that someone created. A singular person owns that property. Indeed, in cases where something is already publicly disclosed, you explicitly CAN’T claim ownership of it. You can’t patent stuff that lots of people already know about.

No one owns cuisines, or cultural fashion styles, or broad musical genres.

Those things are all owned by society as a whole… And not just one select portion of human society.

37

I agree that you can’t point to individuals and say they’re doing something wrong in appropriating a culture. But taken in a broad context, it’s not difficult to see historic unfairness and exploitation.

Capitalism seems to allow for all kinds of plausible deniability where no individual can be held accountable or needs to feel individually responsible. But there’s still a problem that we should work on.

In the context of representation in film, I agree with you that there’s nothing wrong with white filmmakers telling white stories with casts of white actors. But I want more opportunities for people of color to make films with black casts. So I think that’s similar to your point that it isn’t helpful or necessary to blame people who have these advantages but we should take steps to make those opportunities available to all races, genders, etc.

38

You’re being really word-picky there. Did you really read what I wrote and understood “chefs only work to exploit people”? (I mean all capitalists do lol but not what I’m talking about). People open businesses because they want to make money. Making money off of someone else’s culture, in a system that makes it harder or impossible for someone from that culture to make the same money in the same way, is exploitative.

Haha, are you actually this incapable of separating the morality of an action from its potential for monetary gain? I didn’t say anything about the chef being a venture capitalist. I said the moral path is to help someone else. You know, the thing you do to other humans when you don’t view every interaction as transactional in nature? You’re the one who inserted the idea that they’d be doing so with an ownership stake or something. Which, yeah, would also be bad.

39

I’m not sure if you know anyone who’s owned a restaurant, but there are a LOT of easier ways to make money. The people i know who owned restaurants, did so because they actually liked making food, and they were good at it. They made enough money to survive, but they didn’t go into it with the singular goal of, “I’m going to start this small restaurant to get rich”. Because that would be a terrible plan, since most restaurants fail. 60% fail in the first year, 80% in the first 5 years.

No, it’s not, because it’s not taking anything away from anyone. And again, that other imagined person… Doesn’t own their culture.

Being asian doesn’t somehow give you ownership of asian food.

Let’s just imagine that your ideas were implemented.

In that world, what kind of restaurant can the chef in question open? Do you have a list of foods that are “suitably white” that he’s allowed to cook?

41

Actually, I’d love to see his last two questions answered.