I’ve never understood all the fuss over “cultural appropriation.” Take, for example, white kids who wear dreadlocks: they are probably some of the lesser racist individuals around, but your average SJW would go nuts about this. The only people who would probably get more outraged about a white person with dreadlocks are the KKK. And when your politics begins to resemble those of racist, white supremacist organizations, you might need to rethink your politics.
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Good point. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery
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Here’s how it works, Clarissa:
If you’re one of the oppressed people imitating your conquerors, you’re simply “assimilating,” which can be be a good thing — or a sad sign of abetting in destroying your culture, depending on who’s passing judgment.
If you’re one of the conqueror people imitating the oppressed, you’re simply a racist asshole.
Got it?
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Or professional hairstylists. I’d think they would be very outraged at the aesthetic abomination of white guys with dreds.
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If they ever worked with Jewish hair, they’d love this idea.
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A few black people can carry off dreads and make them not hideous… I don’t think any white people can.
There’s also the Polish plait (original white dreadlocks) but they are purely disgusting.
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What I have on my head right now, is beginning to resemble dreads. Once – just once! – I was too lazy to comb it out after washing and drown it in coconut oil this month, and it’s immediately unmanageable.
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Native American ceremonial headdresses can be an issue, because they mean certain important things to the individuals who wear them and their tribes. But those issues tend to be better taken into the hands of people who actually have a clue as to what those things mean, rather than some random person who automatically thinks of cultural appropriation. However, the chances that person was actually wearing anything approaching a ceremonial headdress is very, very small. The costume may have been in relatively poor taste, but actual cultural appropriation is far more rare than SJWs seem to think.
On an unrelated note, did you know that public libraries can do ILLs as well as university libraries? It costs a bit more than a regular hold, but if you’re like me and still in the process of clearing a ban from your university account because you forgot to return a book, it’s a lifesaver.
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I love ILLs. They are very helpful in our case when the library collection we have is very impoverished.
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I was surprised that I couldn’t even buy a new copy. When I think of a “classic,” I think of a book that is never out of print, that you can maybe even find on Project Gutenberg for free. And they do have it, in the original Swedish. Which is all fine and dandy except for the fact that I don’t know Swedish. Apparently the English version isn’t considered enough of a “classic” to remain in print, and the closest copies were at least two hours away.
I could also complain about how the book is actually the fourth in a series–I read somewhere the author wrote the whole thing as a giant frame story–and no other books in that series were ever translated out of Swedish. I don’t even know if the book is any good, but that just makes me sad.
I read an article a few months ago that intelligently discussed this issue. Some SJW called cultural appropriation when a designer was inspired by some Japanese flower art they saw and used them in the design of shirts and dresses. The author of the article basically said, “WTF, you cannot draw inspiration from anything or anyone outside your own culture? How boring would that life be?”
There is probably a line somewhere that crosses into cultural appropriation, but I think it’s fairly far from wearing a costume that vaguely resembles a native American dress for multicultural week.
The noise surrounding “Cultural appropriation” is just another example of what joyless scolds many on the left (my natural social home) have become.
The new Mrs. Grundy* is an intersecional feminist. Who wants to interact with these people? I’d rather try teaching rattlesnakes to jump rope.
*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mrs_Grundy
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Here’s a link http://disneyforprincesses.tumblr.com/post/70375293322/hey-there-this-may-be-a-very-ignorant-question
Depending on whether the educatrice also had Métis ancestry, the very concerned questioner might have been telling her that she was in danger of appropriating her own culture.
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This is the real unspoken problem:
“Soon posadas become a fad and are popular until they are sold as party items in your local Party City. You have just taken a personal tradition of my culture and reduced to a mere ‘party’, striping away its original meaning. That is cultural appropriation.”
She wants to trademark “culture” and have exclusive rights to sell it. It’s all about selling shit.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
Clarissa's Blog 
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