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Let Them Be Offended: Cultural Appropriation

thisissavvy.substack.com|Savannah Edwards

By: Savannah Edwards

Published: Oct 5, 2022

Let’s get this out of the way: Culture doesn’t come from skin color. Culture is a way of life, it comes from your environment. Just because two people have the same skin color doesn’t mean they come from the same place. A black person in a low income neighborhood of a major city has very little in common with a black person who was born and raised in an upper-middle class suburb. My neighbor and I are both black but we have different cultures. I was born and raised in the Carolinas and he was born and raised here in New Orleans. We’re not the same people. We don’t share the same customs or traditions, and we speak two different versions of Southern American English. According to the New York Times, eating black-eyed-peas on New Years is a black American ritual, but I’ve never heard of that. I can’t remember the last time I ate black-eyed-peas on purpose.

Culture is not stagnant. Culture moves and changes and grows over time. Meanings and rituals change as people and time changes. Cultures blend with other cultures to create new ones. Italian-American culture is exactly what the name suggests, a blend of Italian and American cultures with its own foods and customs and Italian dialect. French Louisiana was owned by both the French and Spanish, but much of the Spanish influence is gone and what’s survived is very much French, along with influences from Italian, Irish, and Haitian immigrants and African slaves.

Culture never stays put, it’s as mobile as people, so I’m not sure why young people today seem to think they can “gate keep” that which is easily accessible to everyone. We live in a multicultural society that has a heavy influence on the world and social media acts as a delivery system. It’s no wonder parts of China and Korea have been heavily influenced by what black Americans are doing in the states: music, fashion, hair, etc. This includes language. The never ending argument on TikTok is the use of AAVE (African American Vernacular English) by white creators. AAVE, or Ebonics as we called it growing up, isn’t a language. There are no rules and there isn’t a proper or right way to speak it. It’s a dialect closely related to the southern dialect that is mostly used by southern black Americans in urban settings and black Canadians. I don’t use AAVE. Why? Because language comes from hearing, and no one in my immediate family who would have had an influence on my language development uses AAVE, so my vernacular is Carolina southern.

This Dr. Phil segment on cultural appropriation highlights the braids debate, another hot button social media issue. Is it cultural appropriation for white women to wear braids? Is it offensive to black people for white people to wear braids? Let me be very clear: Black American women didn’t invent box braids.

Box braids is one of many African Hair-braiding styles, keyword being: African. In certain places in Africa, hair weaving has cultural significance, but in the United States it does not. It’s just a hairstyle; it’s just fashion. It being a protective hairstyle doesn’t make it culturally significant for black Americans because braids in general, regardless of your skin color, is a protective hairstyle. African Hair Braiding didn’t become mainstream in the United States until the 90s, and it has been shared with women all over the world by African women. Russia has its own market for African Hair Braiding (search: afrokosiki orАфрокосы). Box braids went out of style in the early 2000s and you would get made fun of for getting anything thicker than micros. Now box braids are back in style and young black women are under the impression this hairstyle belongs to us. Would this be considered cultural appropriation.

Should white people get their hair braided? That’s between you and your hairdresser. If you go to Africa and want your hair braided, they won’t deny you service because you’re white. They will take your money just like anyone else except they’ll charge you less and give you better results. Simply getting your hair done isn’t cultural appropriation.

These claims of appropriation come from people who don’t understand how culture works or haven’t experienced or allowed themselves to experience a culture different than their own. There are three concepts people get confused: appropriation, appreciation, and acculturation.

Appropriation:

Simply put, cultural appropriation “takes place when members of a majority group adopt cultural elements of a minority group in an exploitative, disrespectful, or stereotypical way.” Drunk frat boys wearing sombreros on Cinco de Mayo or Black Americans wearing dashikis and claiming it as their own culture could be considered cultural appropriation, but a young woman wearing a Chinese dress she found at a thrift store to prom is not. Wearing a hairstyle because you like the way it looks on your is not appropriation.

Appreciation:

This is self-explanatory. Appreciating or participating in another culture isn’t a bad thing. If you go to markets in other countries some people might offer to dress you in their traditional clothes or style your hair. Buying art and other cultural items and displaying in their home because you find them beautiful is appreciation. I have two dreamcatchers. One was a gift from my aunt who bought it when she was on a business trip several years ago and the second is one I bought at Marie Leveau’s on Bourbon Street. This store sells all kinds of things related to catholicism, voodoo, Santeria, and Native American culture. Appreciating the beauty and history of another culture is normal. Emotionally connecting with a culture different than your own is normal.

Acculturation:

Acculturation is when you acquire or adopt a second, usually more dominant culture, due to a shift or change in your environment. When you get married, whether you and your spouse are of the same race or not, you will experience acculturation because you’re having to adapt to a new culture. Ask any immigrant what it’s like to adapt to American culture while holding onto pieces of their “birth” culture. Moving to New Orleans from Charlotte, I’ve had to adopt a new culture. Everyone will experience this at least once: an eighteen-year-old going to college, moving to a new city, getting married, converting to a new religion, starting a new job, etc.

If your personal culture doesn’t shift, change, or do a complete 180 at some point in your life then you’re not growing.

Black women have, and some still do, face discrimination due to their natural hair, but should this be a reason to stop others from wearing these hairstyles? No. What does Susie Q getting her hair braided by her best friend or Little Lauren in the Bahamas getting her hair cornrowed by a local have to do with Miss Pam trying to get a job? How do these things relate to one another? It would seem to me the best way to move forward is to bring these hairstyles into the mainstream and make them normal, but some people want a reason to remain a victim. As black women, we’re told from the time we’re very little that our hair is our crown so it makes sense that some people want to keep a victim mentality on their shoulders. Unless you’re doing something wrong, let people be offended. Their emotions, triggers, and feelings are not your responsibility. Don’t let someone else’s ignorance stop you from experiencing the world and all it has to offer.

Stop worrying about what society’s most unmoored think of you.

Source: thisissavvy.substack.com

#Savannah Edwards #culture #acculturation #cultural appropriation #cultural appreciation #cultural traditions #box braids #perpetually offended #perpetually outraged #perpetual victim #victimhood culture #victimhood #woke #wokeism #woke activism #cult of woke #wokeness as religion #religion is a mental illness

religion-is-a-mental-illness

Anonymous asked:

What is your opinion on transracial people?

From what I've read, it's hard to tell what they're actually doing, so this is probably going to resemble more of a stream of thought than any solid conclusions.

There seems to be two types.

Firstly, there's people who just simply lie. Skin tone is no indication of anything; people with strong European ancestry vary from very pale to quite tanned, while those with strong African ancestry vary from very dark to, again, a more tanned complexion. There's similar variability across other regions like South America and Asia.

Something of a cultural trope reflective of the pre- and nascent-Civil Rights Era is the black parents who "lucked out" and had a "white passing" child, who has the benefit of attending the "white" school, and the drama then spins off from there.

More recently, there's been a number of people passing themselves off as black or native American. Rachel Dolezal, for example.

It's hard not to notice that they wouldn't do this if not for access to some tangible benefit, one might even say "privilege." Henry Rogers (aka Ibram X. Kendi) hilariously blew up his entire ~~career~~ hustle with one tweet over this same topic.

It's a reflection of opportunity, taken advantage of by opportunists, in order to obtain prestige, notability, influence, or gain access to benefits not normally afforded to them. The question one might well ask is why these separate benefits exist in the first place, which might give someone reason to seek access to them.

Then there's the people who "Identify" out of one category into another. We should note, of course, that the social constructivists don't acknowledge race categories themselves as a social construct, as humans are all one species, just different tones and shades of brown.

I don't really understand whether these people are asserting a dysphoric or dysmorphic phenomenon in effect here, or something more like cultural affinity.

At face value, it seems like they're saying that the way I feel about myself, the way I experience life and the world doesn't correspond to the way anyone with my skin color feels about themselves/experiences life/experiences the world, and it corresponds only to the way someone with a different color skin feels about themselves/experiences life/experiences the world.

How could anyone ever claim to know that? Other than through the usual woke mainstay of gross stereotypes? The collectivist, intersectional nonsense that we see permeating their beliefs, that we experience the world through categories, and everyone in a category shares the same experience or shared identity. Or is supposed to.

How could you ever pretend to know that what you feel/experience as a black person is not the way black people feel/experience, but the way white people feel/experience? Or vice versa? What is the black identity? What is the white identity? Or brown? Or mixed?

What happened to the lessons of every family sitcom from the 90s?

GIF by gullagulla-deactivated20240917

This stereotyping - and that's what it is - and hivemind mentality is the natural result of Kendiism/DiAngeloism and the ideologies of all those race grifters being shoved down our throats. And being taken as anything more than an insane, racist joke.

With that in mind, it's conceivable that you could be a black person who has been told they'll always be oppressed and that your success is dependent on white people using their "privilege" on your behalf, because you can't, or lowering standards because it's assumed you can't meet them, feels disconnected from this and might identify more strongly with the group with more agency, the one that's empowered rather than disempowered. Or you could be a white person who has been told that "all white people are racist," are responsible for all the evil in the world and they have to just sit there in their discomfort and apologize and feel bad for crimes they didn't commit and invisible forces they can't see, who feels similarly detached from this group collective.

Are any of these things actually true? No, they're not. But if you hear them often enough, if you're dragged into "diversity, equity and inclusion" struggle sessions enough, if you're surrounded by it, admonished to believe it as a moral imperative, if your school, college, place of work and even government are adopting it, you might just develop something comparable to dysphoria in the pseudo-reality you've succumbed to. I can totally see that as a possibility.

These ideologies deliberately don't provide an individual "out." "Well, I'm not oppressed." That's because you have internalized oppression. "I'm not a racist." That denial is fragility and proves you're a racist. You might find yourself thinking that you don't see yourself in the purported "black identity" or "white identity" and you feel your skin color doesn't match your how you're supposed to "identify."

Of course, the mistake would be in accepting this ideological crap in the first place, rather than sticking with your individuality and telling the woke neoracists to fuck the hell off.

As I said, the other way I can see this is as cultural affinity. That certain forms of expression, creativity, traditions, etc, resonate beyond racial lines.

The problem is that we are reliably scolded that some people "own" culture, and being so presumptuous as to join in is "cultural appropriation."

Culture is something you do. Not something you own or have or possess. Without people to do it, any given culture ceases. It's traditions, customs, norms, from cooking food to all those little shortcuts in interactions. There's body language, sounds - not even entire words - that Americans can invoke or share that other Americans instinctively understand which non-Americans would miss or not comprehend. Those things don't travel by skin color or through DNA.

There's a man I work with who is from and in South Africa. He grew up there, did compulsory military service, etc. He’s white. He's more culturally "African" - to the extent "African" is even a culture - than Oprah Winfrey.

Any black American who's the descendant of African slaves is culturally American, and no more culturally Zimbabwean than they are culturally Martian. They grew up in America, surrounded by American traditions, customs, norms. They may choose to embrace their ancestral Zimbabwean culture, but that in itself is an American participating in Zimbabwean culture, not a culture they already have a "right" to.

Since it’s something you participate in, culture changes all the time, because what people do and how they do it changes. It’s not a defined box of someone’s personal preconceptions that must be protected at all costs. When people discard a tradition, it’s not for you to decide that they shouldn’t, or that it ruins their culture, or that their culture has been destroyed by not complying with your expectations.

Nobody owns culture.

Not only do cultures change over time, but one of the key points about culture is that it’s shared and adopts parts of other cultures it encounters. Cultures mash together, they split apart, they change and evolve. Remember the Japanese tea party firestorm?

https://cheshireinthemiddle.tumblr.com/post/131407267302

And to top it off, basically 80 percent of japanese customs, traditions, and food, came from other countries. Japanese is an integration of different cultures, like america. Japan takes influences from places like korea, china, russia, and europe. If japan stuck to itself, there would be no tempura, japanese tea, tea ceremonies, kabuki, japanese bread, japanese curry, j- pop, anime, cars, or modern fishing techniques.

Then:

When you tell people they can only experience things ‘meant for their race’, it totally smacks of segregation to me and I can’t stand it. As someone who (obviously) loves Japan, I say let people learn about it, let people experience it, let people appreciate it. You don’t have to know every single thing about a culture to enjoy it.

That’s what humanity does. It stops living in isolated boxes and thinking it got everything right the first time, and instead interacts and learns from each other.

So the mistake in the sense of "identifying with" culture (and as I said at the outset, I have trouble with the whole "identify as/with" thing), or having an affinity for or interest in a different culture, is a misunderstanding, or perhaps being misled by ideologues, that you must belong to a particular category in order to participate in a particular culture. You don't.

Anyone who tells you otherwise is probably a racist, viewing it as "that's what those people do, that's what they do." Classic racists view that culture as a bad thing not to be participated in by the "we", while neoracists view it as a virtuous, holy thing, and to be protected from the "we".

All you should do is have sincerity. That's it. Like learning a new language, you're probably going to get it wrong sometimes, but despite the scolding of ideologues, most people who see you putting in the effort to learn about and participate in their culture will be happy to see you making the effort.

Here's where things get interesting. There's arguably a better case for identifying as a different (perceived) "race" than a different gender.

The average black American has about 20% European ancestry, and about 5% Native American ancestry. "Race" is a spectrum. On the other hand, every human is either male or female.

Surely it's no more unreasonable for an ostensibly "black" person to embrace their 15% white Scottish heritage than to embrace their 15% black Ghanan heritage. Why can't you choose which bits of yourself to "identify" as/with? Why can someone identify as "cupcakegender" (I shit you not 🤡) and demand you use their pronouns, but someone else can't "identify with" her black great-grandmother? One of these is actually real.

Personally, I don't see the value in being anything other than what you are. I don't "identify" with or as my skin color, it's just what I have. I think the reasons I've been able to find for why people might identify as transracial are inherently flawed, reflecting flawed thinking in the person and flawed thinking in society, particularly around the fetishization of, sacredness of, and hyperfixation on skin color.

It is interesting, however, to watch the logic of the people who dismiss immutable biological reality as a social fiction, asserting that a social fiction is an immutable biological reality. Who insist you can’t gatekeep someone’s identity, and then proceed to gatekeep someone’s identity. Mostly because it would collapse their ideology.

It’s almost..... Xianly. Like when I tell them that the “sin” I inherited from Adam and Eve is canceled out by the salvation I inherited from my religious ancestors, and they tell me that I can’t do that.

#ask #transracial #transracialism #identity #identity politics #personal identity #colorblindness #colorblind #religion is a mental illness #Ibram X. Kendi #Rachel Dolezal #culture #cultural appropriation #cultural appreciation #acculturation